In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina

Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

by Orville Vernon Burton

Burton traces the evolution of Edgefield County from the antebellum period through Reconstruction and beyond. From amassed information on every household in this large rural community, he tests the many generalizations about southern black and white families of this period and finds that they were strikingly similar. Wealth, rather than race or class, was the main factor that influenced family structure, and the matriarchal family was but a myth.

Genres: History, American History

501 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 1985

Reviews

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the prewar part. Informative and useful for me

[Ram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burton has done the definitive, exhaustive (and exhausting!) account of Edgefield district, South Carolina. For me, that's grand, as my dissertation is entwined with that hellish place, cradle of some of the terrible specters who have haunted southern history: Strom Thurmond, Ben Tillman, Preston Brooks. But this is not a book for the faint, nor those in a hurry. If you are at all inclined to genealogy, you will find families mapped out, indirectly, over a century or more. If you are one of the poor bastards who wishes for the return of quantitative analysis in history, you may be pleased. There are many charts, graphs, and lists of figures.

But for those of us who simply want to understand Edgefield, a place that also produced industrial luminaries in the antebellum and postbellum eras (William Gregg and DA Tompkins being two), as well as harboring lesser branches of the Pinckney and Calhoun clans, Burton's book is more like a hurricane of information swirling around an empty eye. It does him no service to organize his material by topic ("love, marriage, and divorce" is a chapter, "growing and selling" could be another, and so on), since many of the same characters appear again and again no matter the subject. For those readers looking for a clear narrative, the structure makes the book seem artificially arranged, as though these obviously very important figures Burton includes are interrupted whenever it's time to switch topics, history and continuity of time be damned. Consequently, one jumps all around, from the 1790s to the 1960s and in-between, whenever the theme of a particular chapter demands it. This is most unsatisfying.

However, no one could be unhappy with the sheer amount of information stitched together here. Burton clearly lives and breathes Edgefield history, and I understand that he is also responsible for coordinating historical conferences in the area, bringing in big name historians as visitors, and overall just being a booster for the district. None of these is a bad thing. Given the torpor of quant history these days, I can think of far worse ways to spend an hour or two than leafing through In My Father's House. (The title is pretty silly, but that's another matter.)