Book Review

In How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1885, Jonathan M. Bryant traces the political, social, and economic transformation of a place that appears to have been quintessentially of the cotton South during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. In doing so, Bryant contributes to the literature on how the Civil War and the destruction of slavery convulsed Southern communities. But he adds a different twist by focusing on the legal system and by exploring how white elites used the law to recast social and economic relations to their own advantage.	1
While hardly minimizing the significance of the Civil War or emancipation in accounting for the social transformation of Greene County, Bryant nonetheless argues that the most profound change to occur during this period was the triumph of the world market system. The world market, moreover, both facilitated and was facilitated by the growing power of lawyers and merchants in Greene County, and it fully manifested itself in the dominance of King Cotton and its postbellum retainers—sharecropping and the crop-lien system. The world market left no aspect of life in postbellum Greene County untouched, setting the community on a downward spiral of poverty and underdevelopment. A small number of white elites profited from the new set of social, economic, and legal relations, but the vast majority of Greene County residents, white and black, were condemned to impoverishment at the hands of a world market system that they barely understood and a legal system that they understood all too well but against which they remained powerless.	2
Antebellum Greene County was a thriving and prosperous community, at least for its white residents. Slaves constituted some 60 percent of Greene County's wealth on the eve of the Civil War, but slaveholding was widespread and small holdings predominated. Cotton production was the main source of economic activity, but the county also boasted of several cotton mills and other examples of economic diversification. The transportation revolution of the mid-nineteenth century afforded limited participation in the world market system; and while Greene County remained largely self-sufficient before the war, Bryant also hints that the county's growing infatuation with cotton production was a harbinger of things to come. Unsurprisingly, the planter elite dominated antebellum Greene County, while a small class of lawyers and merchants remained on the economic and political periphery. To complement their economic success, Greene County's white residents enjoyed a fairly vibrant cultural and intellectual life. Mercer University, for instance, was originally located in Greene County.	3
This world was blown apart by the Civil War and turned upside down by Reconstruction, when Greene County's freedmen mobilized for economic independence and legal and political rights. Led by its elites, however, the county's white community thwarted these black aspirations through the familiar legal and extralegal methods. But if Greene County evaded social revolution, its postbellum social landscape was significantly altered. The freedmen's desire for access to land led to sharecropping, while the devastation of the Southern financial system gave rise to the crop-lien system. Perhaps most importantly, a new elite, consisting largely of lawyers and merchants, came to the fore. This new elite owed much to the old, but its members harbored an ideological outlook that embraced the world market and all it represented. Whereas the planter elite had ruled Green County before the war, after it lawyers and merchants came to dominate this increasingly legalistic and commercially oriented society.	4
Indeed, nothing could halt the inexorable march of the world market system, which Greene County's white residents had only half-embraced before the war but which now dominated every facet of their lives. A few Cassandras, recognizing the devastation that cotton production and the market were wreaking on their society, urged diversification. But as Bryant notes: "Most farmers could not escape the lien system if they wanted to continue farming, and by entering the credit system, they also inevitably entered the market system" (164). Bryant sympathizes with the black and white residents of Greene County who became ensnared by the impersonal market, yet he is unsentimental in noting that many of them contributed to the market's growth by participating in a nascent consumerism, mesmerized as they were by the increasing number of commodities that the world market provided. Thus, Greene County's residents were not merely passive victims of the march of progress but rather helped it along.	5
If a criticism can be leveled against this deeply researched and eloquently written book, it is that Bryant might have tried to draw larger conclusions from the experiences of Greene County. One of the book's main strengths is its elucidation of how the law worked at the local level to deny freedmen their political rights and a measure of economic independence. Nonetheless, the reader wonders how Greene County differed in this respect from other localities in the cotton plantation South after the Civil War. Bryant does not say. On the one hand, he seems to hint at the distinctiveness of Greene County, or at least of Georgia, by documenting the limited impact of Radical Reconstruction upon that state. On the other hand, much of Bryant's account of Greene County seems to reflect the larger story of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Was there in fact something distinct about Greene County that explains why a black population that made up two-thirds of the county's population appears to have been so helpless in the face of white legal and extralegal power? Or is Bryant making a larger point about the ultimate limitations of political power and legal equality, and thus of Reconstruction itself, for a freed population that came out of slavery disadvantaged in so many other ways? In not directly confronting this question, Bryant has missed an opportunity to draw larger lessons from the experiences of this one Georgia community during a critical moment in its, and the nation's, history.	6
But such criticism should not detract from this fine work, which deserves more than a strictly academic audience.	7
John C. Rodrigue Louisiana State University

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