| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark V. Wetherington. Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia. (Civil War America.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. 383. $39.95.
According to Mark V. Wetherington, plain white folk in the Georgia piney woods along the lower Ocmulgee River thought and fought for themselves. Plain folk agency, clear-eyed pursuit of perceived self-interest, is the overriding theme of this nuanced, powerful, and comprehensive examination of the piney woods world.	1
Race trumped class for plain folk along the lower Ocmulgee. They gave majority support to immediate secession, furnished large numbers of troops for Confederate armies, retained faith in the Confederate cause until nearly the end, and used violence and intimidation to suppress black voting and reassert white hegemony during the Reconstruction era. Plain folk believed in Jeffersonian republicanism, accepted that slavery or subordination for blacks promoted freedom for whites, prized honor, embraced market opportunities that made sense, and kept patriarchal household authority functioning through the stresses of war. By Wetherington's expansive definition—owners of fewer than ten slaves or less than 150 acres—around ninety percent of piney woods white households were plain folk. Multifarious kinship ties between the few planters and the plain folk reduced yet further any potential for class strife. Plain folk politics revolved around the ideological fundamentals noted above, neighborhood ties, and shifting group identities. For example, Wetherington argues that plain folk assumed a more sectional southern identity during the 1850s, and that Primitive Baptist sentiments particularly shaped political allegiances.	. . .

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