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“A Gentleman and an Officer”: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War

James B. Griffin

Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton (eds)

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of ... More

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite Legion as a major of cavalry. This book features eighty of Griffin's letters written at the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. The letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers, the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways in which officers and enlisted men interacted. The letters shed light on the life of a middle officer—a life of extreme military hardship, complicated further by the need for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of the southern gentry. Griffin describes secret troop movements, such as the Hampton Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign. Here he relates the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the Legion after Hampton was wounded. Griffin recounts day-to-day issues, from the weather to gossip. Monumental historical events sent Griffin off to war but his heartfelt considerations were about his family, his community, and his own personal pride. Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the ordeal by fire that tested and verified—or modified—Southern upperclass values.Less

Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America

Martha H. Verbrugge

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including ... More

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.Less

After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915

John M. Giggie

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great ... More

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.Less

Aggressive Nationalism: McCulloch v. Maryland and the Foundation of Federal Authority in the Young Republic

Richard E. Ellis

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before the US Supreme ... More

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before the US Supreme Court. It also examines many of the key issues involved in the case that John Marshall either slighted or totally ignored: the private profit-making nature of the Second Bank of the United States (2 BUS); the power of the 2 BUS to create branches in the states without their consent, which many people viewed as a direct assault upon the sovereignty of the states and which they feared would lead to the creation of other privately controlled profit-making national corporations that could operate within a state and yet be beyond its control; and the differences between a tax levied by a state for the purposes of raising revenue and one which was meant to destroy the operations of the branches of the 2 BUS. These issues are particularly important to understand because they were at the heart of Ohio's unwillingness to abide by the Supreme Court's decision and which eventually led to Osborn et. al. v. Bank of the United States (1824) and formed the basis for Andrew Jackson's famous veto for the rechartering of the 2 BUS in 1832. The book also examines the relationship between McCulloch v. Maryland and the creation of a federal program of internal improvements.Less

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

J. Matthew Gallman

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next ... More

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades. This book offers a full-length biography of Dickinson. The book describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her abolitionism and biting critiques of anti-war Democrats struck a nerve with her audiences. In barely two years, she rose from being an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to becoming a successful New England stump speaker and eventually a national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the famous figures who populate this book are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book explores Dickinson's public triumphs but also discloses how, as her public career waned, she battled with her managers, critics, audiences, and family. The book demonstrates how Dickinson's life illustrates the possibilities and barriers faced by 19th-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant.Less

Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King

Thomas J. Balcerski

The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791–1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786–1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither one ... More

The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791–1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786–1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither one ever marry? Might they have been gay, or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day “bromance”? Then, as now, they have intrigued by the many mysteries surrounding them. In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse. They developed a friendship that blossomed into a significant political partnership. Before the Civil War, each man was elected to high executive office: William Rufus King as vice president in 1852, and James Buchanan as the nation’s fifteenth president in 1856. This book recounts the story of their bosom friendship through a dual biography of Buchanan and King. Special attention is given to their early lives, the circumstances of their boardinghouse friendship, and the political gossip that has circulated about them ever since. In addition, the author traces their many contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the debates over slavery, while finding their style of politics to have been disastrous for the American nation. Ultimately, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were, and continue to be, an important part of success in the clubby world of American politics.Less

British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Stephen Foster (ed.)

Until relatively recently, the linkage between British Imperial History and the History of Early America was taken for granted. This is no longer the case. Instead, Early American historiography has ... More

