The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 [Book Review]

Abstract

Basing his sweeping reinterpretation of southern society and politics from the 1850s to the 1890s chiefly on an intense study of two counties in the Georgia upcountry, Steven Hahn argues that white southern yeomen were transmogrified largely against their will from subsistence farmers in the antebellum era to producers, particularly of cotton, for local, national, and international markets after 1865. During the 1880s, many small farmers, in what he depicts as an effort to defend their "Revolutionary republican heritage" (p. 240), opposed such laws as those that required owners to fence in their animals, instead of letting them roam freely down village streets, or through neighbors' corn fields. Reacting against their changed socioeconomic roles and against the credit relations that their abandonment of self-sufficiency necessitated, yeomen voted "independent" in the 1870s and Populist in the 1890s. These clashes between Democrats and their opponents reflected not simply material self-interest, Hahn asserts repeatedly, but profound cultural differences between smallholders who adhered to a preindustrial "republican producer ideology'' (p. 283) and the forces of "bourgeois individualism and the free market" (p. 282), here represented by small town merchants and a developing "agrarian bourgeoisie" (p. 244). Engagingly written, provocative, fashionably blending simple social statistics with cultural "Marxism," this book, winner of the Nevins dissertation prize, has already attracted considerable attention.

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