In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS353 major accomplishment. One's only regret is that they did not see fit to provide a comprehensive index to the entire series. Allan Peskin Cleveland State University The Calhoun Family and Thomas Green Clemson: The Decline of a Southern Patriarchy. By Ernest M. Lander, Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983. Pp. x, 262. $17.95.) This volume is a thoroughly researched history of the Calhoun family, useful to those interested in John C. Calhoun, in South Carolina, and in southern family history. Drawing heavily on the Calhoun family correspondence , theauthorchallenges recent interpretations ofCalhoun's private life. Both the romantic vision of Charles M. Wiltse and Margaret L. Coit, who stress Calhoun's devotion to his reasonably harmonious domestic circle, and the sharp critique of Gerald M. Capers, who believes that Calhoun's family ran a poor second to his political ambitions, lose plausibility in light of this work. This volume is a meticulous documentation of the declension of a southern family under the burdens of the debt, infighting, and death. Calhoun emerges as a concerned but only marginally effective father who cannot control his underachieving son's expensive tastes, mollify his wife's bitter and divisive suspicions, end the feuding between family members, or buoy his sinking finances. The immense energy he invested in his difficult family held it together during his lifetime but could not prevent dissolution after his death. What bickering and debt began, disease concluded. When Thomas Green Clemson, his son-in-law, willed Fort Hill, Calhoun's seat, to South Carolina for an agricultural college, a few scattered grandchildren constituted Calhoun's surviving issue. By implication, the book speaks to the warmest controversy in currenthistoriography, namely, which set ofrelations —that of planter to the extended plantation family, as Eugene Genovese suggests, or planter to market, as James Oakes maintains— was decisive in shaping the ideology of the planterclass. Given Lander's description of the Calhouns, one suspects that the two were so inextricably bound that the question is falsely posed. In spite of interesting insights sprinkled through the text, Lander often fails to move beyond telling this depressing tale to analyzing it. Like Wiltse, Coit, and Capers, Landerdoes not interweaveCalhoun's perception of his roles as father and statesman or link his attitudes toward home and family with his analysis of southern culture; we are still left with components rather than an integrated world view. In fact, though the volume offers much detail, the normative universe within which family members evaluated specific incidents is unclear. The cast of characters is introduced, replete with the revered patriarch, long suffering planta- 354CIVIL WAR HISTORY Hon mistress, adoring daughter, dissipated sons, and Yankee in-law, but the contours of their relationships elude Landers. Perhaps the most obvious example of this haziness is Lander's unwillingness to sketch Calhoun 's or his family's definition of their duties and prerogatives. Since Calhoun's conspicuous inability to shape his family relations seems to have emasculated his patriarchal authority to the vanishing point, the lapse is striking. Nevertheless, the work is a corrective for the Calhoun historiography and a source of information for historians of the southern family and culture. Susan M. Bowler Northwestern University Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist. By William B. McCash. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 356. $18.95.) For quite some time, Thomas R. R. Cobb has "needed" abiography, and William B. McCash took quite some time to write this one. Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist began as a Ph.D dissertation at the University of Georgia, completed in 1968. To his credit McCash has expanded his research and integrated recent scholarship; this is a book, not a published dissertation. To their credit the editors at Mercer University Press have produced a handsome work; among other things, the footnotes, photographs, and inset quotations are well done. Yet, despite McCash's meticulous research and careful prose and despite the editors' obvious commitment to quality, Thomas R. R. Cobb is a somewhat flawed biography. Indeed it may not even be a biography; McCash has written a series of topical chapters, each of which focuses...

pdf

Share