Until relatively recently, the linkage between British Imperial History and the History of Early America was taken for granted. This is no longer the case. Instead, Early American historiography has suffered from a loss of coherent definition as competing manifestos demand this or that reordering of the subject to combine time periods and geographical areas in ways that would have previously seemed anomalous. Along the way, it has become a commonplace to announce that the history of America is best accounted for in America itself in a three-way melee between “settlers,” the indigenous populations, and the forcibly transported African slaves and their creole descendants. Our collection recognizes the value of the historiographic work done under this new dispensation in the last two decades or so and tries to incorporate its insights. However, we advocate a pluralistic approach to the subject generally and attempt to demonstrate that the metropolitan power was of more than secondary importance to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each of the contributors has been asked to address two questions: did it matter to the people who lived in the areas of Eastern North America that eventually became the United States that they were subjects of an empire and, if so, did it matter that the empire in question was British? The answer in each case is “Yes,” although not without some considerable complexity in the respective formulations. At the least, however, the combined effect is to re-validate Imperial history as one of the useful ways of describing and explaining early America.Less

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Jean H. Baker

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in ... More

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in England and Germany. His parents expected him to follow his father and brother into the ministry, but he rebelled against the church. Moved to London, he studied architecture and engineering. In 1795 he emigrated to the United States and became part of the period’s Transatlantic Exchange. Latrobe soon was famous for his neoclassical architecture, designing important buildings, including the US Capitol and Baltimore Basilica as well as private homes. Carpenters and millwrights who built structures more cheaply and less permanently than Latrobe challenged his efforts to establish architecture as a profession. Rarely during his twenty-five years in the United States was he financially secure, and when he was, he speculated on risky ventures that lost money. He declared bankruptcy in 1817 and moved to New Orleans, the sixth American city that he lived in, hoping to recoup his finances by installing a municipal water system. He died there of yellow fever in 1820. The themes that emerge in this biography are the critical role Latrobe played in the culture of the early republic through his buildings and his genius in neoclassical design. Like the nation’s political founders, Latrobe was committed to creating an exceptional nation, expressed in his case by buildings and internal improvements. Additionally, given the extensive primary sources available for this biography, an examination of his life reveals early American attitudes toward class, family, and religion.Less

Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment

Benjamin Wiggins

Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment presents the historical relationship between statistical risk assessment and race in the United States. It illustrates how, through a ... More

Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment presents the historical relationship between statistical risk assessment and race in the United States. It illustrates how, through a reliance on the variable of race, actuarial science transformed the nature of racism and, in turn, helped usher racial disparities in wealth, incarceration, and housing from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The monograph begins by investigating the development of statistical risk assessment explicitly based on race in the late-nineteenth-century life insurance industry. It then traces how such risk assessment migrated from industry to government, becoming a guiding force in parole decisions and in federal housing policy. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of “proxies” for race—statistical variables that correlate significantly with race—in order to demonstrate the persistent presence of race in risk assessment even after the anti-discrimination regulations won by the Civil Rights Movement. Offering readers a new perspective on the historical importance of actuarial science in structural racism, Calculating Race is a particularly timely contribution as Big Data and algorithmic decision-making increasingly pervade American life.Less

Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement

Phoebe S.K. Young

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Yet as this book demonstrates, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from ... More

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Yet as this book demonstrates, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? A closer look at the history of camping since the Civil War reveals unexpected connections between its various forms and its deeper significance as an American tradition linked to core beliefs about nature and national belonging. Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Still, the dominance of recreational camping as a modern ideal and natural idyll has obscured other forms from our collective memory. Camping Grounds rediscovers these unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between such varied campers as veterans, tramps, John Muir, newly freed African Americans, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family car campers, backpacking enthusiasts, countercultural youth, and political activists in the twentieth century; the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the republic and why public spaces of nature are critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.Less

The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871

Scott Zesch

In October 1871, a simmering, small-scale turf war involving three Chinese gangs exploded into a riot that engulfed the small but growing town of Los Angeles. A large mob of white Angelenos, spurred ... More

