Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War

by Scott E. Giltner

Overview

This innovative study re-examines the dynamics of race relations in the post–Civil War South from an altogether fresh perspective: field sports.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wealthy white men from Southern cities and the industrial North traveled to the hunting and fishing lodges of the old Confederacy—escaping from the office to socialize among like-minded peers. These sportsmen depended on local black guides who knew the land and fishing holes and could ensure a successful outing. For whites, the ability to hunt and fish freely and employ black laborers became a conspicuous display of their wealth and social standing.

But hunting and fishing had been a way of life for all Southerners—blacks included—since colonial times. After the war, African Americans used their mastery of these sports to enter into market activities normally denied people of color, thereby becoming more economically independent from their white employers. Whites came to view black participation in hunting and fishing as a serious threat to the South’s labor system. Scott E. Giltner shows how African-American freedom developed in this racially tense environment—how blacks' sense of competence and authority flourished in a Jim Crow setting.

Giltner’s thorough research using slave narratives, sportsmen’s recollections, records of fish and game clubs, and sporting periodicals offers a unique perspective on the African-American struggle for independence from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801890239
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Series:	The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science , #126
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Scott E. Giltner is an assistant professor of history at Culver-Stockton College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hunting, Fishing, and Freedom
1. "You Can't Starve a Negro": Hunting and Fishing and African Americans' Subsistence in the Post-Emancipation South
2. "The Pot-Hunting Son of Ham": White Sportsmen's Objections to African Americans' Hunting and Fishing
3. "The Art of Serving Is with Them Innate": African Americans and the Work of Southern Hunting and Fishing
4. "With the Due Subordination of Master and Servant Preserved": Race and Sporting Tourism in the Post-Emancipation South
5. "When He Should Be between the Plow Handles": Sportsmen, Landowners, Legislators, and the Assault on African Americans' Hunting and Fishing
Conclusion: Contradiction and Continuity in the Southern Sporting Field
Acknowledgments
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

Orville Vernon Burton

Very original... a substantial contribution. Giltner has detailed wonderful vignettes of African Americans and elite white sportsmen hunting in the South. He takes the theme of common rights and shows how an elite white South restricted those rights and worked to take them from African Americans.

— Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln

From the Publisher

Very original . . . a substantial contribution. Giltner has detailed wonderful vignettes of African Americans and elite white sportsmen hunting in the South. He takes the theme of common rights and shows how an elite white South restricted those rights and worked to take them from African Americans.
—Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln

Editorial Reviews

Scott Giltner delivers an intriguing and thoughtful survey of sporting cultures and racial identity in the postbellum South . . . A provocative regional study that highlights the value of approaching the American past from a socio-environmental perspective.
—Karen Jones, Reviews in History

Hunting and Fishing provides a new perspective on the social history of the post-Civil War South, and the 'Notes' section alone is worth the price of the book.
—John White, North Carolina Historical Review

Intriguing study of rural southern black hunters and upper-class white sportsmen.
—Jeanette Keith, Journal of American History

Giltner provides new insight into turn-of-the-century southern race relations.
—Andrea Smalley , Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Essential reading.
—Stephen A. West , Journal of Southern History

From the Publisher

Essential reading.

Journal of Southern History - Stephen A. West

Scott Giltner delivers an intriguing and thoughtful survey of sporting cultures and racial identity in the postbellum South . . . A provocative regional study that highlights the value of approaching the American past from a socio-environmental perspective.

Reviews in History - Karen Jones

Intriguing study of rural southern black hunters and upper-class white sportsmen.

Journal of American History - Jeanette Keith

Giltner provides new insight into turn-of-the-century southern race relations.

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - Andrea Smalley

Hunting and Fishing provides a new perspective on the social history of the post-Civil War South, and the 'Notes' section alone is worth the price of the book.

North Carolina Historical Review - John White