Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands / Edition 1

by J. William Harris

Overview

In this exciting study of the communities on both sides of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina, J. William Harris explores two great ironies of American history—the South’s commitment to a liberty supported by slavery and its attempt to maintain the status quo with a war that undermined southern society. Relying on strong research in quantifiable data as well as manuscript records, Harris examines why white southerners—most of whom did not own slaves—united in a long, bloody war to preserve the institution. He argues that slaveowners relied on an ideology of liberty, a potential for social mobility, and a web of personal relationships between classes to contain white class divisions and ensure control over the black population. The strains of war, Harris shows, dissolved these bonds of community and made Confederate victory impossible, forever changing southern society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807122655
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1998
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	278
Sales rank:	866,146
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

J. William Harris is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. The Old South: New Studies in Society and Culture and Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2002, are among his published books.

Editorial Reviews

[Harris] fully and vividly reveals the interaction of yeomen, large and small slaveowners, and blacks in a manner that few historians have rivaled.

American Historical Review

Two rather similar poetry collections, both by poets with MFAs. Such is their similarity that it is at first difficult to distinguish their different voices. Karr's work, though still uneven, has an edge in that it appears more metaphysical than Bryan's. It is also more strongly integrated, being interspersed with a subseries of poems, the Diogenes poems, that acts as a strategic punctuation. While Bryan's collection, though at times ascending to the welkin, does contain a sequence of poems based on Proust, it has a harder time moving away from the more mundane topics that she chooses to ``describe'' (baseball, school memories, looking at paintings). Her best efforts may be in the long, final poem ``Abiding Love,'' if only because it surveys a wider speculative terrain and indicates a familiarity with the body of traditional poetry. Both poets have a common prosaic diction (e.g., Karr's ``I trudged through snow to the mailbox,'' from ``Exile's Letter'') that seemingly betrays a fear of spontaneity, although Karr exhibits some sense of the ``unconscious'' in poems such as ``Beyond Freedom and Dignity.'' The reader is thus reduced to experiencing the ``description'' of emotions, typically that of watching one's father die. The leap is not there. Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.

Library Journal