| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South. By George B. Ellenberg. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xvi, 219 pp. $42.50, ISBN 978-0-8173-1597-9.)
William Faulkner's famous commentary on mules provides the epigraph for Mule South to Tractor South. The hapless beasts worked steadily at their assigned tasks, abused by their owners and "misunderstood" by their African American handlers. Faulkner cited the "known fact" that a mule "will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once" (p. 1). Despite—indeed, arguably because of—those real and imagined traits, mules held a central place in southern life and culture.	1
Playing off Faulkner's observations, George B. Ellenberg analyzes the rise and fall of mule power in southern agriculture from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. In recounting the early debates, he notes that planters promoted mule use as a kind of "agricultural innovation" (p. 28). The successful development of the upper South as the chief source for plantation mules resulted not from large breeders but from small farmers who raised mules as a sideline. Despite the association between African American plantation workers and mules in both cotton fields and popular imagination, "mule use increased in the upcountry and lowcountry South" after the Civil War, becoming "almost universal" among white and black farmers alike (p. 29).	. . .

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