Southern Classics – serie

Long before there were cobblestone streets along the Charleston battery, there was rice and there were slaves--the twin pillars upon which colonial Carolina wealth was built. But by the Civil War both began to crumble, along with the planter aristocracy they supported. Seed from Madagascar chronicles the linked tragedies of the prominent Heyward family and South Carolina's rice industry while underscoring the integral role African Americans played in the fortunes of the planter class and the precious crop. As much about race as about rice, Duncan Clinch Heyward's account describes the master-slave relationship, the planting and marketing of rice, and the changes wrought by the Civil War. Peter Coclanis's vivid introduction to this Southern Classics edition places Heyward's chronicle in its historical and cultural context, making Seed from Madagascar as important today as when it first appeared in the 1930s.

First published in 1931, the author exposes the commercial aspects of slave trading, including the ""breeding"" and ""rearing"" of slaves for sale to Western territories. The author shows antebellum slavery to be commercial, exploitative and cruel rather than a benevolent ""peculiar institution

Using conscription to illustrate a central paradox of the Confederacy, this work examines the system's daily operations, troublesome substitution, and exemption procedures, and ultimate collapse. William Garrett Piston's introduction places the volume in its historical context.

Originally published in 1878, this novel marked the emergence of a feminist critique of southern society. It follows the romance between a free-spirited, intellectual woman and a Union soldier, and broke new ground in its representation of a wife's ""duties"" and the inclusion of black characters.

First published in 1928, this text explores the Huguenot presence in the South Carolina colonies. The author provides description and analysis of the migration and settlement there, showing how communities and churches were founded and how religious, political and social integration occurred.

Reprinted for the first time in more than forty years this memoir offers a candid look into the daily life of a Low Country South Carolina family, as well as commentary and opinion about such matters as rice cultivation, slavery, and the sporting life. In the SOUTHERN CLASSICS series.

A revealing account of Reconstruction by a Wisconsin carpetbagger and devout abolitionist who moved to Mississippi in pursuit of wealth and social reform. In 1884, Albert T. Morgan published ""Yazoo"" to explain the difficulties he and his compatriots faced in the South.

This look at the Confederate experience of soldiers, African Americans, and women sparked a debate about the reasons for southern defeat when it was first published in 1944. It challenges southern myths about a contented and loyal slave population, and questions popular morale.

REPRINTED FOR THE FIRST TIME since its publication in 1915, Black and White in the Southern States is one of the earliest studies in comparative race relations and the first to connect the experience of the American South to that of South Africa. This work is a synthesis of the observations Evans made as he traveled the southern United States in 1914 to investigate metropolitan life, industrial relations and the workplace, and social and cultural connections. Evans's study presents a revealing assessment of racial attitudes and ideologies in the Jim Crow era. In his introduction to this edition George M. Fredrickson, the preeminent scholar who defined the field of comparative racial ideologies, analyzes the underlying racist character of Evans's work and places it in its full intellectual and social context.

THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH ACCOUNT of the advent of the cotton-textile industry in the region, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South immediately defined industrialization in the rural South upon its publication in 1921. Its influence was widely felt by southern intellectuals and shaped the interpretation of southern industrialization in many ways. Broadus Mitchell's idealistic chronicle of the southern textile industry founders reads as a progressive's endorsement of a southern industrial ""revolution from above,"" to elevate the South from its economic and cultural doldrums. Mitchell viewed industrialization as necessary for southern progress and believed that its benefits to the South ultimately reached far beyond its profits to mill owners. In a lengthy introduction, David L. Carlton further explores the life and economic philosophies of Mitchell - giving a sturdy framework to this history and reinforcing it as a valuable assessment of a historical moment.

