The Southern Fault Line

Opposing perspectives on the desirability of democracy and equality dominates white Southern history. Both before and after the end of slavery, plantation oligarchs rejected democracy, while small farmers in the upcountry embraced it--if only for whites. Drawing from his own family's centuries-old roots in the region, the eminent American politics scholar Bryan Jones compares the experiences of a slaveholding line with three non-slaveholding lines to retell the entire history of the region. Through his family's history across a host of Southern states, he retells in vivid detail the ceaseless battle between Southern oligarchy and democracy--and how racial politics threads through all of it.