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Orville Vernon Burton, Susan Eva O'Donovan. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 364. $35.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 543–544, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.2.543
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Susan Eva O'Donovan's examination of change and continuity in slavery, war, and the early days of emancipation chronicles confusion and disruption, idealism and malevolence. O'Donovan provides rich detail and insightful analysis on eighteen counties in the southwest corner of Georgia from the 1820s, after American Indian residents were forced out, until 1868, “the beginning of the end of regional radical politics” (p. 1). One of the reasons to study communities is to gain new knowledge of behavior—to learn how people lived, how they reacted to and treated others, and what their lives meant to them; this study does that remarkably well. O'Donovan reveals the complexity of slavery and freedom by exploring ambiguities, contradictions, and negotiations across lines of race, gender, and power in southwest Georgia. O'Donovan's study provides a perspective for understanding other communities.
White settlers to southwest Georgia were single-minded, intent upon recouping the cost of the land and accumulating wealth as quickly as possible. As a result, they forced slaves in this region to work beyond the limits negotiated over time in the older settled regions of the eastern seaboard. The forced migration also meant that slaves had less social capital, such as detrimental kin relationships and church affiliation and leadership roles. This uprooting disproportionately affected enslaved women. O'Donovan shows that slavery was worse here, and her thesis about the connection of slavery to freedom, rings especially true in this southwest region of Georgia, “where a gendered slavery erupted abruptly but late, and where cotton truly was an immediate king” (pp. 265–266).
