
          Vengeance and Justice
          By Hahn, StevenSteven Hahn
          Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 22-24
          
          Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the
Nineteenth Century South. By Edward L. Ayers. Oxford
University Press, 1984.384 pp. $24.95
          The glass and steel that now form the skylines over Atlanta,
Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Greensboro, and a good many smaller
cities may symbolize the South's new found cosmopolitanism, but the
recent spate of executions in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas,
North Carolina, and Virginia reminds us of the cultural peculiarities
that began to distinguish the region by the early nineteenth century
and still manage to leave their imprints. The code duello, lynch law,
the convict lease, and the county chain gang have of course, passed
from the scene. Yet, in the incidence of violence and the meting out
of harsh justice the South continues to hold invidious distinctions:
the highest homicide and assault rates, the greatest number of
handguns, and the most inmates on death row. This is a nation
experiencing unprecedented rates of violent crime and renewed
acceptance of capital punishment.
          The apparent continuity of Southern distinctiveness of these
regards cannot fail to impress. It should not, however, obscure
significant changes in the nature and conceptualization of crime and
punishment, particularly during the 19th century as the South moved
from slavery to freedom. For it is in the very changes that the
meaning of Southern distinctiveness may be discovered. So Edward
Ayers, a talented young historian at the University of Virginia,
suggests, and his new book, Vengeance and Justice 
takes us far along the route of discovery.
          The route is difficult and treacherous, replete with wart paths,
false leads, and blind alleys. Much is shrouded in the haze of myth
and shibboleth. Ayers is mindful of the dangers and respectful of
those who have made the journey before him. Nonetheless, he pushes
ahead boldly and ambitiously, shedding fresh light on older trails
while charting many new ones. His scope is at once regional and local,
sweeping across the Southern states and then focusing in upon three
different areas of Georgia so as to explore patterns of crime and
punishment in considerable detail: Greene County in the Black Belt;
Whitfield County in the Upcountry; and Chatham County along the coast
and dominated by the city of Savannah.
          Ayers begins with the antebellum period and an examination of the
social and cultural underpinnings of Southern violence and
justice. Like Bertram Wyatt-Brown before him, he finds a system of
honor-wherein one's own worth was determined by the judgment of the
community -to be the prevailing field of force, encouraging extremes
of behavior, acute sensitivity to insult, and personalized settlement
of disputes. Unlike Wyatt-Brown, he situates honor within a specific
grid of social relations while recognizing the strong countervailing
currents produced by the South's links to the increasingly bourgeois
North and the increasingly important market economy. Honor, Ayers

reminds us, thrived historically in hierarchical, economically
undiversified, and localistically-oriented societies, and its roots in
the South would have withered, as they had withered in the North, were
it not for slavery. More than anything else, the master-slave
relationship helped insulate the South from the economic and cultural
forces associated with the alternative system of dignity and
self-worth. But the insulation was never complete, and although
traditional patterns of crime and punishment persisted in many areas
up to the Civil War, Southern states began to build penitentiaries and
white Southerners began to debate the issue of institutional
confinement in a language of republicanism that touched the entire
nation.
          Ayers highlights the parameters of continuity and change in his
meticulously researched local studies, where he utilizes quantitative
and literary evidence. Thus, in the rural plantation and nonplantation
counties, violent crime loomed largest, relatively few cases went to
trial, and convicted offenders normally received fines as
penalties. Defendants, for the most part, came from middling economic
ranks and if they had not committed an act of violence it was likely
that their offenses involved drinking, gambling, or sexual
misconduct. Indeed, fluctuations in the "crime rate"had little to do
with the cycles of the marketplace and a good deal to do with various
campaigns against "immorality." Crimes against property-ever
pronounced in the North- were rare, but at the same time punished most
severely: of the few rural offenders sent to the state penitentiary,
the majority had committed property crimes. The affected parties, of
course, were white and usually male; slaves were subjected to
plantation justice lest their offenses were capital or committed off
the plantation when the state stepped in and, significantly, devoted
careful attention to proper procedure. Significantly, too, when cases
involving slaves reached the courts, the conviction rates were about
the same as for whites.
          In antebellum cities such as Savannah, where ties to the market
economy and bourgeois world were more extensive, the dimensions of
crime came nearer to approximating the North. White offenders tended
to be outsiders, often immigrants, from the poorer classes; property
crime proved more common; authorities resorted to the penitentiary
more frequently; and the onset of economic depression, as in the late
1850s, triggered a dramatic rise in incarceration rates. Still the
majority appearing before the local courts had committed an act of
violence, testimony to the power and pervasiveness of the South's code
of honor.
          If Savannah anticipated some of the vectors of social change, the
Civil War and Reconstruction propelled them forward while giving them
a distinctive aspect. With the bonds of enslavement severed, black
people entered, however ambiguously, the South's civil society; and
the relations of the marketplace spread, however haltingly, through
the region. With the plantation system in disarray, landowners
surrounded private property with newly defined and sharpened hedges so
as to limit the economic alternatives available to ex-slaves. The
result was a rather different "configuration of crime and punishment,"
yet one that would "endure for generations to come." The ebb and flow
of crime, in town and country alike, came to follow the fortunes of
the economy, with a considerable surge evident during the depression
ridden 1870s. Offenses against property furthermore, became
increasingly common, and defendants in the plantation counties were
now overwhelmingly black. Finally, institutional confinement,
especially for the swelling number of convicted black offenders,
emerged as the first rather than last resort.
          The numbers soon overtook the institutions, however, and although
Southern legislatures planned to build larger penitentiaries, county
and state officials looked for alternatives to the already crowded
jails. They eventually found one in the convict lease. But as Ayers
demonstrates in an excellent chapter-length account, there was nothing
automatic or inevitable about the rise of the lease, and its early
history was filled with irony. Indeed, while many Southern states
turned to the lease as a temporary expedient, blacks as well as
whites, Republicans as well as Democrats, share some responsibility
for perpetuating it. The 1860s and 1870s saw "cautious
experimentation," as leases ran for relatively short periods and
convicts worked chiefly as agricultural and railroad laborers. By the
1870s and 1880s, the lease's moorings had been firmed and convict
labor concentrated most heavily in mining, particularly in Alabama,
Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Handsome profits there were, both 

