From the Old South to the New. Essays on Transitional South. West-port - Lnd. Contribution in American History N 93. 1981. 284 p. (I); Towards a New South? Studies in Post Civil War Southern Communities. Westport. Contribution in American History N 97. 1982. 319 p. (II).

The debate about the profitability of slavery and the industrialization of the pre-war South, raised by the representatives of the new economic history, had not yet subsided in American bourgeois literature, when the discussion again flared up, this time about the post-war South, which had been little studied until recently. In the late 1970s, a number of studies of this period1 appeared .

A leading US historical magazine published an article by the radical left-wing historian D. Weiner, which caused a lively controversy .2 The main topics of this debate are: what was the post-war South, "new" or "old"; what determined its development - continuity or change; what was the path of its bourgeois evolution?

The same problems occupy a central place in the articles of peer-reviewed collections representing the materials of three scientific conferences (Chicago, 1978; Charleston, 1978, 1979). Since only a part of the discussion materials is published in the collections, the main participants of which remained behind the scene, we will briefly focus on the essence of the controversy.

The concept of the "new South" emerged in the late nineteenth century, when S. Lanier of Georgia, after reviewing the materials of the tenth census (1880), noticed that the southern states had become a small-scale farming area. A major contemporary historian of the liberal trend, K. Van Woodward refuted this view as having nothing to do with reality .3 Until the late 1970s, American historiography generally accepted the interpretation proposed by Van Woodward: as a result of the civil War and Reconstruction, the South acquired bourgeois features - planters were replaced by entrepreneurs. In the late 70s, this concept met with objections. The most serious of them came from radicals: the historian D. M. Weener, the sociologist D. Billings, and the economist D. R. Mandl. After studying the social structure of Alabama from 1860 to 1885, Weiner showed that the Civil War and Reconstruction did not destroy the power of the planters. Mandl argued that it was only after World War II that the plantation system was overcome and the South moved to modern forms of agricultural production4 . Hence the conclusion was drawn: after the civil war, the South had not yet become "new"; continuity in that period was stronger than changes; and finally, the bourgeoisie

1 Degler C. Place over Time: the Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness. Baton Rouge. 1977; Ransom R. L., Suth R. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge (Mass.) 1977; Wiener J. Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860 - 1885. Baton Rouge. 1978; Billings D. Planters and the Making of a "New South". Chapel Hill. 1978; Mandle J. R. The Roots of Black Poverty. Durham. 1979.

2 Wiener J. Class Structure and Economic Development in American South, 1865 - 1955. - American Historical Review, 1979, Vol. 84, N 4.

3 Woodward Vann C. Origins of the New South, 1877 - 1913. Baton Rouge. 1951, p. 175.

4 Wiener J. Social Origins, p. 33; Mandle J. R. Op. cit., pp. 84 - 97.

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the development of the South was qualitatively different from the North, approaching rather the "Prussian way".

A similar question worried the participants of these conferences. The editors of the first of the peer-reviewed collections, W. D. Frazer and W. B. Moore, formulated the problem as follows:: "Was the shift from the' old 'South to the' new 'One characterized by change or continuity?" (I, p. XI). This question applies to various specific topics that relate primarily to social history: leadership in the post-war society of the South, urbanization, the evolution of race relations, trends in social thought, and so on. The authors include not only historians, but also sociologists and geographers. Almost all of them use an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative methods. Most of the articles are devoted to stories taken from the life of individual cities, counties, or states. The collection, edited by O. V. Burton and R. K. Makmat, consists entirely of works on local history. This interest in local stories is influenced by the "new social history".

The editors are disappointed to note the absence of generalizing works among the materials presented in the collections. Despite the hope expressed by McMath that "the empirical study of individual communities provides the basis for social theory" (II, p.282), the authors of the collections did not manage to go beyond the details and particulars and formulate significant generalizations. For this reason, interesting facts in themselves hang in the air. This can be illustrated by the example of articles by D. M. Russell - about elite participation in municipal politics and government in Atlanta (II); T. Terrill - about the case of violence in South Carolina (II) and a number of others.

