A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent.

A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent. By Michael Thomas Smith. (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 2003. Pp. 216. $45.00, ISBN 0-87413-841-8.)

Michael Thomas Smith's biography of Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick advances the ongoing work of weaving the story of southern dissent into the tapestry of southern history. Born in North Carolina's western Piedmont, Hedrick took full advantage of available educational opportunities, earning degrees from the University of North Carolina and the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. He was hired by the University of North Carolina in 1853 as the school's first professor of agricultural chemistry and then dismissed in the fall of 1856 because of his vocal stance in favor of Free Soil. Hedrick again left the state in search of employment. As the conflict over slavery escalated, he became a leader of southern Unionists in exile. After the war he styled himself a centrist Conservative Republican. Embittered toward and distrustful of Governor William Woods Holden yet too radical for state Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan, Hendrick eventually found it impossible to return home. After working as an examiner for the United States Patent Office in Washington for twenty-five years, he died in exile in Georgetown in 1886.

Smith places Hedrick's dissenting voice squarely within the context of antebellum political and economic debates over the expansion of slavery, utilizing rich, if also previously well mined, sources. Further, he ferrets out rarer sources that delineate Hedrick's thinking on what he considered vital matters of his day: scientific farming and the future of non-slaveholding white southern farmers. Though some readers may find his approach a bit old-fashioned, Smith focuses on the strong tension between antebellum southern politics and agricultural reform, which helps explain why Hedrick shifted political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Free Soil movement. He contends that Hedrick's level of political conviction is best measured by the personal cost of dissent, his exile from the Old North State.

Like Hinton Rowan Helper, who befriended him, Hedrick sacrificed his status and place in state and section by expressing his belief that slavery was squeezing the vitality and industry out of the land and people he loved. Thus he could see eye to eye with Free Soil Republicans concerning the economic limits and hardships imposed on white yeomen by the close proximity of slavery. Yet, as Smith notes, Hedrick continued to identify himself as a North Carolinian and a southerner, apparently failing to see any contradiction in such a complex identity. Smith has rescued Hedrick's story of dissent and its consequences from reconciliationist-imposed obscurity and from the oversimplifications of earlier historians. He has also left ample room to explore further the culture of dissent that gave birth to and surely nurtured Hedrick, Helper, and other southern dissenters from the Piedmont.

J. MICHAEL RHYNE

University of Cincinnati