
          Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen
Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry,
1850-1890 New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
          By Beatty, BessBess Beatty
          Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 14-16
          
          When Frank Owsley completed his study, The Plain Folk of the
Old South, in 1949, he considered the title "The Forgotten Man
of the Old South," but rejected it as too flamboyant. Three decades
later this rejected title, enlarged to include the Forgotten Woman,
would still be appropriate for a work on the white yeomen farm
families who made up the majority of nineteenth-century
Southerners. Southern image makers have generally continued to
relegate the Southern common folk "either to obscurity or to oblivion"
while they focus on the white elite, on blacks, and even on the bottom
rail of white society, "the poor white trash." As a result, Southern
history remains distorted, and a large number of Southern people
remain estranged from their past. Although most historians accept
Owsley's contention that "the core of the [Southern] social structure
was a massive body of plain folk who were neither rich nor very poor,"
they have rarely given this group in depth attention. There are
hopeful signs, however, that the forgotten people of Southern history
are beginning to find their historians. Steven Hahn's The Roots
of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of theGeorgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 joins a small but significant
list of Southern studies that focus on the region's plain folk.
          Historians of Populism have given considerable attention to the
issues yeomen farmers confronted and to the leaders who mobilized
their protest. For the most part, however, the many good studies of
Southern Populism have paid little attention to the activities and
reponses of the average members of this group. When "we turn to the
thousands of Southern rural folks," Hahn explains, "the shadows
rapidly steal forth." Lifting the shadows in fraught with enormous
difficulty. Yet, as Hahn notes, more written sources exist for the
yeomanry than is usually acknowledged or consulted by
historians. Hahn's extensive and skillful use of a wide variety of
available sources--including newspapers, letters, census returns, tax
reports and various other government records--enables him to to
substantiate abundantly the general story he tells. Despite Hahn's
efforts in the libraries and archives, much of the feel and sense of
the yeoman culture still comes up missing in The Roots of
Southern Populism. A couple of months spend living in or
travelling through Georgia's Upper Piedmont, talking with descendants
of the late nineteenth century farmer folk, listening to their stories
and music, looking at their family photographs and heirlooms, might
have enriched and deepened Hahn's work. Faulkner's Flem Snopes is not
enough of a substitute for the Georgia yeomanry. Neither are the
written views of Floyd County planter John Dent, who appears under
several guises, a large enough representation of the typical planter
assessment of the times. Yet in fairness, The Roots of Southern
Populism, is not intended as a study of folk culture.
          Although his subjects are agrarian rather than industrial workers,
Hahn's story is strikingly similar to the recent work in American "new
labor history" which has been so influenced by Edward P. Thompson's
The Making of the English Working Class. Hahn does, in
fact, challenge the common view that agrarian rebellion is of a nature
fundamentally different from industrial. Hahn's Georgia yeomen, like
their industrial counterparts, tried to retain autonomy and to resist
the encroachments of capitalism--in their case commercial
agriculture--by clinging to precapitalistic norms and prerogatives.
          Establishing the cultural and economic roots of Populism over a
forty year period forces Hahn to confront one of the most perplexing
questions of Southern historiography: If, according to conventional
wisdom, "Southern yeomen were touchy and isolated individualists," how
could they have been lured by the Populist vision of a cooperative
common" wealth? In his penetrating analysis of the multi-faceted
nature of yeomen independence, Hahn offers a significant new
perspective on the question. Although he agrees with the traditional
contention that yeomen economic organization based on the household
and fee-simple landownership "fostered the bourgeois traits of
individualism, acquisitiveness and deep adherence to private
property"--traits that meshed well with the emerging ethic of
laissez-faire economics--he also argues that "strong countervailing
tendencies" existed. In direct contrast to the laissez-faire ethic, a
"preindustrial republicanism" convinced many of the Upcountry ;yeomen
that the state should control productive resources and actively defend
petty producers. Further more, Hahn contends, yeomen independence also
"hinged on social ties, on 'habits of mutuality' among producers, that
impart to their culture a communal, prebourgeois quality whose
equalitarian proclivities sharply distinguished it from that of the
planters." As a result of his careful analysis of the meaning and
limits of independence in the economic and social lives of the Georgia
yeomen, Hahn concludes that Populism was not an aberration in Southern
Upcountry life but a product of a deeply embedded world view.
          Before the war, class conflict resulting from distinctive planter
and yeomen world views was latent, muted by planter efforts to unite
their region in the growing struggle with the rest of the country. The
yeomen enjoyed a large measure of autonomy; popular laws and customs,
such as the homestead exemption and access to common lands, were
protected. But the social fabric which sustained yeomen autonomy began
to unravel under the strains of war. War-time privations combined with
Confederate taxation and impressment policy made the yeomen
increasingly resentful and generated "growing class antagonisms,"
which were further exacerbated by severe economic dislocations in the
wake of Confederate defeat. Hahn rightly argues that transformations
in the lives of the Upcountry yeomen "during this period elucidate the
larger meaning of the Civil War itself."
          Central to the economic change which these people confronted was
the transformation of the Georgia Up-

