From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880, and: The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS343 Not surprisingly, the most illuminating of Fremont's letters are those covering the Civil War years. While John Fremont served in St. Louis as commander ofthe Union's Department ofthe West, "General Jessie," as she was known to critics, became her husband's "secretary and other self," participating in staff meetings, seeing visitors, and presiding over Fremont's headquarters in his absence. In August of 1861, John Fremont issued his controversial emancipation proclamation, freeing the slaves of Missouri Rebels; for the rest of the war, Jessie Fremont publicly defended her embattled husband, writing a novel and even meeting personally with President Lincoln to justify John Fremont's actions. At the same time, she contributed to wartime relief efforts, most notably the Western Sanitary Commission. Her wartime letters shed light not only on her and her husband's activities, but on the general conduct of the war in the West. When paired with editor Pamela Herr's fine biography ofJessie Benton Fremont , the new volume makes a strong case for the historical significance of a remarkable woman but leaves the reader wanting to learn more—about Fremont 's abolitionism, the 1856 campaign, her thoughts on women's suffrage and on Reconstruction, and her unusual marriage, among other subjects. Despite the extensive documentation of her life, Fremont proves surprisingly difficult to get to know; thanks to the efforts of Herr and Spence, she is no longer difficult to meet. Elizabeth R. Varón Yale University From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880. By Joseph P. Reidy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. 360. $45.00.) The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 18451871 . By Vicki Vaughn Johnson. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 328. $39.95.) In each of these books the trauma of the Civil War serves as a central event that forced change upon the South. Reidy looks at the development of new economic and social relationships in the agrarian economy that emerged from the destruction of slavery. Johnson examines the South's commercial leaders as they formulated their vision for the region before and after the war. Reidy's study moves back and forth between a tightly focused case study of the five counties surrounding Macon in Central Georgia to a larger world stage on which we see the emancipation of slaves in the Americas and serfs in Russia. Though grounded in the particular events, places, and people of a local empirical study, Reidy grapples with big questions about the transforming experience the war imposed on slaves, planters, and yeomen. In the early chapters he traces the development of central Georgia, comparing it to 344CIVIL WAR HISTORY Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. No sooner were the Creek Indians dispossessed of the land than a swarm of land-hungry settlers transformed this backcounty first into a crude yeoman's economy of subsistence and trade and, then rapidly , into a prosperous cotton plantation economy in which the planters' wealth and power rested solidly on their command of land and slaves. "The Thomas Sutpens were coming, with the Will Varners close behind," Reidy tells us early on, summarizing much of the story that is to follow. (15) The so-called Old South, in this vivid picture of its expansion, was a young, dynamic society constructed within a generation of its frontier beginnings . Lines of authority that evolved among planters, slaves, and yeomen were all defined by ongoing struggles for power. The depression that followed the Panic of 1 837 allowed the planter class to consolidate its wealth and position . It was this class, Reidy contends, that imposed its ideals of social hierarchy and patriarchy over slaves and yeomen. Planters employed the power of the lash and political control of the state to enforce its will and advance its interests. Whatever tension remained in the contests of power between master and slave, planter and yeomen, the planters, Reidy argues, had "largely succeeded in constructing a patriarchal world" and, by the time of the secession crisis, were able, "politically and ideologically," to rally "both smallholders and nonslaveholders behind the essential principles of plantation slavery" (57, 56). This planter...