The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890, and: White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia (review)

book reviews355 The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890. By Steven Hahn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 340. $29.95.) White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Charles L. Flynn, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 196. $20.00.) In The Roots of Southern Populism, Steven Hahn sets out to reconstruct the cultural heritage of the "plain folk" of Georgia's upper Piedmont and to show how their response to social stress in the years following the Civil War led them to embrace the cooperative commonwealth of the People's Party in the 1890s. Using concepts developed by the interpreters of the moral economies of rural communities elsewhere in the world, Hahn depicts the antebellum upcountry yeomanry as peasants combining private property institutions with a safety first economic orientation. While devoted to personal independence, Hahn's farmers were not individualistic; rather, they sought to preserve their independence through a social ethic stressing mutual aid (e.g., log rollings and corn shuckings), mutual forebearance (e.g., controlling the bidding at estate sales), and such traditional common rights as the open range. Above all, the yeomanry sought to keep market relations at bay by pursuing self-sufficiency minimally supplemented with local trade, and by resisting commercial developments such as railroads. Their autonomy, though, was fatally weakened by the multiple disasters of the 1860s; the generation following Appomattox saw a commercial, cotton-based economy surge into the region, bringing in its wake railroads, tenancy, and, especially, a new class of merchants, based in the towns and using their control of credit to extend their dominion over a newly dependent yeomanry. Conflict between country and town increasingly shaped political life, notably in the protracted efforts of townsmen and large landowners to close the open range. Thus, the drastic postbellum erosion of personal independence and the destruction of traditional rights directed by the new ethic of laissez faire made upcountrymen receptive to the visions of the Farmers' Alliance and the Populists. There is much to admire in this wonderfully written book. Hahn's historical skills are extraordinary, not only in his feel for the process of change but also in his richness of detail and his subtlety in handling frequently messy evidence. Caveats are nonetheless in order. Hahn does not allow ideology to corrupt his method, but he is unmistakeably a man of the left, unsympathetic to capitalists and their works and eager to excavate a radical tradition from native soil. Furthermore, his concept of the yeomanry as a premodern peasantry sucked into the vortex of the capitalist world tends to be self-fulfilling. The sturdy opposition of Hahn's upcountrymen to market relations seems on occasion to be overdrawn; his own evidence suggests that their attitudes were in fact more ambiguous, embracing prudent commercial agriculture as a means of bolstering 356 CIVIL WAR HISTORY their independence and passing it on to their progeny. His merchants, as well, tend to be autonomous actors, laissez faire ideologues using liens and fence laws to shape the world to their exploitive desires. Many did indeed fatten on Georgia's adversity, but merchants disliked the new economic order themselves, viewing it as risky and, worse, unprogressive ; far from encouraging debt, they longed to put their businesses on a cash basis. In emphasizing the role of men in history, Hahn risks turning it into melodrama. Had he not taken such risks, though, Hahn would not have produced a work nearly as powerful and important as this. No book in a generation has done more to extend our understanding of the South's white majority. Local and state studies are normally undertaken either to highlight particularities of time and place or to facilitate studies not feasible over larger areas. At the outset of White Land, Black Labor, though, Charles Flynn announces that he has "every reason to believe that my conclusions about Georgia hold true for the South in general" and will therefore refer to "Georgians" and "southerners" interchangeably (p. 5). In succeeding pages he goes further, promiscuously mixing Georgia evidence with secondary material from other Southern states^ frequently...