A large group of articles is devoted to the social structure of the post-war South. Some authors supported Van Woodward, others supported the radical left - wing historians. W. L. Barney, analyzing the changes that took place in the "black belt" of Alabama in 1850-1870, agreed with Weiner: historians greatly exaggerate the weakening of the planters after the Civil War (I, p.33). Based on the censuses and newspaper material, he concluded that the changes in Dallas County after the war were in fact a continuation of the pre-war development, when the Whig party planned a transition to the "new South" (meaning the construction of railroads, cotton mills, etc.). The planters-Democrats, although they resisted, but at the same time were forced to take this program into account (I, pp. 33-36). However, the measures proposed by the Whigs to industrialize the South were designed solely to strengthen the plantation system, and not at all to develop the bourgeois economy.

The continuity thesis is also supported by the authors of three articles on Charleston - M. P. Johnson, D. G. Dole, and D. P. Radford. The latter examined the evolution of the social structure and appearance of the southern city over 20 years (1860-1880) and found no "radical changes" in it: "The era of war and Reconstruction, despite all the personal injuries it caused, was characterized not so much by changes as by continuity" (I, p. 89). The city, the author believes, as before the war, served the needs of planters.

Radford is strongly opposed by D. W. Harris, who researched plantation farming in Georgia after the abolition of slavery. Changes in the lives of slaves, overseers, and planters, in his opinion, were radical in nature and meant, as he writes, "a social revolution." "It is true that plantation agriculture survived the war. It is true that there is a great continuity in land ownership. It is true that most blacks remained in agriculture, working on foreign land... But a decisive change took place in the organization of labor: from the group work of slaves on vast continuous expanses of land passed to farms cultivated by tenant families" (II, p.247).

About changes in the organization of work, which led to other changes, says the article by R. Davis. He notes that the plantations broke up into small plots, and many planters, having leased land to merchants, moved to the city (I, p. 159) and turned into rentiers. The abolition of slavery led to the decentralization of plantations, the extinction of planters as an independent stratum of Southern society. Historians argue about the form of management of post-war plantations. Davis argues that the merchants did not deal with them, because they themselves transferred land plots to tenants, and cliometrists argue that landowners still controlled the activities of tenants and to some extent retained centralized management of the plantations.

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D. Carleton also opposed the thesis about the predominant role of planters in the post-war society of the South. Based on the material of the industrial districts of the state of South Carolina, he found that the leading place in the economy and social life of the state in 1880-1910 belonged to industrialists. The main part of the directorate of textile factories were not planters, but representatives of local trade and financial circles (I, p. 49). The material given by Carleton confirms Van Woodward's idea of the dominance of entrepreneurs in the South.

Analyzing the historiography of this problem, D. G. Carter reproached the radicals for supporting the thesis of continuity, despite emphasizing the role of class conflict, they took positions generally close to the historians of the consensus school that flourished in the 1950s. But Weiner and Billings do not deny the revolutionary character of the civil war and Reconstruction, they only point out the incompleteness of the bourgeois reforms that never resolved the agrarian question in the South, since they almost did not touch the main thing - property relations (planters did not lose land, and Negroes did not get it). This predetermined the future problems of the South. The idea of continuity, of denying "radical changes", inevitably leads to a denial of the revolutionary nature of the civil war, which dealt a fatal blow to the slave plantation system. By contrasting continuity with the changes that occurred during the South's transition to the new order, American scholars ignore the dialectic of the concrete historical process.

It is interesting that, as a rule, the thesis of continuity is insisted on by those researchers who studied areas with a predominance of plantation farming and, moreover, took relatively short periods of time (Weiner, Charleston historians, etc.). This approach, of course, does not allow us to identify more or less significant changes in southern society. It is hardly possible to detect tangible changes in 20 years in the face of, for example, Charleston, which has remained aloof from industrial development. But if you look at the data for a half-century period across the entire region, as Van Woodward did, then these changes are clearly visible. In mountainous areas where farming was predominant, capitalism developed faster. Cities, industry, and with them the urban middle strata grew rapidly here, but even in areas with a predominance of plantation farming, profound changes took place (the decentralization of plantations, the disappearance of planters as a social stratum, etc.5). In general, the South was in a difficult transition state after the civil war, and to characterize it during this period, it is necessary to take into account all elements of this situation. This is why Woodward was wrong when he chided Charleston historians for choosing an "atypical" city far from industrialization6. Charleston is just as typical of Southern history as Atlanta. Both cities represent different trends of social transformation.

