From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community.

In 1974, Carl Degler suggested there was an "other South" - a group of Southerners who, in his words, "stood out against the prevailing views and values of their region."(1) After twenty years of historical scholarship, we know that Degler only discovered the tip of the iceberg. Historians have uncovered so many regional, ethnic, class, and racial variations within Southern culture and society that the historic South is beginning to look every bit as complex in its diversity as the North. Yet the picture is hardly complete. Topical and local studies continue to make important discoveries about the heterogeneity of Southern culture, especially for the nineteenth century. Michael Shirley's study of Winston-Salem, From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community, is the most recent contribution to the field.(2)

From the first, Shirley tells us, Winston-Salem diverged from the Southern mainstream. Moravians, a pietist sect from Germany, founded the town in the late eighteenth century as a "congregation community" where life was lived "within a framework of personal relationships between kin and friends with one set of values" and where "public and private spheres merge under church direction" (p. 11). Until at least 1825, Moravians remained united by this religious vision. Through their participation in the congregation, community members - most of whom were artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers - lived a life characterized by brotherly love, cooperation, purity, and patriarchal authority. The community, through congregational boards, even controlled the economy. By regulating the trades, determining who could own a shop, and controlling prices, residents tried to ensure the ability of each member to make a living. According to Shirley, all submitted for the good of the whole.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Moravians gradually became victims of their own success. As Salem began to develop trade relations with northern cities, a few artisans tried to expand their enterprises to meet demand and to survive against outside competitors. As they did, they became disenchanted with the congregational regulations of the economy which they saw as antagonistic to their economic interests. To retain peace in the community, church leaders began to concede their communitarian vision and slowly let go of their control of the economy. By the end of the antebellum period a new moral economy began to dominate Salem. The most ambitious began to see themselves as autonomous, rational individuals who would find their destiny through participation in the marketplace, not the congregation. As this new ethic took hold, residents began to look to other institutions besides the congregation for social cohesion - namely political parties, benevolent associations, and evangelical religion.

The Civil War and the postwar reconstruction of the Southern economy proved to be boons for ambitious residents of the growing metropolis of Winston-Salem. Textiles and tobacco manufacturing created new opportunities for wealth. Yet as the town gained a foothold in national and international economic networks, the community became increasingly fragmented, especially among the lower classes.

With precision and clarity, Shirley delineates how the town's various labor groups responded to the new industrial order. Using census materials, government surveys, and business records, he argues that no single working class developed in late nineteenth-century Winston-Salem. Although white and black, laborer and artisan wanted much the same thing - autonomy, greater respect for their labor, political power, better working conditions - they remained divided by status, cultural background, and especially race. Thus the most concerted labor movement in Winston-Salem, the establishment of the local order of the Knights of Labor in the late 1880s, failed, not only because the opposition was stronger, but because laborers could not set aside their differences. Race, Shirley observes, was a "conundrum for southern labor which made possible only a fragile unity among the workers in Winston-Salem" (p. 222).

Shirley's painstaking analysis of the evolution of working-class life in Winston-Salem is a welcome contribution to the field of Southern labor history. His careful and sensitive use of the sources makes this one of the better studies of its kind. Still, one wishes Shirley had pushed the sources even farther by analyzing the gray areas and the roads not taken. Did the Moravian artisans who wanted economic expansion sometimes regret the choices they made? Was Moravian culture really so easily undone by the new values of the market revolution? After the war, what happened to the Moravians, their institutions, and their ideals ? Similarly, Shirley might have given more attention to the complex issue of lower-class race relations. Why did white workers ultimately decide that race was more important than class? When and how did they come to this decision? Were they aware of the cost of their racism? How did blacks respond to lower-class white racism? How did black and white laborers interact day to day? How did these interactions inform their class and racial identities? Did they ever experiment, even unknowingly, with alternative forms of race relations? Given Winston-Salem's isolation from the Southern mainstream in most matters, it is a rather sad irony that residents conformed to their region so perfectly on this one issue.

These criticisms aside, Shirley's From Congregation Town to Industrial City makes a significant contribution to the study of the nineteenth-century urban South. Although Shirley's study sometimes begs for further analysis, this only suggests how much we still need to know about the diverse subcultures and subsocieties within the South.

Steve Tripp Grand Valley State University

ENDNOTES

1. Carl Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 2-3.

2. Recent works that have analyzed the diversity of nineteenth-century Southern society include: James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874 (Lexington, 1990); Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York, 1990); Robert C. Kenzer, Kinship and Neighbor. hood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849-1881 (Knoxville, 1987); Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed: 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge, 1988); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989); Daniel Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (Charlottesville, 1992); Richard Lowe, Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1856-70 (Charlottesville, 1991); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984).