One South or Many?

This book is a statewide study of Tennessee's agricultural population between 1850 and 1880. Relying upon massive samples of census data as well as plantation accounts, Freedmen's Bureau Records, and the Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires, the author provides the first systematic comparison of the socioeconomic bases of plantation and nonplantation areas both before and immediately after the Civil War. Although the study applauds scholars' growing appreciation of southern diversity during the nineteenth century, it argues that recent scholarship both oversimplifies distinctions between Black Belt and Upcountry and exaggerates the socioeconomic heterogeneity of the South as a whole. It also challenges several largely unsubstantiated assumptions concerning the postbellum reorganization of southern agriculture, particularly those regarding the impoverishment of southern whites and the immobilization and economic repression of southern freedmen.