country from an area of
subsistence agriculture on the periphery of the cotton economy to the
mainstream of commercial agriculture. In a period of such widespread
destruction and rapid change, these farmers could no longer opt for
the "safety of diversification." They rapidly lost their
self-sufficiency as they were forced to plant cotton, the only crop on
which they could receive credit. As a result, the Upcountry,
previously "the domain of yeomen freeholders," fast became " a
territory of the disposed." Merchants, protected by lien laws,
replaced the communal prebourgeois network of exchange characteristic
of antebellum Upcountry society. "By the 1880s," Hahn finds, "an elite
deriving surpluses from both land and commerce held the economic reins
in the upcountry." Increasingly the "republicanism of petty producers"
was arrayed against "the values of the free market."
          The inevitable postbellum class conflict took on a uniquely
Southern tone because of simultaneous racial conflict. Hahn offer
important, but sometimes contradictory, analysis of the old question
concerning how much coming together there actually was between the
South's poor black and poor white farmers. Georgia Republicans, he
asserts, had a chance after the war to build a biracial coalition, but
they failed to do so. However, Hahn presents so much evidence of
deep-seated yeomen racism that he undermines his own argument. He is
more persuasive in claiming that the Southern yeomen viewed blacks,
both in slavery and freedom, "as symbols of a condition they most
feared--abject and perpetual dependence--and as a group whose strict
subordination provided essential safeguards for their way of life."
          But racism was not sufficient to keep the yeomen loyal to elitist
Democracy. By the 1870s election returns revealed "emerging divisions
between town and countryside and between rich and poor farmers." The
issue that most polarized Upcountry white society was the question of
grazing rights which, Hahn claims, "revealed the cultural, as well as
economic, dimensions of political struggles, and . . . paved the road
to Populism." Since colonial days both law and custom had required
that crops be fenced so that farmers could allow their animals to
graze on open lands. To small landholding farmers as well as to
tenants, the right was an essential prerequisite for
self-sufficiency. In the post-war world, when a new elite pushed for
laws requiring the fencing of stock, the yeomen, still informed by a
preindustrial ideology of republicanism, fought, not only for "local
custom," but also for what they perceived as their "natural right." It
was the struggle over grazing rights, Hahn contends, that first
aroused the upcountry yeomen; "the appearance of the Southern Farmers
Alliance and then the People's party promised to transform
defensiveness into a humane and progressive force."
          Hahn successfully challenges most historians of Southern Populism
with his compelling argument that the appeal of Populism to Upcountry
Georgia yeomen farmers was more than a factor of their increasing
impoverishment; the movement also offered a vehicle to restore "a
producers commonwealth" which had been overwhelmed by the
encroachments of the free market. To the yeomen who joined the
Populist revolt, the party's goals were "a vision informed by
historical experience."
          For myriad reasons Populism quickly failed. One important reason,
according to Hahn, was the two-sided nature of the yeomen sense of
mutuality which made this cooperation possible. He argues that the
"very networks and norms of the household economy partially disguised
class distinctions and probably discouraged reliance or. supralocal,
unfamiliar, and more formalized organizational' structures." This
meant that, art least in the Georgia Upcountry, Populism rested on "a
tenuous foundation." But to Hahn, as to Lawrence Goodwyn, author of
Democratic Promise, the most important book on American
Populism, the rapid failure of Populism should not be construed to
minimize its historical importance and ideological legacy. What
Goodwyn describes as "the largest democratic mass movement in American
history" is to Hahn "a watershed in the history of industrializing
America."
          Steven Hahn's book is excellent history, but it is more than that;
it is also an excellent study of the interaction of the powerful and
the powerless. The descendants of these Upcountry yeomen know little
of their ancestral legacy of cooperative republican and
rebellion. Goodwyn has written that "more often than not, the triumph
of the received culture is so subtle it is not apparent to its
victims. Content with what they can see, they have lost the capacity
to imagine what they can no longer see. Ideas about freedom get
obscured in this way." The importance of Hahn's book is as current as
it is historical.
          
            Bess Beatty is assistant professor of history at Shorter
College in Rome, Georgia.
          
        