Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

SYNOPSIS:

Rather Populism itself, Hahn's book examines the "experiences leading to and . . . informing" the Populist 'moment.'" (10) His analysis of these experiences focuses on the transformation of social relations and confrontations in the context of a market economy penetrating into a Georgia Upcountry society of "different organization and sensibility." Yeomen in this society owned their farming operations and resources, relied on household labor, and maintained "a distinctive sort of contact with the labor market." (49) Hahn argues that relationships of "production and exchange, the habits of mutuality, the common use-rights, and the customs of inheritance" encouraged anticommercial sentiments along with a "general authoritarianism" that created deep-seated animosity toward the slaveholding class. (85) By convincing the white citizenry of their common stake in slavery, slaveholders "implicitly questioned the loyalties of the lower classes and exposed their fears of social conflicts." (85) Though yeomen expressed "complex reasons" for defending the Confederacy, "the requirements of defending a nascent slaveholders' republic brought those conflicts to the surface." (85) In the Civil War's wake arose an exploitative credit system, tied to changing local, national, and international markets, that held yeomen to staple agriculture. This situation led to political unrest in the Upcountry during the 1880s, fueling the "fires of Southern Populism." (152) The experience of an expanding agricultural market, railroad construction, and rising land values at this time all led to an increasing concentration of wealth. Hahn argues that "impersonal forces" were not responsible for the Upcountry's absorption into the national and international market, rather it "was accomplished, in large part, by landlords and, especially, by merchants who sought to make the best of postwar conditions, to extend the realm of staple agriculture, and to reap profits," resulting in heightened yeomen animosity towards local storekeepers, landlords, and Northern capitalists. (169) Hahn ultimately sees the controversy over fence law as the pivotal force that "galvanized budding antagonisms" and "paved the road to Populism." (240)

EXCERPT:

"A comparative glimpse at the Black Belt casts that hierarchy into sharper relief, for there the setting was rather different. To begin with, the richest landowners held a larger while the poorest held a smaller share of the total real wealth. Indeed, the Upcountry bore a closer resemblance to much of the rural North in this regard. Even more striking were geographical distinctions in absolute wealth: the Black Belt elite was far more imposing than its Upcountry counterpart. Real estate holdings among the top tenth of Black Belt's landowners normally averaged well over $20,000; in the Upcountry they averaged well under $10,000." (25)

"Yet, the racial appeals of proslavery theorists can easily obscure the underlying tenets of their argument and, perhaps, the very meaning of race to different social groups. For whether one considers the doctrines of George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes or those of others who offered less of a challenge to bourgeois sensibilities, the defenders of slavery ultimately rested their case, not so much on the innate inferiority of blacks--though they never hesitated to make this point--but on the inevitability of class distinctions and the consequent moral superiority of a system whose social relations were not beholden to the whims of the marketplace." (87)

"Yeoman farmers, especially in nonplantation areas, did not need to accept--and generally did not accept--the paternalist underpinnings of the proslavery argument to feel a certain affinity with its social and cultural premises." (89)

"And it was not simply a penchant for local autonomy that enabled yeomen to feel a certain commonality of interest with the elite. Whatever the complex meanings of state rights, all parties clearly recognized that, as a political ideology, it served to defend slavery. That numerous Upcountry farmers owned slaves and that nonslaveholders occasionally hired them explains part of this proslavery sentiment. That others who had little direct involvement with the institution followed suit suggests that the slavery issue tapped deeper concerns and fears. Those concerns and fears reflected the status of yeoman farmers as petty property holders and their staunch belief that property ownership formed the foundation of their independence. Thus, the planters struck a responsive chord when they argued that abolitionism threatened not only slave but all property." (108)

RELATIONSHIP:

In important ways, Hahn's Upcountry counties were similar to Augusta. Enslaved persons made up one-fifth of the population in the Upcountry, just as in Augusta. The railroad clustered development in the region, as in Augusta. Hahn, however, considers the world of the Upcountry "one in which production and consumption focused on the household, in which kinship rather than the marketplace mediated the most productive relations, in which general farming prevailed and family self-sufficiency proved the fundamental concern." (29) Hahn's argument concentrates on antebellum Upcountry resistance to any intrusion of the marketplace and on the postbellum railroad development which shattered an independent, yeoman household economy. In Hahn's analysis slavery was less significant for the way it transformed the economy and organized a social logic in support of itself than for the manner it provided common ground for slaveholders to meet nonslaveholders. We find in Augusta that slavery's role in economic development was central and as driving as the railroad. Augusta's social logic manifested few expressions of resistance to the market or fears of dependence. Instead, slavery appeared to catalyze market forces, and Augustans eagerly looked for opportunities to take advantage of these forces.

"White people in Augusta rarely discussed slavery openly and for the most part only did so under provocation when they hoped to defend their institution."

"Franklin County's papers spent more ink--almost all of it negative--on its nearly two thousand free blacks than Augusta did on its five thousand enslaved people."