First published in 1945 to international acclaim and winner of the Southern Authors Award, Three O'Clock Dinner is Josephine Pinckney's best-selling novel about an ill-fated marriage on the eve of World War II. This powerful tale written by a consummate Charleston insider and set in the historic city resonates with universal appeal by daring to touch on topics that had been taboo. Three O'Clock Dinner reveals how the modern world has intruded in a most unwelcome way upon the Redcliffs, a Charleston family long on pedigree but short on cash. Mortified when their son ""Tat"" elopes with the henna-haired daughter of the Hessenwinkles, an especially galling bourgeois clan, the Redcliffs are determined to respond with civility. They invite their son, his new wife, and her family for Sunday dinner, served at the traditional time of three in the afternoon. Tension builds across an expanse of white damask. After mint julep aperitifs, dinner claret, and Madeira toasts, a chance remark ignites the novel's climax amid a flurry of raised voices, hurt feelings, and broken china. Their new daughter-in-law's revelation further shatters the Redcliffs' well-ordered society but opens a door to forgiveness and redemption. Barbara L. Bellow's insightful introduction places the novel in its historical context, illuminates the history of its publication and treatment in the hands of Hollywood producers, and provides an in-depth critical analysis.

A unique creole language spoken on the coastal islands and adjacent mainland of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah existed as an isolated and largely ignored linguistic phenomenon until the publication of Lorenzo Dow Turner's landmark volume Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. In his classic treatise, Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguist, focused on a people whose language had long been misunderstood, lifted a shroud that had obscured the true history of Gullah, and demonstrated that it drew important linguistic features directly from the languages of West Africa. Initially published in 1949, this groundbreaking work of Afrocentric scholarship opened American minds to a little-known culture while initiating a means for the Gullah people to reclaim and value their past. The book presents a reference point for today's discussions about ever-present language varieties, Ebonics, and education, offering important reminders about the subtleties and power of racial and cultural prejudice. In their introduction to the volume, Katherine Wyly Mille and Michael B. Montgomery set the text in its sociolinguistic context, explore recent developments in the celebration of Gullah culture, and honor Turner with a recounting of his life and scholarly accomplishments.

The definitive biography of a controversial South Carolina leader; Upon its initial publication in 1944, Pitchfork Ben Tillman was a signal event in the writing of modern South Carolina history. In a biography the Journal of Southern History called ""definitive."" Francis Butler Simkins brings his research skills and professional dispassion to bear upon a study of one of the state's most controversial political leaders. Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918) accomplished a political revolution in South Carolina when he defeated Governor Wade Hampton and the old guard Bourbons who had run the state since the end of Reconstruction. During his political ascendancy as governor and then United States Senator, Tillman introduced the state's dispensary system and shaped the state's 1895 constitution into a bulwark of white supremacy. Almost single-handedly Tillman established the iniquities of Jim Crow that countless other southern demagogues would imitate. These ""accomplishments"" would plague the South and the nation until this day. Orville Vernon Burton's new introduction looks at both Tillman and author Francis Simkins as prime examples of southerners with tremendous talent but unsettling accomplishments.

African Americans in the state after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow; First published in 1952, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 rediscovers a time and a people nearly erased from public memory. In this pathbreaking book, George B. Tindall turns to the period after Reconstruction before a tide of reaction imposed a new system of controls on the black population of the state. He examines the progress and achievements, along with the frustrations, of South Carolina's African Americans in politics, education, labor, and various aspects of social life during the short decades before segregation became the law and custom of the land. Chronicling the evolution of Jim Crow white supremacy, the book originally appeared on the eve of the Civil Rights movement when the nation's system of disfranchisement, segregation, and economic oppression was coming under increasing criticism and attack. Along with Vernon L. Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (1947) which also shed new light on the period after Reconstruction, Tindall's treatise served as an important source for C. Vann Woodward's influential The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). South Carolina Negroes now reappears fifty years later in an environment of reaction against the Civil Rights movement, a situation that parallels in many ways the reaction against Reconstruction a century earlier. A new introduction by Tindall reviews the book's origins and its place in the literature of Southern and black history.

John E. Cairnes's seminal work on slavery was widely acclaimed upon its publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the essential cause of the American Civil War and to shape European policy concerning the struggle.

The landmark political study of South Carolina's secession and governance during the Civil War. First published in 1950 and long sought by collectors and historians, ""South Carolina Goes to War, 1860-1865"" stands as the only institutional and political history of the Palmetto State's secession from the Union, entry into the Confederacy, and management of the war effort. Charles Edward Cauthen's germinal study offers a thorough examination of the state's political leadership and policymaking during the secession crisis and the subsequent four years of war. Notable for its attention to the precursors of war too often neglected in other studies, the volume devotes half of its chapters to events predating the firing on Fort Sumter and pays significant attention to the Executive Councils of 1861 and 1862. This edition features a new introduction by J. Tracy Power summarizing the political climate that characterized South Carolina's departure from the Union and entrance into war, and examining the significance of Cauthen's book within the context of its initial creation and reception.