A third of the articles included in the collections are related to the topic of Southern urbanization, which American historiography did not deal with much until the 70s. In the last decade, this topic has been intensively developed by the New Social History. In addition to the structure of society, the collections deal with the problems of urban development and race relations. D. H. Dole focuses on the causes of the decline of Charleston and Mobile, comparing them with Atlanta and Nashville. In addition to external factors (such as remoteness from railways and industrial centers), he notes the resistance to bourgeois development exerted by the conservative plantation elite, who wanted to preserve the values of the "old South" (I, p.104). However, it must be borne in mind that the planters resisted the irreversible advance of capitalism. Charleston and Mobile were little affected by industrialization, and the influence of the planters remained there to a greater extent than in other places.

Several articles are devoted to the fate of Negroes in cities. Memphis showed how, in the context of preserving the "legacy of slavery" - the dependent position of Negroes, they adapted to new conditions. He noted a significant social stratification among blacks. Their history after the Civil War, Robinson emphasized, should be considered as part of the history of the US working class (II, p. 99). D. Wheeler, L. and D. Horton came to the conclusion that there were no major differences between the two countries.-

5 Prior to 1910, American censors collected almost no information about plantations, considering only tenants.

6 American Historical Review, 1983, N 1, p. 188.

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In the same way, there were differences in race relations that existed in different parts of the country.

Race relations and their evolution after the Civil War are somehow related to almost all the authors of the collections. In the 1950s, Van Woodward suggested that there was an alternative to segregation and racism in the South of 1877-1890, which were legalized in the late nineteenth century and became part of the white reaction to Reconstruction. In the 60s, he was opposed by D. Williamson, who argued that segregation and restrictions on the civil rights of Blacks existed during the Reconstruction period, and the laws of the late XIX century only formally consolidated the practice. The White South has never seriously considered any other " alternative." X supported him. Rabinowitz: Segregation "by law" has replaced the time when Negroes were excluded from society altogether .7 However, the theses of Williamson and Rabinowitz do not contradict Woodward's statement. There was indeed an alternative to racism, but it came, of course, not from white planters, but from democratic forces - northerners, populists, and, of course, from the Blacks themselves, who fought for equality. Jimcrowism and Black suffrage restrictions only legitimized racism.

D. Donald proposed his own version of the emergence of jimcrowism (I). This historian considers it in the spirit of the "theory of generations", as the alleged last public action of the "generation of the defeated". According to him, former Confederate soldiers in this way sought to establish the values that they defended in the war. But this argument does not stand up to criticism, because it ignores the real historical process, changes in the correlation of classes, the evolution of their positions, etc.

Other topics covered in the collections include crime and violence, which are so characteristic of the South during the transition period, as well as mythology and features of social thought in the South. The article of the left-wing radical historian L. Goodwin, one of the most interesting in the collections, raises the question of trends in the development of the South. It is interesting to note that the democratic tradition represented by Reconstruction, populism, the modern civil rights movement, and in historiography - the works of W. Dubois and Van Woodward-has never been dominant in the South. Despite the changes in the economic and social structure, certain essential features remained unchanged in this region, which the historian called the "hierarchical tradition" (I, p.236). The South never became a democracy: the oligarchy of slave owners was replaced by the oligarchy of large entrepreneurs. In peer-reviewed collections, Goodwin, unfortunately, was alone in posing truly significant problems on the history of the region.

The works reviewed by us allow us to conclude that the American historiography of the post-war South is entering a new stage marked by the expansion of local research, the use of quantitative methods and interdisciplinary methodology. As a result, the picture of the post-war South turned out to be much more complex and diverse than it was previously imagined. However, bourgeois historiography, as evidenced by peer-reviewed collections, is not able to provide an objective scientific synthesis of the vast amount of material it has accumulated.

7 Woodward Varn C. Op. cit.; ejusd. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. N. Y. 1974; Williamson J. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction 1865 - 1877. Chapel Hill. 1965; Rabinowitz H. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865 - 1890. N. Y. 1978.

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