for
the state governments and the lessees.
          Yet Ayers perceptively views the lease as more than one of the many
parvenu schemes befitting the "great barbecue"; he views it as an
integral part of the larger transition from slave to capitalist social
relations. For in the South, as in other post-emancipation societies,
various forms of forced labor bridged the path from the old order to
the new. It required a lengthy campaign on the part of free workers
and the urban middle classes before the lease was laid to rest; even
then the death throes were protracted and the legacy ambiguous.
          Ayers concludes his study with a close consideration of the
vigilante violence-lynching and whitecapping-that swept the Black Belt
and Upcountry during the 1880s and 1890s. Reluctant to "over-explain,"
he nonetheless sees the contradictory intersection of honor,
republicanism, and the market provoking a social crisis. Intensifying
white dread of black men violating white women did reflect the premium
that honor placed upon female chastity, male virility, and the
integrity of the patriarchal household. But by the 1880s a new
generation of whites and blacks eyed each other across an
ever-widening chasm, adding fears born of ignorance to the deeper
fears born of the tenuous social balance that had characterized
relatively insulated and hierarchical communities. Lynching harked to
the tradition of retribution and public humiliation, and it was no
accident that black victims were often considered outsiders by both
races in a particular neighborhood. The great upsurge in lynchings,
however, also dramatized the disintegration of relations and norms
that had given the antebellum system of honor some structure of
order. And it was not simply a question of race, for the increasing
penetration of the market into white counties turned the wrath of
communities against whites who violated local custom or represented
the intrusive forces of the outside world, whether they be Mormons or
federal revenue agents. If slavery served as the foundation of
Southern distinctiveness before the war, the gradual and peculiar
transition to capitalist relations continued to set the region
apart. Jettisoned by the educated middle class, honor and its code of
vengeance were perpetuated during the twentieth century by smalltown
folk, and the lower classes, white and black.
          Vengeance and Justice is at its weakest in examining
the legal re-definition of crime after the Civil War and the very
specific social contexts in which "crimes," as distinguished from
general acts of violent retribution, occurred. We learn relatively
little about what Ayers acknowledges to be a wide-ranging process
whereby the law mediated the transformation of social and property
relations: changing patterns of crime provide evidence more of the
impact than of the substance and historical meaning of the
transformation. At the same time, we do not get much of a feel for the
subjects or circumstances in the story; we are, by and large, offered
aggregate statistics instead. It should be said, of course, that the
court records leave much to be desired in this regard and Ayers has
done an impressive job simply in compiling the cases. Nonetheless,
given the challenging insights into the social dimensions of crime
that have come, most notably, from recent studies of sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth century Europe, Ayers could have culled a
bit more even from his limited resources. That he did not do so in
part reflects some of the book's thematic ambiguity: Vengeance
and Justice is both about more and about less than crime and
punishment in the nineteenth century South.
          Shortcomings aside, Edward Ayers has written a book of enormous
interest and genuine importance. His work contributes compellingly to
the debate over the character of the South and the transition from
slavery to freedom, and will serve as an indispensable guide for
students who wish to pursue the many lines of inquiry that Ayers has
opened up. Without question  Vengeance and Justice
helps to raise the discussion of Southern distinctiveness and the
South's painful legacies to a new level of sophistication.
          
            Steve Hahn teaches history at the University of
California at San Diego. He is author of The Roots of Southern
Populism. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).
          
        