Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia.

Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia. By Mark V. Wetherington. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. [xiv], 383. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2963-3.)

Mark V. Wetherington's study of Georgia's "wiregrass" region examines the motivations and experiences of landless whites, yeoman farmers, and small slaveholders to argue that ordinary whites of Pulaski, Wilcox, Telfair, Irwin, and Coffee Counties supported secession, the Civil War, and the postwar enforcement of white supremacy not because they were hoodwinked by elites but out of commitment to localism and white supremacy. Drawing on government, church, and railroad records, newspapers, letters, and diaries, Wetherington chronologically considers civilians and soldiers at each stage of war and Reconstruction. Although the book's treatment of localism and of women and black Georgians is uneven, these shortcomings are outweighed by its important contribution: well-supported analysis of why ordinary white piney-woods men supported slavery and white supremacy.

Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia joins two historiographical conversations. It rebuts the emphasis of Paul Escott, Armstead Robinson, David Williams, and others on class conflict, asserting that "race consciousness outweighed class consciousness" (p. 66). Wetherington maintains that loyalty to the local community and white supremacy transcended without erasing class differences, uniting whites to fight against the Union and, later, racial equality. Plain Folk's Fight also counters Drew Gilpin Faust's interpretation in Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996) that the war-induced absence of white men and weakening of slavery enfeebled the antebellum social structure, causing white women to withdraw loyalty and prompt the Confederacy's collapse. Instead, Wetherington insists, "household authority and patriarchy exhibited considerable resiliency" and sustained the war effort because older white men stayed home (p. 7).

It is a measure of the book's success that it provokes questions in some areas and persuades in others. When by localism Wetherington means attachment to loved ones and neighborhood, he offers solid evidence that love for home and family fueled ordinary piney-woods residents' will to fight and, after the fall of Atlanta and a rout close to home at Griswoldville, to withdraw support from the Confederacy. Yet when by localism he means the principle of local control as a motivation for secession, his evidence disagrees: wiregrass Georgians in the election of 1860 decisively backed John Breckinridge and a federal slave code, while regarding Stephen A. Douglas's platform of popular sovereignty, or local control over slavery, as "political heresy" (p. 7). Insistence on unchanged patriarchy also raises questions. While Wetherington shows that older white men remained in charge at home, he also shows that white heads-of-household away at war had to depend on the state and other men to care for their families rather than exercising complete control over their own households--a shift that changed the place of soldiers and their families within patriarchy. Wetherington often bases his argument that "patriotic women became a powerful force for the state" rather than questioners of it on the assumption that white men spoke for white women (p. 148); few women's voices appear and, when they do, they present a more complex picture--as, for example, in Mrs. William Bennett's petition for her husband's exemption from military service. Finally, some readers may be uncomfortable with the book's dismissive treatment of black Georgians, who "did little to openly win their freedom" (p. 165).

All these observations pale compared to the book's overall contribution. Rather than deny or assume that Confederates fought to preserve slavery, Wetherington shows what slavery meant and why it mattered to wiregrass Georgians. Slavery, they believed, prevented blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, and thereby threatening the open range on which livestock relied and menacing white men's protection and control of their families; in the absence of slavery, violently enforced white supremacy could achieve the same purposes. This analysis enriches knowledge of the Confederate South.

CHANDRA MANNING

Georgetown University