Becoming Southern

Mississippi, perhaps more than any other state, epitomized the Old South and all it stood for. Yet, at one time, this area had more in common with newly settled northwest territories than it did with older southeastern plantation districts. This book takes a close look at a "typical" Southern community, and traces its long process of economic, social, and cultural evolution. Focusing on Jefferson Davis's Warren County, Morris shows the transformation of a loosely knit Western community of pioneer homesteaders into a distinctly Southern society. This region was first settled by farmers and herders; by the turn of the nineteenth century, the wealthiest residents began to acquire slaves and to plant cotton, hastening the demise of the pioneer economy. Gradually, farmers began producing for the market, which drew them out of their neighborhoods and broke down local patterns of cooperation. Individuals learned to rely on extended kin-networks as a means of acquiring land and slaves, giving tremendous power to older men with legal control over family property. Relations between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and planters and yeoman farmers changed with the emergence of the traditional patriarchy of the Old South; this transformation created the "Southern" society that Warren County's white residents defended in the Civil War. Drawing on wills, deeds, and court records, as well as manuscript materials, Morris presents a sensitive and nuanced portrait of the interaction between ideology and material conditions, challenging accepted notions of what we have come to understand as Southern culture.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.