Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina. Vol. 1: 1514-1861. By Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. xiv, 521 pp. $39.95, isbn 1-57003-090-1.)

Our Fathers' Fields: A Southern Story. By James Everett Kibler. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xii, 444 pp. $29.95, isbn 1-57003-214-9.)

These books about South Carolina are dissimilar in kind. The History of Beaufort County is the first volume of a projected two-volume general history of South Carolina's southeastern coast written by a trio of specialists in South Carolina history. Our Fathers' Fields is a personal narrative, partly autobiographical, set in a more limited locality, a plantation in westerly Newberry County where an Anglo-Norman family named Hardy lived for two centuries after 1786 and where the author, unrelated by blood but a native of the county who is also a poet and student of southern culture, now resides in their former home. While Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers Jr. claim for Beaufort County a larger than local historical weight, especially because of native sons such as Robert Barnwell Rhett, "the father of secession," and the volume concludes with the invasion of Beaufort by armed forces of the United States early in the Civil War, James Everett Kibler situates his plantation and tiny human cast squarely in the middle of a truly cosmic struggle—of country and town, farm and factory, conservation and "development"—the origins of which wend back to human beginnings and the ending of which is not yet. His theme, once sounded by William Gilmore Simms and Henry Timrod, South Carolina's most admired antebellum writers, was given its most renowned formulation seven decades ago by John Crowe Ransom and other southerners in I'll Take My Stand (1930). . . .

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