Reviews of Books

The tangled relationship between race and class has long been a central concern for historians of the American South. Studies of the region, ranging from the seventeenth until the twentieth centuries, have depicted southern society as divided into three main parts: wealthy planters, enslaved blacks, and poor whites. This last group, which the literature has alternately termed "plain folk," "yeomanry," or "common whites," has been the hinge on which the fate of the South supposedly turned, for it has been considered the only group to enjoy any choice of identity and action. If the antagonism between masters and slaves (or landlords and sharecroppers) is taken for granted, the question becomes: on which side of this struggle would the "plain folk" decide to be? Would they identify by race and align themselves with the masters? Or would they identify by class and stand with their black neighbors (whether slaves or tenants) against the common economic enemy? For most of the past three centuries of southern history, the former choice has prevailed. Poor whites followed the master class even unto death in a bloody war to defend slavery. Most historians would prefer that the plain folk had chosen otherwise.

1

By examining the interaction of black slaves and nonslaveholding whites in lowcountry Georgia from the legalization of slavery in the colony in 1750 until the outbreak of the Civil War, Timothy Lockley contributes to the "race or class" debate. Lines in the Sand provides a close scrutiny of economic and social relations among those at the bottom of coastal Georgian society over more than a century. Lockley poses two basic questions: "What impact did the range of biracial interactions, social, religious, criminal, and economic, have on racial ideology?" and "Were racial boundaries nothing more than 'lines in the sand,' barriers that were readily overcome by the 'waves' of everyday contacts between white and black" (p. xv)? Before endeavoring to suggest answers, Lockley loads the historical dice. He affirms the twenty-year-old commonplace that race is culturally constructed but neglects the equally insightful observation made by E. P. Thompson two decades earlier that class is also created from cultural processes. Consequently, in a book that likens race to transitory and artificial "lines in the sand," the existence of class might be said to be like water to a fish, so obvious as to be accepted without question.

. . .