A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. By Steven Hahn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 610. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01169-4.)

Awarded the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Merle Curti prizes in history, this elegant account will introduce a wide readership to a quarter century of revisionist scholarship on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Hahn adds to that scholarship an emphasis on continuity between those three periods and a focus on the rural South, both of which lead him to novel interpretations and a few less-than-convincing critiques of existing literature. The result is a work that will be valuable for graduate and undergraduate courses in American, southern, and African American history but that does little to push scholarship in new directions.

Hahn's most important contribution, and one that makes the book invaluable for teaching the history of emancipation, lies in his rooting the history of Reconstruction in a discussion of African American politics during slavery. As he points out, such an interpretation requires a broad understanding of politics that is familiar to social historians but foreign to those accustomed to thinking of politics in the formal sense of direct engagement with the state. Slaves, of course, were by definition cut off from the latter. That did not prevent them, however, from understanding their relationships to structures of power in American society or from building kinship and community networks that allowed them to influence those structures. According to Hahn, those networks articulated a political understanding of the world that allowed slaves to realize the opportunities created by political and military conflicts over slavery and that formed the basis of their political behavior during and after the Civil War.

Slaves developed a "proto-peasant consciousness," according to Hahn, that allowed them to "sense very different possibilities" from other political actors in the conservative era that followed slave revolts and working-class uprisings early in the century (pp. 44, 64). That consciousness led them to initiate what he calls "the most sweeping revolution of the nineteenth century" (p. 65). Similar to his thesis in The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York, 1983), this contention locates the roots of nineteenth-century radicalism not in an embrace of the possibilities offered by liberalism and commercial capitalism but in a defense of a kin- and community-based moral economy. Hahn argues that American slaves rooted their politics in a worldview shared by "the West African societies from which they originally came" and "most rural societies in the preindustrial world" (p. 17). Slaves' political sense was overshadowed in the quasi-military antebellum social order, but it came to light when slaves laid down their tools and flooded into Union lines at the beginning of the Civil War. It also informed freedpeople's efforts to control land, reunite families, and gain formal political power during Reconstruction. Finally, it animated efforts to emigrate--first to Africa, then to the West, and finally to the urban North--in the decades following the Democratic Party's violent exclusion of African Americans from formal politics between 1877 and 1898.

Hahn adopts Eugene D. Genovese's characterization of North American slaves as "Jacobins of the Country," but his interpretation departs in significant ways from those advanced by Genovese, Eric Foner, and other important scholars of slavery and emancipation. Genovese originally cited the quote to support his contention that slaves rejected "restorationist" goals in the early nineteenth century and turned instead to a radical "bourgeois-democratic ideology" inspired by the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions (From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World [Baton Rouge, 1979], 96-97). That position is consistent with Eric Foner's argument that freedpeople radicalized Reconstruction's "massive experiment in interracial democracy" by "seiz[ing] upon America's republican values as a weapon for attacking the nation's racial caste system" (Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 [New York, 1983], xxv). Such claims are typical, Hahn contends, of the "liberal integrationist framework" that dominates the study of emancipation (p. 6). By valuing "liberal ideals of civil and political equality, economic opportunity, and interracial democracy," he writes, previous scholars overlooked "[e]migrationism, separatism, self-help, and racial solidarity," which were more important factors in shaping black politics in slavery and freedom (p. 6).

In place of previous efforts to understand African American politics in relation to other contemporary political trends, Hahn suggests that historians "look out from slavery onto the postemancipation world" (p. 6). It is unfair to suggest, as he does, that previous accounts claim freedmen had their "politics and politcal history made for them" (p. 7). But his perspective does lead to novel insights on black political organization. He demonstrates, for example, that the mostly black paramilitary Union Leagues emerged as much from the northern Republican model and from the observation that whites saw military violence as inseparable from political action as from kinship and religious networks. He also provides a detailed accounting of rural freedmen's rise within Republican political circles, which had been dominated initially by urban and northern whites and by blacks who had been free before the war. Much of his narrative relies on previous studies, but Hahn brings new and convincing interpretations to that material.

Less convincing is Hahn's broader argument that rural African American politics can be understood in isolation from broader trends of liberalism and, more importantly, urbanization and industrialization in the South. Hahn relies heavily on Foner's study of Reconstruction, but his account contains little of the nuance that characterizes Foner' s discussion of African American political thought in the postwar South. An example of the contrast between the authors' interpretations is their accounts of Robert Smalls, a former slave and Civil War hero who was elected to Congress by South Carolinians. Whereas Foner examines the material in light of ideological contradictions produced by black political power in the South, Hahn simply dismisses Smalls as a self-serving "'politician,'" although Small had just intervened to prevent a violent conflict during a plantation workers' strike along the Combahee River (p. 348).

Hahn's focus on the rural working class corrects a long-standing bias toward black urban elites. But his sharp distinction obscures what was certainly a more dynamic relationship--not only between classes but also between individual workers who moved between the city and the countryside or between agriculture and industry. It would have been interesting to know what plantation workers thought of the urban schoolteachers and preachers who Glenda Gilmore tells us sought to transform the gendered social order of the postwar South. And what of the washerwomen in Tera Hunter's study of Atlanta, who left the rural South seeking better pay and social freedom in urban service work? If kinship and community are so important for understanding the political consciousness of rural African Americans, as Hahn argues convincingly, then how were those ties stretched and changed with urbanization?

Even if we accept Hahn's focus on the countryside, it is remarkable how little he has to say about industrialization. Beyond noting the presence of African American sawmill and railroad workers in Arkansas assemblies of the Knights of Labor, he tells us little about their reasons for seeking such work or the effect it had on their political consciousness. Hahn raises those questions only in the final chapter, when he attributes rural industrial migration--and even the Great Migration to the urban North--to the same desire for autonomy that drove emigrationist movements of the 1870s and 1880s. His closing argument that southern Garveyism echoed the same rural consciousness relies on little new evidence and contradicts a wealth of scholarship documenting working-class African Americans' embrace of urban industrial capitalism in the early twentieth century.

These are differences of interpretation, however, and should not prevent scholars and students from taking advantage of Hahn' s well-written narrative of black politics in slavery and freedom. There is no better account of the links between those two eras, and the focus on the rural working class provides an important comparison to studies that focus on southern cities and the black middle class.

WILLIAM P. JONES

University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee