First published in 1949, Frank Lawrence Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old South refuted the popular myth that the antebellum South contained only three classes—planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley draws on a wide range of source materials—firsthand accounts such as diaries and the published observations of travelers and journalists; church records; and county records, including wills, deeds, tax lists, and grand-jury reports—to accurately reconstruct the prewar South’s large and significant “yeoman farmer” middle class. He follows the history of this group, beginning with their migration from the Atlantic states into the frontier South, charts their property holdings and economic standing, and tells of the rich texture of their lives: the singing schools and corn shuckings, their courtship rituals and revival meetings, barn raisings and logrollings, and contests of marksmanship and horsemanship such as “snuffing the candle,” “driving the nail,” and the “gander pull.” A new introduction by John B. Boles explains why this book remains the starting point today for the study of society in the Old South.

"A significant voice in a significant debate . . . full of marvelous quotes."--William W. Freehling, University of Kentucky "Shows clearly that the Solid South was not solid at all [and] demonstrates that the war encompassed much more than military strategy and tactics . . . it was fought at home as well as on the battlefield."--Wayne K. Durrill, University of Cincinnati This compelling and engaging book sheds new light on how planter self-interest, government indifference, and the very nature of southern society produced a rising tide of dissent and disaffection among Georgia's plain folk during the Civil War. The authors make extensive use of local newspapers, court records, manuscript collections, and other firsthand accounts to tell a story of latent class resentment that emerged full force under wartime pressures and undermined southern support for the Confederacy. More directly than any previous historians, the authors make clear the connections between the causes of class resentment and their impact. Planters produced far too much cotton and avoided the draft at will. Speculators hoarded scarce goods and brought on spiraling inflation. Government officials turned a blind eye to the infractions of the rich, and were often bribed to do so. Women left to go hungry took matters into their own hands, stealing livestock in rural areas and rioting for food in every major city in Georgia. The hardships of families back home weighed heavily on soldiers in the field, contributing to rampant desertion. Deserters banded together, sometimes with draft dodgers and blacks escaping enslavement, to defend themselves or to go on the offensive against Confederate authorities. Some whites even planned and participated in slave resistance, a joining of forces that previous historians have long dismissed as highly improbable. So violent did Georgia's inner civil war become that one resident commented, "We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy." This work stresses more forcefully than any before it that plain folk in the Deep South were far from united behind the Confederate war effort. That lack of unity, brought on largely by class resentment, helped to ensure that the Confederacy's cause would, in the end, be lost. David Williams is professor and acting chair of the Department of History at Valdosta State University.

In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest. Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.

The book employs the story of one particular extended family network--the Browns, Sherrods, Mannings, Sprowls, and Williamses--to illustrate the powerful influence of kinship ties as a force mitigating lines of class distinction in the nineteenth-century American South. It traces each family's story from its earliest appearance in the historical record to the convergence of the family network, first taking shape in northeast Alabama and eventually reaching full-blown form in northwest Louisiana's Red River Valley. There, both the plain folk and planters within the group demonstrated exceptional harmony and cooperation in constructing a flexible family network that left its mark on the area between the 1820s and 1870s. The story of these five families reveals much about migratory patterns of that restless segment of early- to mid-nineteenth century Americans who hankered to exploit opportunities on the ever-expanding, westward-moving agricultural frontier.

Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection made Virginia's Southampton County notorious. Gradually, however, the bloody spectacle receded from national memory. Although the timeless rhythms of rural life resumed after the insurrection, Southampton could not escape the forces of change. From the Age of Jackson through to secession, wartime, and Reconstruction, it shared the fate of the Old South. Many who had witnessed the insurrection lived to see Tuner's cause triumph as war destroyed the slave system, inaugurating an intense struggle to shape the new postwar order. Old Southampton links local and national history. It explains how partian loyalties developed, how white democracy flourished in the late antebellum years, how secession sharply divded neighborhoods with few slaves from those with large plantations, and how, following emancipation, former slaves challenged the prerogatives of former slaveholders. Crofts draws on two volumnious diaries and other rich records, plus rare poll lists that show how individuals voted. He vividly re-creates the experiences of planters and plain folk, slave owners and slaves, the powerful and the obscure. This deft combination of political and social history is must reading for anyone interested in the Old South and the Civil War era.

The story of the tempestuous romance between Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara is set amid the drama of the Civil War.

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