Review - Keith on McCurry

H-NET review: Keith on McCurry, MASTERS OF SMALL WORLDS

Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996
From: David Herr
Subject: H-NET review: Keith on McCurry, MASTERS OF SMALL WORLDS

Jeanette Keith's review of Stephanie McCurry presents an opportunity for a discussion about the relationship between yeomen families and planter elites. Is McCurry correct? What about the use of the household as an analytic historical tool? Where do you stand on the idea that yeomen farmers fashioned their politics after the planters even though the two groups often found themselves in conflict?

>
>Stephanie McCurry.  MASTERS OF SMALL WORLDS: YEOMAN
>   HOUSEHOLDS, GENDER RELATIONS, AND THE POLITICAL CULTURE
>   OF THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH CAROLINA LOW COUNTRY.  New York:
>   Oxford University Press, 1995.  320 pp., tables,
>   appendix, notes and index. $39.95.
>
>Reviewed by Jeanette Keith, Bloomsburg University of
>Pennsylvania, for H-CIVWAR. 
>
>     Stephanie McCurry's superb study of antebellum South
>Carolina deserves a place on the shelves and reading lists
>of all historians of the South and the Civil War.  In lucid
>prose, backed up by careful and sophisticated research, she
>provides an answer to one of the most basic questions about
>the war and the region, a question best posed in the terms
>many professors have heard from freshmen students:  "If
>most Southerners didn't own slaves, then why did they fight
>for the Confederacy?"  For her answer, McCurry looks at the
>South Carolina Low Country.
>
>     The Low Country represents the Slave South carried to
>extremes, characterized as it was by huge plantations, a
>majority slave population, and a political system unique in
>the South for its elitism.  South Carolina was not "the
>South" any more than Massachusetts was "the North," but its
>very nature as the extreme example of "Southern-ness" makes
>it an excellent place to ask some basic questions about the
>nature of antebellum society and its relationship to the
>political system.  McCurry's answers demolish some deeply
>cherished myths about the Low Country and cast new light on
>some very old questions in the historiography of the South.
>
>     McCurry's book is about yeoman farmers, their families,
>their religion, and their relationships (political and
>otherwise) with the planters.  McCurry notes that the very
>presence of yeoman farmers in the Low Country has been
>written out of history: they exist only as "the people" in
>the discourse of planter politicians.  Ironically, two
>opposing groups are responsible for this -- the descendants
>of planters, who have found their self-created myth of the
>aristocratic Low Country both soothing and a lucrative
>tourist attraction, and antebellum travelers like Frederick
>Law Olmsted, who assumed the degredation of the non-planter
>white population and who usually saw in the South what he
>wished to see.
>
>     Through the use of quantified data, McCurry establishes
>the existence of yeoman farmers in the Low Country and
>demonstrates that they were the majority of the white male
>population in the region.  According to McCurry, these
>farmers owned small amounts of land and possibly a few
>slaves.  Their strategy for survival, as described by
>McCurry, will be familiar to any student of the new rural
>social history. They produced food first for family
>sustenance and then grew cotton for the market.  Farmers
>were masters of small households and controlled the labor of
>their wives, their children and (if they had them) their
>slaves.  Farm women worked the land alongside the men -- a
>fact of particular historical significance, given the pro-
>slavery advocates' insistence that slavery kept white women
>out of the fields.
>
>     To this point, Low Country farmers may sound rather
>like farmers anywhere else in the South, or in parts of the
>Midwest for that matter.  But McCurry understands the
>political significance of the household economy she
>describes and never lets the reader forget it.  Low Country
>yeoman farmers were "masters" in a slave society where that
>word had deep meaning.
>
>     As masters, albeit of small farms and families rather
>than plantations and slaves, yeoman farmers controlled their
>small worlds and their dependents just as the planters did
>theirs.  As threats to slavery loomed, planter politicians
>developed a rhetoric of mastery that could be made to
>include non-slaveholders as well.  Students of antebellum
>proslavery rhetoric will be familiar with the use of the
>family metaphor to describe slavery: slaves were family,
>they were dependent, and so were women and children, and to
>strike at slavery was to strike at -- shall I say it? -- family
>values.  Proslavery rhetoric frequently tied abolitionism
>together with feminism as challenges to the God-ordained
>authority of white men.  McCurry makes it clear that this
>rhetoric was pitched to yeoman farmers, to whom the meaning
>was clear: an end to slavery meant an end to the privileges
