Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 [Book Review]

Abstract

In this broad, ambitious, and important book, Jonathan M. Wiener argues that the black belt planter elite reconstructed its hegemonic class position after the Civil War by shepherding its wealth despite the death and destruction of war, forcing black labor into a new oppressed state, employing political power to beat back a challenge by crossroads merchants, forming an opportunistic alliance with Yankee financiers to prevent the rise of an industrialist class in Birmingham until that potential Southern bourgeoisie in effect agreed to subject itself to planter domination, and spawning a "nonbourgeois agrarian ideology" (p. 187) to justify planter rule. Thus, the South was condemned, in the term of Wiener's thesis director, Barrington Moore, Jr., to follow "the Prussian Road" to modernization. Interesting and well-written, the book is a forceful statement of an original and coherent thesis. Yet I found it unconvincing at certain crucial points.