Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (Civil War America) - Hardcover

Wetherington, Mark V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807829633 ISBN 13: 9780807829639

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Synopsis

In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest.

Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.

About this title

Book Description

"An authoritative analysis of one remote section of rural Georgia. . . . For those scholars and general readers more interested in the intricacies of the Confederate home front than in the dryness of battlefield tactics, Plain Folk's Fight is a must-read."-- H-CivWar

From the Inside Flap

Wetherington examines the local effects of the Civil War on a section of southern Georgia, in part of the region known as Wiregrass Country. The author looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk"--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--who feared that emancipation would encourage freed slaves to move from cotton plantations into the piney woods communities they had claimed for themselves.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0807829633
• ISBN 13: 9780807829639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400