IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS
Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina
Orville Vernon Burton
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985
480 pp., $29.95
FRANCIS W.PICKENS AND THE POLITICS OF DESTRUCTON
John b. Edmunds, Jr.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986
256 pp., $25.00
When John Randolph of Roanoke died in 1833, Virginia lost more than a half-made, coruscatingly brilliant orator. Randolph was the last of the line of men who, for nearly three-quarters of a century, had made Virginia the cynosure of American politics. The plantation houses of the Old Dominion produce no more Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, or Monroes; like its soil, worn thin by the overproduction of tobacco, the state's political system had lost its fecundity. Ascendancy in the political arts migrated to South Carolina, and for the next thirty years South Carolinians, not Virginians, formed the advance guard in southern politics. The dour, austere figure of John C. Calhoun towered above all his contemporaries in the Palmetto State, but ranged about him, scrabbling for advantageous positions, was a cohort of talented men: James Henry Hammond, Francis W. Pickens, Robert Banwell Rhett, Andrew Pickens Butler, Preston Brooks, and William C. Preston. The Virginians of '76 created a nation; their South Carolinian heirs sought a similar end but at the cost of the union the Virginians had forged. The Virginians initiated the south's preeminence in politics; the South Carolinians brought it to ruin.
Because of its role in the events that plunged America into fratricidal warfare, antebellum South Carolina has commanded the attention of generations of historians. Orville Vernon Burton and John B. Edmunds, Jr., demonstrate that the golden vein of antebellum South Carolina history has yet to be exhausted. Their book mesh perfectly: Burton focuses on Edgefield country between 1850 and 1880, while Edmunds examines the career of Francis W. Pickens, Edgefield's most prominent planter-politician until his death in 1869.
Local history a genre much prized in New England and the South, has traditionally been the preserve of two groups: genteel matrons engaged in an American variety of ancestor worship worthy of Shintoism: and garrulous, white-thatched gentlemen bent on proving that Great-Great Uncle Pennington was not a rogue who sired a half-dozen bastards and then absconded to Texas. At best, local history has provided a colorful repository of fact and fancy that scholarly historians have mined for illustrative anecdotes and raw information. At worst, it has furnished vanity presses a steady income from producing leather-bound, gold-embossed volumes that everyone's Aunt Maud enshrines, along with other knickknacks and gimcrackery, in her musty parlor, whose faded, papered walls resonate with the murmured politesses of five generations.
Local history as microcosm
Burton transforms the old filio-pietism into an illuminating probing of the microcosm. In his hands, "local history
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