>of the master for them as well as for their planter
>neighbors.
>
>     McCurry debunks the idea that southern whites of
>whatever class were united in a herrenvolk democracy based
>on race.  Rather, yeoman farmers made common cause with
>planters in defense of the privileges of mastery, but never
>deluded themselves that they and the planters were equal in
>power.  Yet, according to McCurry, yeoman did not defer to
>planters or exist in a client-patron relationship with
>them.  Planters had to defer to the rights of yeoman
>farmers as property owners and masters, since the farmer's
>rights derived from the same value system that justified
>slavery.  No one in South Carolina could afford to
>challenge the supremacy of a master (of whatever class) in
>his home or cast doubt on the legitimacy of his control over
>his dependents and his property.  Planters also had to court
>yeoman votes.  Even though South Carolina was the most un-
>democratic of Southern states, vesting unusual power in the
>state legislature, no one could get elected to that
>legislature without the vote of "the people."
>
>     MASTERS OF SMALL WORLDS uses gender as a category of
>analysis in a very sophisticated way.  As noted above,
>gender relations help explain much about support for
>slavery.  Gender roles -- the parts played by men and
>women -- also factor into McCurry's discussion of class
>relations and religion.  One of the most amusing, and at
>the same time saddening, parts of the book is McCurry's
>description of the "gendered" relationships between
>planters and yeoman families.  Men from both classes met in
>the militia and at political rallies (although their
>different status was marked at such places), but planter
>women and farmers' wives rarely met at all.  When they did,
>their interactions as described by McCurry give the lie to
>any notions of cross-class sisterhood.
>
>     Religion, McCurry says, acted as a powerful unifying
>force in South Carolina -- a force that was firmly
>pro-slavery.  Beginning in the early 19th century, revivals
>converted much of the white population of the Low Country
>to evangelical Christianity.  Planters and yeomen worshipped
>at the same churches, although seating indicated the man's
>status.  McCurry does not believe that the evangelical
>impulse in the Low Country was ever seriously anti-slavery.
>>From the first, evangelical preachers upheld the mastery of
>God and white men.  Churches exhorted dependents to be
>obedient and submissive to their masters, whether those
>dependents were women, children or slaves.  Although
>congregations occasionally intervened to discipline men
>whose treatment of their wives was truly awful, ministers
>asserted that emancipation for women or slaves was
>unnatural and would end Christian civilization.
>
>     When Lincoln's election forced the secession crisis in
>South Carolina, evangelical ministers led their flocks out
>of the Union.  McCurry points out that the insistence from
>the pulpit that God was on the side of the South was a
>critical factor in rallying cross-class support for the
>Confederacy.  So was violence.  Yeomen, in particular,
>suffered a crisis of fear in 1860 that led them to be
>suspicious of all strangers and to threaten Unionist
>neighbors and Yankee visitors to the region.
>
>     When South Carolina's men went to war, McCurry
>concludes, they did not go as equals.  Everyone understood
>that planters had more power than yeomen.  But yeomen and
>planters shared "a definition of manhood rooted in the
>inviolability of the household, the command of dependents,
>and the public prerogatives manhood conferred.  When they
>struck for independence in the fall of 1860, when they
>contributed their part to tearing the Union asunder,
>lowcountry yeomen acted in defense of their own identity,
>as masters of small worlds" (p. 304).
>
>     Not the least of the virtues of this book is that it
>is written very well, in clear and entertaining prose.  My
>criticisms are very few.  I wish the book had a
>bibliography.  Although McCurry's notes are clear and
>indicate the depth of her research, a bibliography is still
>a great convenience to the reader.  On a more substantive
>level, I wish that this book had more to say about the
>relationship of yeoman farmers to slaves.  McCurry reminds
>us that planters and yeomen were always conscious of the
>presence of the black majority, but this is a book mostly
>about whites.  Nonetheless, this is simply one of the best
>books on Southern social history I have ever read.
>Sophisticated in technique and subtle in analysis, MASTERS
>OF SMALL WORLDS carries that analysis into politics to
>produce strikingly original insights that will have an
>impact on Southern historiography for years to come.
>
>Copyright (c) 1996 H-NET.  All rights reserved.  This work
>may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
>is given to the author and the list.  For other permission
>please contact .
>
>[The book review editor for H-CIVWAR is Daniel E. Sutherland.]

Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996
From: Susan O'Donovan
Subject: Re: H-NET review: Keith on McCurry, MASTERS OF SMALL WORLDS

I'm not so sure McCurry was claiming that "yeomen farmers fashioned their politics *after* the planters." Rather, I suspect what she's trying to argue is that given similar understandings about the proper constellation of domestic relationships (what's going on inside households), yeomen reached a similar understanding about proper relationships between Southern households--and thus where the South fit into the nation. I doubt very much that McCurry would deprive yeomen of an agency of their own by submitting that they simply modeled their politics after those of their neighbors.

Susan O'Donovan
Freedmen & Southern Society Project
University of Maryland at College Park
so29@umail.umd.edu
(301) 405-4310

Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996
From: Jeanette Keith
Subject: Yeoman politics

Having reviewed McCurry's book, I agree with Susan O'Donovan that she is NOT arguing that yeoman farmers simply took their political lead from the planters. I thought my review said pretty much what O'Donovan says below:

<<--I'm not so sure McCurry was claiming that "yeomen farmers fashioned their politics *after* the planters." Rather, I suspect what she's trying to argue is that given similar understandings about the proper constellation of domestic relationships (what's going on inside households), yeomen reached a similar understanding about proper relationships between Southern households--and thus where the South fit into the nation.-->>

I think part of the problem here is that McCurry is describing how politics can grow from gender relationships and household economies, and that is possibly something political historians aren't used to dealing with.

Jeanette Keith
Bloomsburg University
keith@planetx.bloomu.edu

Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996
From: Bill Cecil-Fronsman

I think we need to be careful about how applicable McCurry's book is to the South as a whole. It's an impressive book, no question about it. McCurry rightly rejects criticism about how "typical" lowcountry South Carolina was of the South as a whole, rightly pointing out that every area was unique. Since her book stands on its own, she may not have to deal with issues of typicality. But those who would apply her notions of yeoman/planter interactions to the South as whole *do* have to deal with these issues.

According to McCurry's tables, in 1860 blacks in the lowcountry outnumbered whites by a two-to-one margin. The pattern in the South as a whole was the opposite -- whites outnumbered blacks by a two-to-one margin. The presence of a black majority forced a degree of unity that certainly did not exist in many of the areas outside of the plantation districts. The power of planters in the lowcountry was greater than in the typical southern community if for no other reason than the vastly greater resources commanded by lowcountry planters.

I think Susan O'Donovan's point about the McCurry's views on the origins of yeoman politics is on target. I don't see McCurry claiming that the yeomanry model its politics after the planters. What I see her claiming is that the power of planters was sufficiently strong that they were able to frame the political decisions facing South Carolinians in such a way as to insure an impressive degree of unity. -- A unity, I would stress, that was not achieved in many other areas without the same kind of planter control.

