A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865.

A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865. By Stephen V. Ash. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xiv, 289. $26.95, ISBN 0-312-29493-X.)

Stephen V. Ash's study of three southern men and one woman offers an eyewitness account of the collapse of the Confederacy and the emergence of the New South during the year 1865. It tells the stories of Louis Hughes, an African American slave and freedman; Cornelia McDonald, a Virginia woman and Confederate patriot; John Robertson, a teenage, plain-folk soldier from East Tennessee; and Samuel Agnew, a minister and son of a Mississippi planter family. Following the lives of these four individuals through the winter, spring, summer, and fall of 1865, this unusual book provides an intimate and moving account that is also sensitive to the critical issues of race, gender, and class about which historians of the South have written so much.

The broad outlines of Ash's story are familiar ground. The Confederacy was at war with itself, as neighbors, particularly those in some regions of the upper South, took different stands for and against secession. When the war came, these communities were convulsed by bitter, unconventional fighting. Other Confederates, rich and poor, slaveholder and non-slaveholder, men and women alike, resented and hated the wartime measures of conscription, impressment, and taxes-in-kind. The extraordinary mobilization of human and material resources demanded by the war created shortages and hard times that sapped the will of white southerners, bred defeatism, and eventually helped to destroy the Confederacy. Meanwhile black slaves exhibited remarkable boldness and autonomy, as they always had, yearning and struggling for freedom and dignity while they endured the cruelty and oppression of their last months of bondage. Freedmen and freedwomen had their own ideas about the end of slavery and the meaning of emancipation. "What they wanted," Ash writes, "was to obtain land and live as independent farmers" (p. 224).

If Ash's study affirms a lot of what historians already know about the life and death of the Confederacy, this is nonetheless a valuable and useful book. Beautifully written, it evokes striking images of the varied southern landscape and conveys a powerful sense of the rhythms of time, leisure, work, and production that governed the tempo of human activity in the Old South. Set against a backdrop of fields of cotton and corn, of livestock ranging freely in the unfenced woodlands that dominated the countryside, of roads to market and the outside world that were little more than paths through the forest, the lives of Ash's four southerners were punctuated by the natural movements of the seasons and the sun. "The first part of August," for instance, "began the laying-by season, when the ripening corn and cotton needed no further attention," making this "a time of relaxation and communal gatherings" (p. 155). Likewise, the onset of cold and freezing temperatures in December or January marked hog-killing time.

The one feature of Ash's book that is disappointing concerns John Robertson, whose story stands for the southern yeoman experience during the Civil War. Robertson's story sheds little light on the vital question of plain-folk loyalty to the Confederacy. Of the principal racial, gender, and class groups that made up the southern population, historians know the least about white plain folk. What historians do know about this group emphasizes their disaffection and disloyalty, not their support and allegiance. As historian Gary W. Gallagher has argued, until a better understanding of yeoman fidelity to the Confederacy arises, the story of the Confederacy and its downfall will not be complete.

CHARLES E. BROOKS

Texas A&M University