Stories with a Moral: Literature and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. (Book Reviews).

Stories with a Moral: Literature and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Michael E. Price. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 394. $45.00, ISBN 0-8203-2132-X.)

Michael E. Price, a professor of history and social science education at Armstrong Atlantic State University, borrowed the title of his book from that of a collection of stories by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Price argues that the common moral of the works he examines is that the way of life associated with the southern cotton plantation, both before and after the war, was the best possible.

Price pursues that theme through six chapters and an epilogue that are organized into three major parts. The first part consists of three chapters that treat the portrayal of antebellum Georgia in various kinds of writing: travel accounts, humor sketches, domestic novels, diaries, and letters. Although some of the travel accounts were proslavery, others were not, thereby revealing "the inherent shortcomings of relying on transient observers to construct a literary defense of slavery" (p. 60). That task was assumed in part by Georgia humorists such as Longstreet and William Tappan Thompson, conservative men who applauded the societal order that accompanied planter control. In addition, many women writers rallied to the defense of slavery. Price devotes a good deal of attention to Caroline Lee Hentz's 1854 novel, The Planter's Northern Bride, as well as to diaries kept by plantation mistresses.

Part Two deals with the Civil War and Reconstruction. As in the last chapter of Part One, Price's focus during the war years is on writing by women in diaries and letters and in fiction, specifically Augusta Jane Evans's 1864 encomium to Confederate patriotism, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice. The chapter on Reconstruction includes commentary on travel accounts and on works by the humorist Bill Arp (Charles Henry Smith) and the poet Sidney Lanier.

Part Three--at fifty pages, the shortest section of the book--covers the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and also assays the impact of the Lost Cause ideology on the early twentieth century. Among the writers treated are Bill Arp, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and Joel Chandler Harris.

Price's research in both primary and secondary sources is impressive, and he is certainly right when he writes that "the literary record is vital to the historical study of the American South" (p. 11). Some of his interpretations, however, are suspect. Although Price admits that it is "important ... not to overlook the social revolution that divided the Old and New Souths" (p. 3) and that the Civil War was "a social revolution and a great turning point in the history of the South" (p. 10), he proceeds to diminish that revolution and to argue that the New South was the same Old South. Only on the issue of race was that the case in Georgia, and Henry Grady did not need A. B. Longstreet to tell him to keep black people down.

Two of the major writers that Price examines do not support his argument for the continued hegemony of the planter ideology after the war. Because Price himself acknowledges that Lanier does not fit the mold, it is difficult to see why the treatment of his work is so extensive. And Price's analysis of Harris's work, which occupies much of the last full chapter, is badly flawed. It fails to appreciate Harris's complexity and too often conflates the author and his characters.

Although the book is largely free of factual errors, one noticeable mistake has this reviewer's 1980 book, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913, being published by Mercer University Press instead of by the University of North Carolina Press (p. 340 n. 8, p. 371).

Stories with a Moral contains a great deal of useful information. Even so, had Price ended his account at the Civil War, he would have produced a stronger book.