A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation by Beth Barton Schweiger (review)

In 1826, historian Jared Sparks was making his way through the state of Virginia, gathering documents related to his research on George Washington, when he paid a visit to a Mr. Gray of Fredericksburg, an agent for the North American Review, which Sparks had purchased in 1824. Sparks noted Gray's relative success—forty-six subscribers—in circulating the Review in the vicinity. Yet, he wrote, "[Gray] thinks there will be no such thing as book-making in Virginia for a century to come. People here prefer talking to reading."¹ In her rigorously researched and elegantly written study of literacy in the antebellum South, Beth Barton Schweiger maintains that "talking" and "reading" are not so separate. Indeed, in an essential reminder to historians of literacy and print culture, Schweiger contends at the outset that print "[co-existed] with oral tradition in a rich give-and-take in which printed texts reflected speech and speech incorporated texts," especially in the American South (xi). A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation historicizes "literate" (a term far from settled in the antebellum period) and the act of "reading" by decoupling them from a strict engagement with alphabetic print literacy and by questioning their centrality to the fostering of liberal ideals.

Capturing the unexceptional and somewhat haphazard nature of everyday reading and writing in the rural South is one of the book's major contributions. Schweiger elegantly moves between the personal habits and affairs of two families living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Cooleys and the Speers, and a much larger narrative about the "poetics of everyday life" in the South (xi). Grounded in the private diaries of farmer's daughters Amanda and Betsy Cooley of Virginia, and Methodist tanner's daughters Jennie and Ann Speer of North Carolina, Schweiger builds the book around their literacy histories—what they read and when, what genres they liked and why, what levels of education they achieved. The Cooley diaries illuminate the relationship between these habits of reading and writing and all of the other demands of life on the farm and in the home: milking, spinning, weaving, gossiping, worshipping. The Speer diaries, on the other hand, record the "spiritual ambitions and aspirations" of two young women yearning to improve their learning and become educators themselves (32), dreams sadly cut short by tuberculosis, recounted affectingly by both women. Even if the center–periphery dynamic of antebellum print production (well-documented by book historians) remains true, the rural South was a rich market for print, sustained through book agents, the mail, missionaries, schools, and printing offices. Both sets of diaries reveal how deeply connected these women were to the region, the nation, and the world by reading from the same spellers, browsing the same copies of Godey's Lady's Book, consulting the same almanacs, and singing the same hymns as others had across time and space.

In part one, Schweiger focuses on nineteenth-century pedagogy, exploring how autodidacts like the Cooleys engaged with steady sellers like Webster's blue-back or Lindley Murray's English Grammar (1795). The Cooleys never reached the educational level of the Speer women, who studied rhetoric and composition in formal academic settings and whose personal writings are inflected with the Romantic-era aesthetics they had studied. Crucially, through the Cooleys' diaries, we are also introduced to Jincy, an enslaved woman who was sometimes recorded spelling or reading. Though information on Jincy is thin, Schweiger uses her fleeting presence to interrogate the boundaries of literacy and liberation in the 1840s when slaveholders "saw no contradiction between their power to whip Jincy and her ability to read" (51). If anything, literacy was a "means of social control," and Jincy's time with the blue-back speller, a book sometimes crafted by enslaved people's hands, reaffirmed her subordination (51).

Part two more explicitly tackles the reciprocal relationship between orality and print by...