In October 1871, a simmering, small-scale turf war involving three Chinese gangs exploded into a riot that engulfed the small but growing town of Los Angeles. A large mob of white Angelenos, spurred by racial resentment, rampaged through the city and lynched some eighteen people before order was restored. This book offers a compelling account of this little-known event, which ranks among the worst hate crimes in American history. The story begins in the 1850s, when the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1849 California gold rush. Upon arrival, these immigrants usually took up low-wage jobs, settled in the slum neighborhood of the Calle de los Negros, and joined one of a number of Chinese community associations. Though such associations provided job placement and other services to their members, they were also involved in extortion and illicit businesses, including prostitution. In 1870 the largest of these, the See Yup Company, imploded in an acrimonious division. The violent succession battle that ensued, as well as the highly publicized torture of Chinese prostitute Sing Ye, eventually provided the spark for the racially motivated riot that ripped through L.A. The book evokes the figures and events in the See Yup dispute, deftly situates the riot within its historical and political context, and illuminates the workings of the early Chinese-American community in Los Angeles, while simultaneously exploring issues that continue to trouble Americans today.Less

The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America

Nancy E. Davis

This book encompasses the life of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese female sojourner in America. Brought to this country by American merchants in 1834, she traveled the country on bound feet as an ... More

This book encompasses the life of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese female sojourner in America. Brought to this country by American merchants in 1834, she traveled the country on bound feet as an advertisement and attraction for their Chinese imported wares. Cast by the national press as an exotic curiosity, she also provided insight on Chinese life and material culture to the general public as well as to American presidents and politicians. The everyday goods Afong Moy promoted were widely adopted by the middle class, but acceptance of these goods did not extend to her acceptance as a Chinese woman. Afong Moy’s arrival at a time of great upheaval in American cultural and economic life placed her in the crosshairs of slavery, Native American removal, the moral reform movement, and ambivalent attitudes toward women. During her three-year journey throughout the mid-Atlantic, New England, the South, Cuba, and up the Mississippi River her race provided an occasion for public scorn, jingoism, religious proselytizing, or paternalistic control. As the first researched account of Afong Moy’s life, the book presents the intertwining narrative of her coerced travel, the American merchants who initially sponsored her, and Americans’ reaction to her later presentation of Chinese culture on P. T. Barnum’s stage.Less

Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War

Bruce Levine

This book offers an illuminating account of Major-General Patrick Cleburne's fascinating and politically charged idea — that “the most courageous of our slaves” be trained as soldiers and that “every ... More

This book offers an illuminating account of Major-General Patrick Cleburne's fascinating and politically charged idea — that “the most courageous of our slaves” be trained as soldiers and that “every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war” be freed. This book looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. It shows that by 1865, within only a year of Cleburne's proposal, which was initially rejected out of hand, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Robert E. Lee had all reached the same conclusions. At that point, the idea was debated widely in newspapers and drawing rooms across the South, as more and more slaves fled to Union lines and fought in the ranks of the Union army. Eventually, the soldiers of Lee's army voted on the proposal, and the Confederate government actually enacted a version of it in March. The Army issued the necessary orders just two weeks before Appomattox, too late to affect the course of the war. The book aims to capture the voices of blacks and whites, wealthy planters and poor farmers, soldiers and officers, and newspaper editors and politicians from all across the South. In the process, it sheds light on issues such as what the Confederacy was fighting for, whether black southerners were willing to fight in large numbers in defense of the South, and what this episode foretold about life and politics in the post-war South.Less

Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands

Lindsay G. Robertson

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world (the United ... More

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). At the heart of the decision for Johnson v. M'Intosh was a “discovery doctrine” that gave rights of ownership to the European sovereigns who “discovered” the land and converted the indigenous owners into tenants. Though its meaning and intention has been fiercely disputed, more than 175 years later, this doctrine remains the law of the land. In 1991, while investigating the discovery doctrine's historical origins this book's author made a startling find: in the basement of a Pennsylvania furniture-maker, he discovered a trunk with the complete corporate records of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, the plaintiffs in Johnson v. M'Intosh. This book provides a complete and troubling account of the European “discovery” of the Americas, detailing how a spurious claim gave rise to a doctrine — intended to be of limited application — which itself gave rise to a massive displacement of persons and the creation of a law that governs indigenous people and their lands to this day.Less

Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Amy DeFalco Lippert

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the ... More

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the nineteenth century. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco explores the significance of that revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush and the hub of Pacific migration and trade. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which to navigate the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that had divided groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader national transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and visitors, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.Less

Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation

Paul Schor

By telling how the US census classified and divided Americans by race and origin from the founding of the United States to World War II, this book shows how public statistics have been used to create ... More

By telling how the US census classified and divided Americans by race and origin from the founding of the United States to World War II, this book shows how public statistics have been used to create an unequal representation of the nation. From the beginning, the census was a political undertaking, torn between the conflicting demands of the state, political actors, social scientists, businesses, and interest groups. Through the extensive archives of the Bureau of the Census, it traces the interactions that led to the adoption or rejection of changes in the ways different Americans were classified, as well as the changing meaning of seemingly stable categories over time. Census workers and directors by necessity constantly interpreted official categories in the field and in the offices. The difficulties they encountered, the mobilization and resistance of actors, the negotiations with the census, all tell a social history of the relation of the state to the population. Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups, and on immigrants, as well as on the troubled imposition of US racial categories upon the population of newly acquired territories, the book demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation, and discrimination.Less

Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873

Jay Sexton

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-19th century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to expand and ... More

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-19th century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to expand and then preserve it, the United States looked across the Atlantic for investment capital. The need to obtain foreign capital greatly influenced American foreign policy, principally relations with Britain. The intersection of finance and diplomacy was particularly evident during the Civil War when both the North and South integrated attempts to procure loans from European banks into their larger international strategies. Furthermore, the financial needs of the United States (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period. This study explores and assesses how the United State's need for capital influenced its foreign relations in the tumultuous years wedged between the two great financial crises of the 19th century, 1837 to 1873. Drawing on the unused archives of London banks and the papers of statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, this work illuminates our understanding of mid-19th-century American foreign relations by highlighting how financial considerations influenced the formation of foreign policy and functioned as a peace factor in Anglo-American relations. This study also analyses a crucial, but ignored, dimension of the Civil War — the efforts of both the North and the South to attract the support of European financiers. Though foreign contributions to each side failed to match the hopes of Union and Confederate leaders, the financial diplomacy of the Civil War shaped the larger foreign policy strategies of both sides and contributed to both the preservation of British neutrality and the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy.Less

Defining the Struggle: National Racial Justice Organizing, 1880-1915

Susan D. Carle

This book uncovers the forgotten contributions of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national organizations—including the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American ... More

This book uncovers the forgotten contributions of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national organizations—including the National Afro-American League, the National Afro-American Council, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Niagara Movement—in developing strategies for racial justice organizing, which they then passed on to the NAACP and the National Urban League. It tells the story of these organizations' leaders and motivations, the initiatives they undertook, and the ideas about law and racial justice activism they developed and passed on to future generations. In so doing it sheds new light on how these early origins helped set the path for twentieth-century legal civil rights activism in the United States. The book shows that, at an early foundational stage of national racial justice organizing, activists thought about civil and political rights and the social welfare and economic aspects of achieving racial justice as interrelated aspects of a comprehensive agenda. As the enormity and difficulty of the task became clearer with experience over time, organizations developed specializations in both issue areas and strategies. This tendency was unstable, however, and reflected pragmatic concerns rather than any deep ideological commitment to pursue some aspects of the racial justice agenda over others.Less

Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

Lacy K. Ford,

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, this book illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the ... More

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, this book illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. Drawing on primary sources, including newspapers, government documents, legislative records, pamphlets, and speeches, this book recaptures the varied and sometimes contradictory ideas and attitudes held by groups of white southerners as they debated the slavery question. The book conveys the political, intellectual, economic, and social thought of leading white southerners, vividly recreating the mental world of the varied actors. The book also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South.Less