| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Becoming Free in the Cotton South. By Susan Eva O'Donovan. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv, 364 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02483-0.)

In her pioneering history of Reconstruction in southwest Georgia, Susan Eva O'Donovan reminds us that the men and women negotiating the first few years of freedom there operated within a framework established by their subregion's particularly harsh history of slavery and war. Her detailed political, labor, and gender study focuses on 1865–1868, when a range of different communities of interest battled over the meaning of freedom for the ex-slaves. While she does not consider the motives of white Republicans or poor whites in this struggle, her narrative opposes a unified white planter class against a fascinating assortment of black movements and leaders. Like the South Carolinians in Thomas Holt's Black over White (1977), O'Donovan's black Georgians exhibit a wide range of aspirations and strategies that evolved over time to counter the changing behaviors of planters. According to O'Donovan, southwest Georgia was a hotbed of political radicalism, where calls for land redistribution and armed self-defense consistently defeated moderate black appeals for individual industry, thrift, and patience.

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