Book Review

A good rule of thumb for academic biographers is to avoid both undue hostility and excessive partiality toward their subjects. James E. Bagwell, a professor of history at Georgia Southwestern State University, has written an informative biography that will strike some readers as a bit too celebratory. His subject is an antebellum grandee and scientific agriculturist of Sea Island, Georgia, the eldest son of an indentured servant from Scotland who achieved mercantile affluence. The reader is told that James Hamilton Couper (1794–1866) illustrated "in the highest degree the best type of antebellum Southern society," particularly "the qualities of honor, integrity, morality, and noblesse oblige so characteristic of genteel classes everywhere." In the early 1850s, when a moderate Whig opposed to secession, Couper owned four plantations and approximately 1,500 slaves in the Altamaha River delta and on St. Simon's Island. Bagwell's biography is at its best when explicating Couper's detailed agricultural records to provide a clear account of his complex agricultural operations and crop rotations, including his transformation of Hopeton Plantation from a diversified farm raising Sea Island cotton, sugarcane, and rice into an estate where rice was the dominant crop.

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