The reissue of The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston makes available for a new generation of readers a firsthand look at one of South Carolina's most influential antebellum dynasties and the institutions of slavery and plantation agriculture upon which it was built. Often cited by historians, Robert F. W. Allston's letters, speeches, receipts, and ledger entries chronicle both the heyday of the rice industry and its precipitate crash during the Civil War. As Daniel C. Littlefield underscores in his introduction to the new edition, these papers are significant not only because of Allston's position at the apex of planter society but also because his views represented those of the rice planter elite. Allston (1801-1864) owned or managed seven plantations along the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers, including Chicora Wood, Rose Bank, and Brookgreen, now known as Brookgreen Gardens. A Jeffersonian republican, he served in the South Carolina General Assembly from 1832 until he was elected governor in 1856. After his death in 1864, his daughter Elizabeth Allston Pringle continued the family's rice-growing activities and achieved personal renown as a columnist for the New York Times and author of A Woman Rice Planter. The collection includes letters between Allston and his wife and children, correspondence with politicians, fiscal documents from the operation of his plantations, records related to the sale and care of slaves, and political speeches.

A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial political career of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1842-1931), ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"" is a firsthand account of the political and social machinations of Civil War America and the war's aftermath in one of the most volatile states of the defeated Confederacy. An Illinois native, Warmoth arrived in Louisiana in 1864 as part of the federal occupation forces. Upon leaving military service in 1865, he established a legal practice in New Orleans. Taking full advantage of the chaotic times, Warmoth rapidly amassed fortune and influence, and soon emerged as a leader of the state's Republican Party and, in 1868, was elected governor. Amid an administration rife with scandal, the Louisiana Republican Party broke into warring factions. Warmoth survived an impeachment attempt in 1872, but a second attempt in 1873 culminated with his removal from office. This fall from Republican grace stemmed from his allegiance with white conservatives, remnants of the old guard, and staunch opponents of those Republicans who sought a wider political role for African Americans. Never again to hold political office, Warmoth remained in his adopted Louisiana, enjoying the fruits of his investments in plantations and sugar refineries. In 1930, the year before his death, he published ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"", a vindication of his public life and a rebuttal of his carpetbagger reputation. Despite Warmoth's obvious self-serving biases, the volume offers unparalleled personal insights into the inner workings of Reconstruction government in Louisiana in the words of one of its key architects. A new introduction by John C. Rodrigue places Warmoth's memoir within the broader context of evolving perceptions and historiography of Reconstruction. Rodrigue also offers readers a more balanced portrait of Warmoth by providing supplemental information omitted or slighted by the author in his efforts to cast his actions in the most positive light.

The Southern Literary Messenger enjoyed an impressive thirty-year run (1834-1864) and was, in its time, the South's most important literary periodical. Published in Richmond, Virginia, the monthly magazine was originally edited by Edgar Allan Poe and is remembered for publishing poems, fiction, and essays by the nation's leading authors - both male and female, northern and southern - including William Gilmore Simms, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Joseph G. Baldwin, John Pendleton Kennedy, Mary E. Lee, and Caroline Lee Hentz. In 1905, Benjamin Blake Minor (1818-1905), editor of the ""Messenger"" during the 1840s, wrote the only book-length study of the magazine. Minor recounts in detail the relationships he forged with notable authors and includes excerpts from correspondence with Poe and others. Most important, Minor identifies and discusses hundreds of lesser contributors who might otherwise remain anonymous. He also describes the struggles the magazine's editors endured as they published essays on the divisive issue of slavery. Minor's authoritative account of the journal's history and influence is augmented in this edition with a new introduction by Wells that places Minor's account in historical context.

A celebrated social history, ""Life and Labor in the Old South"" (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by a leading historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) sought to include populations neglected in earlier scholarship as a means of underscoring the region's complex diversity and the importance of human interaction. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips' germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned this study its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. This edition includes a new introduction by John David Smith that frames the volume within Progressive Era scholarship, chronicles its critical reception, and highlights its influence on contemporary historical debates.

