Regardless of color or class, men in the Old South hunted; the meat, hides, and furs they brought home reinforced the hunters' claims to patriarchal authority as providers for their households. During the antebellum era, many white men also began using the hunt as a venue for the display of increasingly complex ideas about gender, race, class, and community. Proctor (history, Simpson College) explores the social drama of the hunt as it was conducted between 1800 and 1860, through accounts in books, letters, journals, and periodicals. He looks at the historical developments that shaped hunting as well as interactions between men and women and between owners and slaves. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This innovative study re-examines the dynamics of race relations in the post–Civil War South from an altogether fresh perspective: field sports. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wealthy white men from Southern cities and the industrial North traveled to the hunting and fishing lodges of the old Confederacy—escaping from the office to socialize among like-minded peers. These sportsmen depended on local black guides who knew the land and fishing holes and could ensure a successful outing. For whites, the ability to hunt and fish freely and employ black laborers became a conspicuous display of their wealth and social standing. But hunting and fishing had been a way of life for all Southerners—blacks included—since colonial times. After the war, African Americans used their mastery of these sports to enter into market activities normally denied people of color, thereby becoming more economically independent from their white employers. Whites came to view black participation in hunting and fishing as a serious threat to the South’s labor system. Scott E. Giltner shows how African-American freedom developed in this racially tense environment—how blacks' sense of competence and authority flourished in a Jim Crow setting. Giltner’s thorough research using slave narratives, sportsmen’s recollections, records of fish and game clubs, and sporting periodicals offers a unique perspective on the African-American struggle for independence from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s.

The hunt, like the church, courthouse, and family, played an integral role in southern society and culture during the antebellum era. Regardless of color or class, southern men hunted. Although hunters always recognized the tangible gains of their mission—meat, hides, furs—they also used the hunt to communicate ideas of gender, race, class, masculinity, and community. Hunting was very much a social activity, and for many white hunters it became a drama in which they could display their capacity for mastery over women, blacks, the natural world, and their own passions. Nicolas Proctor argues in Bathed in Blood that because slaves frequently accompanied white hunters into the field, whites often believed that hunting was a particularly effective venue for the demonstration of white supremacy. Slaves interpreted such interactions quite differently: they remained focused on the products of the hunt and considered the labor performed at the behest of their owners as an opportunity to improve their own condition. Whether acquired as a reward from a white hunter or as a result of their own independent—often illicit—efforts, game provided them with an important supplementary food source, an item for trade, and a measure of autonomy. By sharing their valuable resources with other slaves, slave hunters also strengthened the bonds within their own community. In a society predicated upon the constant degradation of African Americans, such simple acts of generosity became symbolic of resistance and had a cohesive effect on slave families. Proctor forges a new understanding of the significance of hunting in the antebellum South through his analyses of a wealth of magazine articles and private papers, diaries, and correspondence.

Sportsmen will find pleasant reading in this rich collection of authentic tales of hunting in the Old South. The book will be of particular interest to those enthusiasts who savor a good hunting yarn for its own sake and enjoy hearing of the old days when the supply of game seemed endless and the field sports were an integral part of everyday life. The volume, which includes some forty illustrations, should also provoke interest among students of Southern history and folklore, for until now the subject has been given sparse attention by scholars. These accounts were penned by planters, journalists, naturalists and sportsmen—from the South, the North, and Europe. The original style of the accounts has been kept, so that the spirit and charm of the old regime, with its devotion to guns and dogs, horses and juleps, is retained. The editor has even included a couple of choice recipes for cooking of game. The selections included are not only delightful entertainment but are authentic narratives and descriptions which will afford the reader a reliable picture of a phase of the Old South that is absent in ordinary social histories of the region.

The bear and panther that populated the woods and canebrakes of the lower Mississippi Valley in the 1800s left a permanent mark on the collective memory of that region. Unfortunately only a relatively small number of writings from that time have survived that provide real insight into the habits of those creatures and how the early settlers of that region hunted them. Writer James T. McCafferty has added richly to that scant body of Southern lore by collecting some wonderful but previously overlooked articles by an antebellum cotton planter and physician and presenting them in his new book, Hunting Bear and Panther in the Old South: The Writings of Dr. Henry J. Peck of Sicily Island, Louisiana. McCafferty, author of The Bear Hunter: The Life and Times of Robert Eager Bobo in the Canebrakes of the Old South and numerous articles on hunting history, introduces Peck's writings with a brief biography of Dr. Peck (1803-1881) and an overview of his works. Besides Peck's writing on the life cycles and the hunting of the animals named in the title, the book includes articles on hog and deer hunting in his day. Readers will find in this volume rarely encountered details about the weapons and methods used by nineteenth century sportsmen, such as Peck's descriptions of the "fire hunting" of deer, the making of the knives used by bear hunters, and accounts of dangerous-and even deadly-encounters with panther and bear. One of the book's appendices adds Peck's personal investigations and thoughts on the early 18th century fights between the French and the Natchez Indian tribe that took place on or near the doctor's appropriately named Battleground Plantation. Hunters and lovers of Southern history will welcome this book.

The "honorable men" who ruled the Old South had a language all their own, one comprised of many apparently outlandish features yet revealing much about the lives of masters and the nature of slavery. When we examine Jefferson Davis's explanation as to why he was wearing women's clothing when caught by Union soldiers, or when we consider the story of Virginian statesman John Randolph, who stood on his doorstep declaring to an unwanted dinner guest that he was "not at home," we see that conveying empirical truths was not the goal of their speech. Kenneth Greenberg so skillfully demonstrates, the language of honor embraced a complex system of phrases, gestures, and behaviors that centered on deep-rooted values: asserting authority and maintaining respect. How these values were encoded in such acts as nose-pulling, outright lying, dueling, and gift-giving is a matter that Greenberg takes up in a fascinating and original way. The author looks at a range of situations when the words and gestures of honor came into play, and he re-creates the contexts and associations that once made them comprehensible. We understand, for example, the insult a navy lieutenant leveled at President Andrew Jackson when he pulls his nose, once we understand how a gentleman valued his face, especially his nose, as the symbol of his public image. Greenberg probes the lieutenant's motivations by explaining what it meant to perceive oneself as dishonored and how such a perception seemed comparable to being treated as a slave. When John Randolph lavished gifts on his friends and enemies as he calmly faced the prospect of death in a duel with Secretary of State Henry Clay, his generosity had a paternalistic meaning echoed by the master-slave relationship and reflected in the pro-slavery argument. These acts, together with the way a gentleman chose to lend money, drink with strangers, go hunting, and die, all formed a language of control, a vision of what it meant to live as a courageous free man. In reconstructing the language of honor in the Old South, Greenberg reconstructs the world.