Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nicolas W. Proctor uses the ubiquitous activity of hunting as a way to understand race, class, and gender in the Old South. Even though most American men hunted, hunting held different meanings for men of different classes, races, ages, and regions. Southern plantation elites, who no longer relied on the provisions resulting from hunting for their families' survival, constructed elaborate rituals and rites concerning hunting activities, appropriate game, and etiquette during the hunt, in the hunting party, and at base camp. These were sportsmen hunters who regarded hunting as a form of leisure and amusement appropriate to their race and class. Sportsmen showed their white, southern, elite manhood by exercising "prowess," "self-control," and "mastery" with their guns, the "talisman of white manhood" (p. 44).

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White men of lower status hunted for profit and food. These men, often called pothunters, were the "antithesis of the sportsman." Because they were "intent upon harvesting as much game as possible," using "whatever methods proved most effective and economical" for a wider variety of game (including animals shunned by sportsman like opossum and raccoon), they did not demonstrate those all-important qualities of prowess, self-control, and mastery. Slaves also hunted. Some participated in their masters' hunting expeditions (usually doing very demeaning labors, such as retrieving ducks from ponds). Some masters actually provided particularly skilled slave hunters with guns and set them to the fields to get meat for the master's table. Slaves also hunted for their families in the slave quarters. Often trapping (not using a gun) raccoons, opossum, and rabbits—game that sportsmen shunned—male slave hunters could act as providers for their community.

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