| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward E. Baptist. Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 392. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.

Edward E. Baptist has rendered a provocative analysis that is likely to force a rethinking of the way the antebellum slave plantation system operated on the southern frontier. He argues that the planters from the Chesapeake and the Carolinas who settled middle Florida did not merely replicate the system they were familiar with. The new environment, with all its daunting challenges, shaped and molded the plantation system that emerged there. In making this argument, Baptist analyzes the challenges facing three distinct groups: planters, white yeomen, and African-American slaves. The planters, determined to acquire riches and dominate the political economy that emerged, rode roughshod over their slaves and used the mechanisms of power to overwhelm the yeomen. They ripped their slaves from community and kin without regard to the psychological toll that such a separation would involve and moved them to a harsher physical environment than they were accustomed to, an environment that itself challenged the slaves' ability to adjust. Planters were to discover, however, the limits to their ability to "rule imperiously" (p. 102), and both yeomen and slaves came to influence the shape and form of the society that emerged.

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