Morris

Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. By Christopher Morris. (New York: Oxford University Press, c. 1995. Pp. xix+258).

Warren County, Mississippi played several important roles during the Civil War. Favored son Jefferson Davis served as the Confederate President, while the main city of Vicksburg provided a critical stronghold along the Mississippi River. In spite of these notable connections to the archetypal Old South, Christopher Morris describes Warren County as anything but. His social history of the county’s development, Becoming Southern, highlights key periods in Warren County’s history, finding a recognizably Southern society only at the very end. He delves into patterns of settlement, growth of family and social structures, including the development of slavery, and the growth of Vicksburg to create a narrative of a changing county.

Warren County is situated between the Mississippi and Loosa Chitto (or Big Black) Rivers, north of already heavily-settled Natchez. During and following the American Revolution, settlers began moving into this region, a period roughly covering 1775 to 1795. These settlers came from across the new United States, Massachusetts and New York as well as Virginia and South Carolina. In these early years, the region lacked the infrastructure of civilization, and most farming was of the subsistence variety, heavily dependent on corn and other feed crops. This changed in the early years of the nineteenth century as Spanish authorities began to open New Orleans and other routes to trade, providing easily accessible goods and markets. Farmers began shifting towards more profitable crops, particularly cotton, and Warren County began to see the development of large planters.

Morris also deals with the development of social relationships in Warren County. In the earliest years, pioneering families relied heavily on one another in a vaguely communal system, as the area lacked may basic forms of infrastructure and finished goods. Though they were not necessarily equal, the importance of women’s labor in maintaining subsistence did not allow men to dominate society. Men were expected to uphold certain standards of behavior and masculinity, and a wife was within her rights to divorce a man unable or unwilling to meet them. The expansion of property away from the river, generated by the growth of cash crops and large plantations, created the need for additional labor sources, fulfilled by the spread of slavery. Early settlement slavery utilized divided labor, with slaves and owners working closely with one another. The growth of plantations necessitated greater distance between master and slave, entrenching the planter as the clear superior to his labor force, which translated into greater control over all aspects of his household, including women, cementing the image of a male-dominated society. As the population grew, kinship networks became increasingly important, and families developed relationships to further their position within the county’s social structure, and replaced the initial cooperation of the early settlers.

Morris gives special attention to the development of urban areas, in particular Vicksburg. Settlers came to Warren County with the goal of establishing an urban center, linking urbanization with civilization. Early urban centers began on waterways, as stores and warehouses sprung up at popular landing sites along the rivers. Merchants followed, and soon other businesses that benefited from the influx of people joined. Initially settlers tried to build their capital at Warrenton, but moved the courthouse and other businesses to the rapidly growing Vicksburg in 1825. Transportation advances had made Vicksburg a more plausible choice by that point, even though Warrenton was located closer to the earlier population centers. By 1850, Vicksburg was a recognizably cosmopolitan city, and heavily influenced by Whig politics. Vicksburg became the center of county politics, as many of the county’s most influential voices generated their support from the city’s divided neighborhoods. Though planters from the countryside, like the Davises, maintained influence, they were one of many voices in a dynamic economic and political environment.

Hovering over this story, as with most Old South histories, is the eventual coming of the Civil War. Morris notes that Warren County, unlike most of the rest of Mississippi, voted for John Bell and the Constitutional Unionists, and likely opposed the state’s secession. Morris further highlights the apparent lack of interest taken in the national saga by Warren County’s residents, befitting their generally local outlook. Like much of the rest of the South, Warren County would experience significant changes during Reconstruction and beyond, but as Morris’ history points out, this was nothing new. Change had been a constant during the County’s near century of development.

Texas Christian University Keith Altavilla

Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. By Christopher Morris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. xix, 258.

Some historians mistakenly present the antebellum South as the absolute reverse of the pre-Civil War North. They argue that the South obsessively relied on the supremacy of cotton while the North industrialized and modernized. Mississippi might serve as a metaphor for the static and archaic Old South; the state produced the most cotton, the slave population outnumbered that of the white inhabitants, and the Confederate president resided within its borders. University of Texas at Arlington historian Christopher Morris challenges these assumptions in his 1995 work Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. Morris, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, Canada and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, believes that “the Old South, like any society, was forever in the process of becoming something new” (xiv). In order to support his argument that the South developed at varying speeds in different ways depending on the region, Morris examines Warren County, the northernmost county of the five river counties in the southwest corner of Mississippi. The county served as Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s home county as well as boasted hosting the city of Vicksburg within its borders.

