Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/865

 REVIEWS 851

but only in our day has this become the primary object of history.

This ambitious undertaking, aided by appropriations from the Carnegie Institution, is one of those later-day efforts to show just how men have lived in this country — all classes of men. And the first two volumes are devoted to those phases of American life which now really appeal to historians more keenly than any other: the ante-bellum South. Mr. Phillips was undoubtedly the proper man to undertake this task and it may be said in the beginning that he has done his work well.

The Old South, the Lower South, and the Old Southwest are the sections he deals with; and in these three regions there lived to 1865 three distinct classes of people: the planters — tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar growers ; the farmers, who occupied in the main the less fertile strips of land and the Piedmont hills; and the pioneers, who broke the way westward, first to Kentucky, then to Mississippi, and finally to Texas. About one-tenth of the total popu- lation were connected with the planters, while the other nine-tenths were farmers and pioneers — a population much like that which com- posed the major part of the Middle West prior to i860.

Of the six hundred and fifty pages devoted to the documentary reproduction of the ante-bellum South, more than four hundred have to do with plantations, slaves, the slave trade, indentured servants, etc. ; the "poor whites" are given four pages, free Negroes twenty-three, immigrants about twenty, and migration and frontier life something over a hundred ; the remainder is devoted to a descrip- tion of the manufacturing interests of the South prior to the War.

It will be seen that the slavery regime occupies the "main tent," and that is proper since the norm of the ante-bellum South was the plantation and since the commanding influence of that region was centered about the narrow "black belts" of the different states. The plantations were the "interests" who dominated legislatures and who controlled Congress in most crises between 1800 and 1861. Still the other nine-tenths interest us and one would like much to know more than these volumes offer about their life, their markets, and the effect of invention on their system of husbandry. The "poor whites," a term which the Negro was able to fix upon white people who did not own slaves but who lived in the vicinity of the planta- tions, merit more space than they receive. And the immigrant, who at the beginning of the Revolution composed 14 per cent, of the population of Virginia and almost as large an element of the Caro-