The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 208
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
local community. A good foundation for that is laid in the chapter on
site development (chap. 5), but it is not followed up as well as it might
have been. On the whole, however, dealing as it does with an early ex-
ample of "big science," the book makes a real contribution to a subject
of much contemporary interest. That it is generally well written is an
added attraction.
University of South Alabama GEORGE H. DANIELS
Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation. By Fred Arthur Bailey.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. x+ 20o5.
Preface, maps, tables, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $21.)
In 1915 Gustavus W. Dyer, director of the Tennessee Department of
Archives, sent out a questionnaire to all identifiable Civil War veterans
living in Tennessee. This survey was particularly thorough. It asked the
veteran to report on not only his Civil War career but also his family's
socioeconomic position prior to the war. Nonmilitary questions con-
cerned slave ownership, real property ownership and value, type of
housing, occupations, slaveholder and nonslaveholder relationships,
amount and type of schooling, and postwar careers. The military por-
tion of the poll requested information about enlistment, battles, camp
life, hospital and/or prison experiences, and the discharge procedure.
Seven years later John T. Moore, Dyer's successor, distributed a slightly
amended version of the questionnaire. Together they received a total of
1,648 responses.
Fred Arthur Bailey has examined 1,250 of these completed question-
naires and presents his findings in Class and Tennessee's Confederate Gen-
eration. Bailey excluded from the sample 115 Tennessee Unionists, 263
non-Tennesseans (residents of other states prior to 1865), and 20 "indi-
viduals whose social status could not be determined from the informa-
tion given" (p. 5). The author then divided these 1,250 veterans into
four groups according to the economic status of their father: 286 were
wealthy (planters and professionals), 385 slaveholding yeoman (1-19
slaves), 336 nonslaveholding yeoman, and 243 poor (farmers and la-
borers owning no slaves and less than eighty acres of land). On the basis
of analyzing these responses according to economic class, Bailey con-
cludes that class consciousness was very prevalent among Tennessee's
Civil War generation.
The author shows the extent of this consciousness by quoting the vet-
erans. One remarked that "there was a distinction and a broad one be-
tween the slave owners and others that had to do their own work" (p. 20).
The son of a small farmer wrote that "all who owned as much as one208
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989, periodical, 1989; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101212/m1/235/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.