A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2005 by Robert Bonner

A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective. By Peter Kolchin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 124 pp.).

The most valuable insight of this slim new volume comes in its closing pages, and has nothing particular to do with the American South. Peter Kolchin's epigrammatic claim that "almost every historical statement of significance is implicitly comparative" is followed by the equally provocative suggestion that "disagreements among scholars often rest more on the differing comparative frameworks that implicitly underlie their judgment than on differing understandings of what actually happened" (116). Historians in some sense are all comparativists, he might have said, even if some are more self-aware about being so than others.

Kolchin has more than earned his own self-awareness as a comparativist. Over the last quarter of a century, he has surveyed systems of bound labor in the American South and the Russian countryside and is now completing research about how these societies nearly simultaneously adopted systems of free labor. His elegant one-volume history of slavery is attuned to how the experience of slaves in the "southern" context compares with others. (1) A Sphinx on the American Land focuses more intently on the endeavor of southern history, per se, and ranges over a very broad range of topics. These qualities result from the book's origin as the Walter Lynwood lecture series and from Kolchin's own conscious pride in being a "southernist."

The first of three chapters takes up the least self-conscious of three types of historical comparisons--the broad tendency to set the South apart from the rest of the United States, which Kolchin calls the "un-South." Divergences between a unified region (which is often seen as aberrant and outside the mainstream) and the rest of the United States (typically assumed to be normative) derives from the nineteenth century South's defining features--the embrace of slavery by regional elites and the rebellion on behalf of slavery mounted by these men and women during the Civil War. These dual regional "signifiers" establish a polarity between the South and the "un-South" that have long framed economic, political, and cultural accounts of both regional and national history. There are perils of this approach, the book warns, especially the tendency to obscure national trends within the South and regional trends outside of it.

The next chapter considers those historians who dismantle the South/un-South polarity by exploring meaningful differences between the "many Souths," thus emphasizing variety over cohesion. Works that distinguish between distinct geographic sub-regions are surveyed here, as are those that analyze the same area at two distinct periods of time. Most disruptive of monolithic renderings of the South are those approaches that investigate social categories like gender, race, and class, and those that emphasize the conflict within the region during periods of crisis. In this last category, special attention is given to struggles within the region during the Civil War and to those multiple forms of southern identity that circulated during the war's long aftermath.

The book's third and final chapter makes the case for transnational comparisons, explaining how putting the American South next to "other Souths" can reduce parochialism and help historians form meaningful generalizations and disprove unsound ones. Kolchin here details topics that are well-mined (such as the rich comparative literature on slavery) and those that are strangely under-developed (such as the nature of nationalism during the Confederate war). He concludes by turning from the historiographical approach that marks most of the book to a sustained discussion of his own research dealing with comparative emancipation in Russia and the United States. In a preview of work to come, he details similar developments in family, education, and social structures in these two societies while noting that changes in them operated at strikingly different patterns of pace and scale.

Kolchin owes his notion of a sphinx-like South to the late David Potter, whose comparative work--often pursued at the international level--he groups with that of C. Vann Woodward and Eugene Genovese. This older generation of scholars, it is worth noting, tended to relate the South to its Theban prototype in a dual sense, since they insisted that the region was at once an inscrutable presence and one that held the answer to the deepest of riddles, waiting to be uncracked by those with Oedipal wisdom. As Potter put it in the essay that gives this books its title: "To some who viewed it, this sphinx has seemed a great insensate monolith, a vast artifact of the past, with no meaning behind its inscrutable expression.... But to others, this sphinx has seemed to hold a secret, an answer to the riddle of American life." (2)

Kolchin tends to consider the southern sphinx primarily in the first of these two senses, suggesting that the primary problem to be solved is the South itself, not the deeper philosophical problem that the region poses for those who pass its way. Understanding the region's complexity can be best accomplished through the demystifying cleansing that comes with rigorous comparative analysis, he suggests. The book's concerns can be seen in this way as thoroughly professional, though not in any narrow sense, since it also makes the case that insights from southern history can illuminate work in other fields. Kolchin strongly believes that works on the nineteenth century South "lie at the forefront of efforts to make sense of human relations around the world" (3) in large part because the region "lends itself so well to the study of 'big' historical questions--continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of 'race,' the formation of national identity, the struggle between local or regional and centralized authority" (117-18). The book develops this and related points with clarity and breadth, making it at once a helpful guide for the specialist and a superb introduction for those who are relative newcomers to this most puzzling of American regions.