Religion, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, and: Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Religion, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward . Edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. xxxvii, 463. $25.00.) Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. Edited by Thavolia Glymph and John J. Kushma. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985. Pp. 119. $17.50.) The essays which comprise the 1982 C. Vann Woodward festschrift and die 1983 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures have this in common: they represent much of the best contemporary scholarship treating the American South, and they express the uncertainty which continues to characterize historical assessments of the Old Souths capacity to accommodate or resist the new industrial order. This element of uncertainty is not new. Nineteenth-century discussions ofslavery and its legacy raised the issue of Southern distinctiveness and did so in terms which, in large measure, continue to describe conflicting historical assessments ofthe same issue. Some Northern advocates ofprogress conceived slavery to be an anomalous relic of barbarism and regarded the economic woes of the postemancipation South as an unhappy but temporary legacy of the slave Souths backwardness . Others, equally progressive in temperament, understood the antebellum South to be in transition to free labor and regarded a swift postwar restoration ofcivil liberties and free market relations to be a necessary and sufficient antidote to the social dislocations and economic hardships produced by war and emancipation. From both points ofview, emancipation and die defeat of the. slave power breached die barriers of Southern regionalism and bound Old Dixie to die Northern industrialjuggernaut. This prevailing faith in progress provided die cement for sectional reunion, between the Northern middle class and die Soudi's former master class, but it did not erase all doubts regarding die extent of the Northern triumph. For former masters—secure in their landed wealth despite civil war—memories of antebellum slave society sustained a postwar hostility toward the intrusion ofNorthern men and methods. With similar doubts, a core of former abolitionists and diehard reconstructionists denounced persistent acts of Southern barbarism as evidence of the region's continued resistance to the triumph of Northern liberalism. For those who doubted the totality ofthe North's triumph, die Soudi stood 170CIVIL WAR HISTORY apart from industrial America, either as a citadel oftraditional liberties or as a region opposed to progress. These two views ofthe relative strength ofmodern and antimodern tendencies in the nineteenth-century South continue to shape discussions of Southern development. The discussion emerges regularly in the diverse and often distinguished essays which make up the Woodward festschrift and die Webb Memorial Lectures. In the Woodward festschrift, Charles B. Dew's fascinating and painstaking recreation of the life and labor of an industrial slave provides a useful point ofdeparture. Dew's portrait ofSam Williams and his family offers a number ofsurprises: trained in the craft of ironmaking by his father, Williams earned substantial amounts ofcash and credit as a forgeman in western Virginia. These incentive payments came to Williams for "overwork," that is, for production beyond a standard quota representing his labor as a slave. As Dew demonstrates, Williams also exercised a good deal ofcontrol over the rate ofproduction at Buffalo Forge and over the conditions under which he labored. Williams's story is a complex and engaging one. It also raises questions basic to the wider discussion of Southern distinctiveness which animates the essays written in Woodward 's honor. If the industrial activities at Buffalo Forge depended upon an insular slave system, Williams's status in the workplace and his ability to accumulate personal property and cash savings (at one point he held a bank account with a balance of approximately $200) can be understood as a curious sidelight in an otherwise patriarchal and plantation-centered culture . Dew is careful to remind the reader diat the control which Williams exercised over his life never altered his status as a slave. Bound to die ironmaster at Buffalo Forge as no free laborer could be, Williams experienced (at some personal distance, it is true, but with great clarity all the same) the mechanisms of slave discipline—the whip, slave catchers, slave patrols, and the threat ofsale...