The Old South and the New History

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW HISTORY Steven M. Stowe. Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. xviii + 309 pp. James M. Woods. Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas's Road to Secession. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987. 277 pp. Craig Simpson Perhaps history was once merelyhistory. In that misty era, antique conceptions of politics and society marked Southern studiesjust as they did other parochialized specialties. But both these significant volumes attest to the limited utility of the innumerable artifacts of historical explanation now strewn about, like so many stagecoaches on the launching pad. They also invite comment on diverging emphases in modern American studies. The distance between them, in terms of subject and method, measures the altered ambience of the 1970s and 1980s. Woods's Arkansas at first glance looks old-fashioned, devoting much space to traditional partisan politics. A highly-factionalized Democracy controlled Arkansas politics until the mid-1850s, and this, together with Arkansas's barren economy, frustrated Whiggery's progress. Democratic alliances founded on kinship, patronage and local networking predictably fractured under pressure from insurgents like Thomas C. Hindman, Jr., who benefited from late antebellum cotton prosperity, and whose rebellion provoked a political realignment which insured Arkansas's secession. At the flashpoint of crisis in 1861, class trumped traditional party loyalties, eventually removing one of the Confederacy's last and least populous states from the Union. Woods has more; to his credit, much more.1 In addition to his extensive notes, he appends twenty-six pages of documents, maps and tables. These highlight his principal claims: that geography and climate, along with Arkansas's peculiar demography, dictated both the nature and pace of economic development, which in tum decisively influenced the outcome in 1861. Woods demonstrates both an 348 Craig Simpson authoritative knowledge of the state's ruling oligarchies and a sensitive appreciation of its environment. In dividing Arkansas's regions primarily along the diagonal running from northeast to southwest, with yeomen farmers in the hills and slave-holding cotton planters nearer the Mississippi, he breaks no new ground-Turner and Owsley might have said as much. Rather, his work on Arkansas's demographics, contextualized with refreshing candor, marks a major contribution; the people of Arkansasexperienced a genuine identity crisis in 1861. Until the Civil War, Arkansas remained a scary place. Violence and lawlessness abounded, even by Southern standards; primitive and unreliable transport and communications discouraged development, as did the absence of banks and "a deep and lasting state debt." 2 Desperation alone must have prompted immigration . By 1860, some 325,000 whites lived there, along with about one-third as many blacks. Native Arkansans composed only thirty-eight percent of white population. 3 Woods suggests that the divergence of Southern origins of immigrants coloured eventual decisions for both economic change and Union or secession. Into the Arkansas back-country moved principally farmers from the border slave states. These farmers, while gradually increasing in numbers, lost control to more dynamic and radical immigrants from the Deep South. This plausible perspective on secession loses force, however, when we examine Woods' s tables, which revealthat Tennessee suppliedby far the largest number of immigrants to both of Arkansas's primary regions. Woods makes no effort to analyze the pre-emigration politics of these expatriate Tennesseans. But he can show that the remarkable expansion of Arkansas's cotton economy during the 1850s coincided with an increasing domination of the region by former Deep Southerners. Their presence? nonetheless, never elevated the number of whites involved with slavery above eighteen percent, a figure characteristic of the upper South. The hostility and abrasivenessof up-country Arkansans, which threatened dismemberment of the State, prevented an endorsement of the Confederacy until May, 1861. Such unity as then existed quickly dissolved, and Arkansans continued , even during the War, their frequently violent, though poignant, efforts to determine who they really were. No trendy concerns for personal, let alone intimate, lives clutter Woods's text. Instead, he places his faith in the numbers in the Appendix. They provide depth and credibility to an otherwise traditionally-conceived study, in which, for example, blacks never appear as actors. Woods...