An Edgefield Planter and His World: The 1840s Journals of Whitfield Brooks ed. by James O. Farmer Jr. (review)

James O. Farmer Jr. has worked years to bring readers the 1840s journals of Whitfield Brooks. The result is an interesting look into the life of South Carolina's Edgefield District and one of its wealthy patriarchs. Whitfield Brooks lived from 1790 to 1851, during which time Edgefield District developed from the backcountry into a wealthy and politically influential region within South Carolina. These journals do not cover that entire period, of course, but run from November 1840 to May 1849. Thus, they cover most of the last decade of Brooks's life. By this time, cotton had become central to the Edgefield economy, and Brooks was an established, wealthy, and politically connected owner of a cotton plantation.

Whitfield's father, Zachariah Brooks, was the first in the family line to enter the planter class, establishing a sizable tobacco plantation (he owned forty enslaved people in 1820, shortly after giving several to Whitfield as a marriage gift). Zachariah provided Whitfield with a formal education and eventually land and enslaved people. Whitfield's mother died in 1802, and he formed a close bond with his aunt, Behethland Foote Moore Butler, as a surrogate mother. Whitfield remained close to her throughout his life. This family connection may be critically important to the reader's interest, as one of her sons was Andrew Pickens Butler, who served as a senator from South Carolina from 1846 to 1857. Whitfield Brooks was well connected, not only by birth and upbringing, but also in his marriage to Mary Parsons Carroll in 1818. She was from a wealthy Lowcountry family and a significant slaveholder in her own right. The couple had five children, perhaps the best known of whom was Preston Smith Brooks. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1853 to 1857, and his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor remains a staple of many college history course lectures on rising sectionalism in the 1850s.

These journals provide a record of the cares and concerns of one of the political and economic elite. Whitfield Brooks's writings reflect his concerns as a plantation owner, particularly over weather, the buying and selling of enslaved people, the organization of fields, the diversity of crops, and the price of cotton. They also reflect his concerns as a lawyer, former holder of public office, and political citizen, as well as his considerations of proper behavior, religion, and honor. The journals begin dramatically with a pair of duels, between James Parsons Carroll and Louis T. Wigfall and between Wigfall and Preston Brooks.

Farmer does well at creating the context for understanding these journals, particularly the familial nature of many of the connections. His introduction runs forty-six pages, much of it densely packed with family biography in addition to geographic and economic information. In some places, the introduction can be confusing, tracing the family information chronologically, abruptly shifting to geographic or political information, and then going back to where the family information left off, with little in the way of transition. Farmer may be a bit enamored of his subject, telling readers that Brooks "weathered the 1820s better than most" while also explaining that he increased his wealth from the ownership of nineteen enslaved people in 1820 to sixty-two in 1830 (p. xxxv). This increase is hardly weathering, but rather prospering. The clarifying footnotes Farmer provides throughout the journal are excellently done and make this publication accessible to those who are not thoroughly expert in the Edgefield District of the 1840s, though at times a foldout family tree would be helpful.