Warren County resembled a western region more than a Southern one in the first decades of its settlement, Morris argues. The county seemed coarse compared to its older counterparts in Virginia and South Carolina. The region also provided settlement opportunities for ambitious migrants, who could buy land and support their families in ways impossible in more established areas. Their wives facilitated the land cultivation by planting domestic gardens and assisting their husbands in the fields. They traded in kind with their neighbors and engaged in means of community labor support, like neighborhood barn-buildings.

Farmers eventually abandoned the ideas of corporate labor in favor of buying or renting the slaves available in nearby New Orleans. They also began planting cotton in order to sell their crop and improve their standard of living. This change in economic goals and practices meant that “households, both slaveholding and nonslaveholding, evolved from relatively simple egalitarian social units organized mainly for production to more complex patriarchal arrangements that also functioned to preserve and transmit property and status” (43).

Warren County also seemed anomalous as a Deep South region because of Vicksburg’s development. The city served as a winter home for drifters and gamblers seeking to escape the North’s intemperate weather. Vicksburg also welcomed immigrant labor as many Irish migrants worked as unskilled laborers building Warren County’s infrastructure. In a final challenge to Warren County’s reputation as a traditionally Southern region, Morris notes that the county voted for unionist John Ball over secessionist John Breckenridge, perhaps, Morris speculates, because a national capitalist environment allowed for the region’s commercial growth.

Morris successfully presents Warren County in a well-rounded perspective; he uses diaries, letters, and court cases to evaluate economic, political and family life. He admirably explores the largely overlooked ideas of divorce and gender stereotypes in antebellum Warren County. Despite these successes, Morris fails to thoroughly defend his thesis by committing the simple oversight of neglecting definitions; he argues that Warren County first seemed more Western than Southern, but defines neither “Western” nor “Northern,” nor does he provide examples of either distinction. Does Warren County resemble an eastern South Carolina county at its founding? If so, then why would Morris argue that Warren County evolved from Western to Southern ideology rather than a primitive to an advanced Southern region? A definition of his terminology would greatly support his thesis. While his explorations of the role of women fascinate a reader, these descriptions also fail to contribute to his thesis’s defense and needs more explanation of or comparison to the place of women in the rest of the South. Despite Morris’s oversights, his research in creating Becoming Southern serves as a concise template for dissecting the commercial structure, kinship networks, and self-concepts of microcosm histories.

In the preface to this study Morris relates that when he presented a portion of this work at a historical conference, a commentator criticized him for his concern with how Warren County, Mississippi became southern. The commentator insisted that the fact that it was southern was clear, and the process was unimportant. Fortunately, Morris disagreed. “The Old South,” he asserts, “was forever in the process of becoming something else.” (xiv) Becoming Southern is the story of how that process evolved in Warren County, and how the county developed from a western frontier settlement to the quintessential southern plantation society.

When the first European settlers entered the county in the late 1700s, they were no different than settlers anywhere else on the vast trans-Appalachian frontier. They were socially isolated, practiced “slash and burn” agriculture and became fiercely independent. Yet by the mid 1800s Warren County had become a “planters’ world.” (23). Large cotton plantations operated by slave labor financed a patriarchy where extended families formed the nucleus of society.

Land became scarce in the county in the 1850s, and as the dominance of “King Cotton” increased, the gap between wealthy planters and poor subsistence farmers widened. Warren County’s development, centered on slave labor and slave ownership, resulted in the emergence of a southern way of life – a way of life that ended little more than a decade later.

Yet Warren County was unique in another way. “Beginning in 1810 with the establishment of Warrenton as the county seat” urbanization began in Warren County. By 1860, half the county’s population lived in Vicksburg. Within this urban environment, wealthy citizens began to invest in businesses and manufacturing, while the urban poor provided the workforce. The county was continuing to evolve, and one wonders where it might have gone had the Civil War not taken its terrible toll. “Everyone … became aware that one world had ended and another begun. Of course, no one knew what that new world would look like.” (185)

This fascinating study demonstrates the value of studying history in terms of localities in order to more fully understand those factors that are often lost in larger historical studies. In his consideration of cotton production after 1810 the author clearly demonstrates that Warren County framers did not immediately see embrace cotton production to the exclusion of their other crops. Their decision to embrace cotton, and the slave labor system required to make it profitable came gradually as they tried to integrate it into a pre-existing and successful agricultural diversity.

Considering the political rise of the cotton south in Warren County, Morris characterizes the community basis of political power as a process of evolution rather than a preordained model. Political power only became organized in piecemeal fashion, and that the planter elite did not consolidate power until very late in the antebellum period.

The emphasis of Morris’ study uses a wide variety of documentation to present this study. Wills, deeds, court records, newspapers and first-hand accounts add a personal dimension to his dynamic portrait of a century of change. While his work suggests that the motives for “becoming southern” are more economic and political than ideological, Morris clearly points out the value of studying the detailed process of change through a localized context.