Recognized since its publication in 1926 as a watershed in American historiography, Craven's study of soil depletion in Virginia and Maryland links elements of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, causal aspects of the expansion of slavery, and the economics of staple-crop production into a unified view of southern history from the colonial era to the onset of the Civil War. Using Maryland and Virginia as a case study, Craven assesses the abusive relationship between southern planters and their most valuable and abundant resource - the land - to posit that soil depletion and other ruinous agricultural practices contributed to the economic crisis faced by mid-nineteenth-century America. In his introduction to this edition, Ferleger sets Craven's first publication in its historical context and offers an appreciation of the historian's life and contributions to the field of southern history.

First published in 1939, ""McGillivray of the Creeks"" is a unique mix of primary and secondary sources for the study of American Indian history in the Southeast. John Walton Caughey's definitive biography of Creek leader, Alexander McGillivray (1750-1793) is coupled with 214 letters between McGillivray and Spanish and American political officials. The volume offers distinctive firsthand insights into Creek and Euroamerican diplomacy in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in the aftermath of the American Revolution. McGillivray, the son of a famous Scottish Indian trader and a Muskogee Creek woman, was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, and took up the mantle of negotiator for the Creek people during and after the Revolution. The letters reprinted in this volume provide a valuable Indian perspective into Creek diplomatic negotiations with the Americans and the Spanish. In the new introduction to this edition, William J. Bauer, Jr., places Caughey's work into its historiographical context and surveys the interpretations of the enigmatic McGillivray that historians have drawn from this material.

This is a firsthand account of a bomb factory's impact on small town life in South Carolina. First published in 1971, grade school teacher Louise Cassels' poignant memoir recounts the displacement of the residents of Ellenton, South Carolina, in the early 1950s to make way for the massive Savannah River Plant, a critical cold-war nuclear weapons facility. In late 1950, amid escalating cold-war tensions, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced plans to construct facilities to produce plutonium and tritium for use in hydrogen bombs. One such facility, the SRP, was built at a cost of $1.3 billion at a site that encompassed more than 315 square miles in South Carolina's Barnwell, Allendale, and Aiken counties. Some fifteen hundred families residing in small communities within the new plant's borders were forced to leave their homes. The largest of the affected towns was Ellenton, with a population of 760 residents. Detailing the period of evacuation and resettlement, ""The Unexpected Exodus"" recalls the dramatic personal consequences of the cold war on the South through the narrative of one uprooted family. Cassels touches on such enduring historical themes as southerners' sense of place and antipathy toward the federal government as she struggles to maintain equilibrium through life-changing circumstances. Throughout the text her extreme pride and patriotism are set against profound feelings of bitterness and loss. Frederickson's new introduction to this edition places Cassels' compelling tale against the historical backdrop of the cold war's impact on the South, a history often lost in the shadow of more widely read civil-rights narratives from the same era.

This is a participant-observer's account of African American life in a small Southern town just prior to the Civil Rights era.Consisting of ""Blackways of Kent"" (1955), ""Millways of Kent"" (1958), and ""Townways of Kent"", the ""Kent Trilogy"" forms a remarkable southern ethnography that maps the social stratification of the Piedmont town of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s, after the Great Depression and before Civil Rights era. In 1946 the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science commissioned a series of southern community studies from which these volumes resulted.Lewis offers a participant-observer's views on small-town southern race relations in the mid-twentieth century. Based on Lewis's interviews with community informants and experiences working in York between 1948 and 1949, the dynamic descriptions of individuals and rich explorations of institutions and traditions bring the community to life once more. Wholly segregated from the townfolk and from the poor whites of the mill village, the black community constructed a fully realized culture all its own. Most telling in Lewis's astute observations into the hierarchy of this community is that, unlike the rigid white class structure based in ancestry and wealth, stratification in the black community was governed by personal behavior. This edition is expanded with a new preface by Reed on the origins and impact of the ""Kent Trilogy"" and new introduction by Stanfield detailing Lewis's field research for this volume as well as his subsequent career.