Bill Cecil-Fronsman           zzceci@acc.wuacc.edu
Department of History         Office:  (913) 231-1010 x1317
Washburn University           Fax:     (913) 231-1084
Topeka, KS 66621

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996
From: Andrew Lee Feight
Subject: More insight on McCurry's work

McCurry's work is path-breaking, but I would caution those who see in her work a fully-cemented bond between the yeomen and planter in the Lowcountry. The emphasis she places on the coercive force of the militias and vigilante groups in the months leading up to secession suggests that the bond of evangelical religion and patriarchy failed to provide, without violence, the needed (or desired) unity.

Andrew Lee Feight
University of Kentucky
alfeig00@pop.uky.edu

Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996
From: Joel Sipress
Subject: Helpful insight about McCurry's Masters

Joel Sipress writes:

I have not yet had a chance to read Stephanie McCurry's book, but I have read her work in dissertation form. Her work is both fascinating and groundbreaking. It is the first monograph that I am aware of that provides a gender-centered analysis of the political economy of the southern yeoman household.

One of the central contentions of her argument is that planters and yeomen, by virtue of their common position as masters of households, shared a common interest as members of what was, in effect, a ruling elite of male household heads. This common interest, McCurry maintains, overshadowed whatever tension may have existed between planters and yeomen in the South Carolina low country. This common interest, she argues, was the foundation of upon which planter-yeoman unity rested during the sectional conflict, the secession crisis, and the Civil War.

This is a provocative line of argument, and one that warrants further discussion.

McCurry's argument rests, in part, on an analysis of pro-slavery political rhetoric in the low country. What she finds (and I consider this one of her most important contributions) is that pro-slavery rhetoric tied the defense of slavery to the defense of patriarchal authority, generally. Abolitionism was, according to this line of rhetoric, a threat not merely to slavery, but to the authrority of all who were masters of households.

The question is, how do we interpret this rhetoric?

We need to be careful, when analyzing political rhetoric, not to take it on face value. Political rhetoric is an act of manipulation. It is sleight-of-hand. An effective rhetoritician (if he or she is unscrupulous) will often assert an untruth in order produce the desired political result.

So, the fact that pro-slavery rhetoriticians asserted that abolitionism was a threat to the authority of yeomen household heads does not necessarily mean that abolitionism really was such a threat. The fact that pro-slavery rhetoriticians asserted an indentity of interests between planters and yeomen does not necessarily mean that there was such an indentity of interests.

In the 1890s, for example, conservative Democrats continually brayed about the identity of interests among all white men. In retrospect, it is clear that the "white supremacy" rhetoric of the 1890s was an attempt to paper over deap seated class antagonisms among white southerners. The very volume with which Democrats asserted that all white men shared a common interest is, in fact, an indication of just how untrue the assertion actually was.

Perhaps pro-slavery rhetoriticians in the South Carolina low country were playing a similar game. By asserting that the authority of the yeoman head of household was equivalent to the authority of the slavemaster, pro-slavery rhetoriticians may have been trying to rally yeoman farmers to a fight that was not really the yeoman's fight. The rhetoric was effective, and this is a very important point that begs explanation. But just because the rhetoric is effective, it does not necessarily follow the rhetoritician's assertion is true.

Stephanie McCurry has demonstrated that the politics of secession (and southern politics generally) cannot be understood apart from yeoman farmers' identity as masters of households. Although I am not yet convinced by her particular line of argument, I appreciate enormously the way she has opened up a new and exciting area of inquiry and discussion.

Joel Sipress
University of Wisconsin-Superior

Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996
From: Gail Murray
Subject: Remark on Sipress

Thanks to Joel Sipress for his cogent remarks on Stephanie McCurry's _Masters of Small Worlds_ which was reviewed on the list a few weeks ago by Jeannette Keith. For those of us who have not yet found time to read the monograph, the thesis which Joel described is basically contained in her article "Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender & Proslavery Politics" _JAH_ 78 #4 (March 1992). I have used the essay very successfully in my antebellum class.

Gail S. Murray
Dept. Of History
Rhodes College
Memphis, TN 38112
murray@rhodes.edu

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