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Seeing the Elephant
The South As It Is 1865-1866
This classic report originally appeared as a series of articles in the Nation between July 8, 1865, and April 11, 1866. Dennett traveled in seven statesâ Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippiâ at the very beginning of Reconstruction. His remarkably prophetic account of the recently defeated South is a major source for the history of this transition.
370 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 22, 2022
I don't remember where I read about this book a few months ago, but I borrowed it from the library to see how some people's current insistence on expressing (and tragically sometimes acting on) views that were once kept muted compares to what might have been heard in the defeated Confederate states immediately after the war.
Dennett started his travels in West Virginia, then went through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. He then turned west through Alabama and Mississippi and finished in Texas. I think he touched down in Kentucky and Tennessee at some point but I can't remember for sure. Everywhere he traveled by boat, rail, foot, horseback and coach he talked to a wide range of southerners, northerners, Blacks, whites, landowners, tenant farmers, people without land or jobs, veterans, widows, Freedmen's Bureau representatives, military forces, politicians, businessmen--everyone.
Attitudes ranged from 'it's over, we have to get to work' to outraged resentment to 'who's going to help us' to 'there's a pile of money to be made here.' Because policies were still in flux he found formerly enslaved people wondering whether rumors of land distribution might be true and whites outraged over the possibilities that Blacks would be allowed to vote or (which seemed even 'worse' to some) testify in court and whether Confederate war debts would be honored.
In most cases his verbatim (at least approximately) quotes from the people he met and their answers to his short questions revealed all he needed to show the readers of the Nation what he found. Over and over again he heard whites idly whiling away the time insisting that former slaves would not work unless they faced the threat of physical punishment. Over and over again he could not find any actual instances of this. And even if in some cases they left before the end of a contract, or refused a work contract, who could blame the impulse to see the world now that they had the freedom to do so. Several whites insisted that the 'problem' would solve itself. They said Blacks would die in large numbers because they were too lazy to work. Then they argued about whether Black contract workers would produce more or less if they were forced to work longer than dawn to dusk.
More often he heard testimony in the offices the military and the Freedmens Bureau of landowners' cruelty and the practices of cheating workers out of their shares of crops.
Yet he also found instances of both Northerners and Southerners who said they thought the former slaves should be educated, entitled to vote and testify and generally live a free life. He visited schools for formerly enslaved children being taught by northern abolitionists and some educated southern Blacks. Many businessmen had lost everything in the war and were looking for northerners to invest capital in local undertakings.
Dennett also paints a vivid picture of the physical landscape. He describes the vegetation and built environment, and the devastation left by four years of war. When stranded on the road he took shelter in very rough quarters, often in widows' huts, and ate the extremely minimal fare that could be scratched from local grounds. These people often were very ignorant of what was going on in the wake of the war.
Highly readable, and valuable documentation of some very familiar attitudes being voiced 160 years ago.
Dennett started his travels in West Virginia, then went through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. He then turned west through Alabama and Mississippi and finished in Texas. I think he touched down in Kentucky and Tennessee at some point but I can't remember for sure. Everywhere he traveled by boat, rail, foot, horseback and coach he talked to a wide range of southerners, northerners, Blacks, whites, landowners, tenant farmers, people without land or jobs, veterans, widows, Freedmen's Bureau representatives, military forces, politicians, businessmen--everyone.
Attitudes ranged from 'it's over, we have to get to work' to outraged resentment to 'who's going to help us' to 'there's a pile of money to be made here.' Because policies were still in flux he found formerly enslaved people wondering whether rumors of land distribution might be true and whites outraged over the possibilities that Blacks would be allowed to vote or (which seemed even 'worse' to some) testify in court and whether Confederate war debts would be honored.
In most cases his verbatim (at least approximately) quotes from the people he met and their answers to his short questions revealed all he needed to show the readers of the Nation what he found. Over and over again he heard whites idly whiling away the time insisting that former slaves would not work unless they faced the threat of physical punishment. Over and over again he could not find any actual instances of this. And even if in some cases they left before the end of a contract, or refused a work contract, who could blame the impulse to see the world now that they had the freedom to do so. Several whites insisted that the 'problem' would solve itself. They said Blacks would die in large numbers because they were too lazy to work. Then they argued about whether Black contract workers would produce more or less if they were forced to work longer than dawn to dusk.
More often he heard testimony in the offices the military and the Freedmens Bureau of landowners' cruelty and the practices of cheating workers out of their shares of crops.
Yet he also found instances of both Northerners and Southerners who said they thought the former slaves should be educated, entitled to vote and testify and generally live a free life. He visited schools for formerly enslaved children being taught by northern abolitionists and some educated southern Blacks. Many businessmen had lost everything in the war and were looking for northerners to invest capital in local undertakings.
Dennett also paints a vivid picture of the physical landscape. He describes the vegetation and built environment, and the devastation left by four years of war. When stranded on the road he took shelter in very rough quarters, often in widows' huts, and ate the extremely minimal fare that could be scratched from local grounds. These people often were very ignorant of what was going on in the wake of the war.
Highly readable, and valuable documentation of some very familiar attitudes being voiced 160 years ago.
March 27, 2022
In the wake of the collapse of the Confederacy and Lee's surrender, not to mention Lincoln's assassination, the nascent The Nation sent one of its writers, Dennett, to wander around the south and pickup the general vibe and zeitgeist, with particular attention paid to the plight and situation of the newly freed slaves. This volume collects his fascinating reports and should prove of interest to those interested in the wake of the Civil War, proto-Reconstruction, the end of slavery, and African-American history.
Dennett wandered over the south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi) with no real clear agenda in mind save to meet local folks, talk to them, and gently prod them for their views on recent events, especially Emancipation. There's lots of great stuff here concerning the recently freed folk, and Dennett interviews them with clear sympathy and a rational head. What is most striking is the sheer ignorance and idiocy of the white trash morons that Dennett encounters at every turn and from virtually every walk of life. The most pathetic are the poor whites who suffer along their newly liberated black brethren but who for some reason can't get it through their stupid racists skulls that maybe they should team-up with them and get shit set right. Really nothing has changed in that respect. Dennett has little sympathy for these poor folks since they are simply the victims of the circular logic of their own racism which perpetuated slavery, denied them paid work (whose gonna hire in-bred crackers when slavery makes it all free?), and basically set the pattern that we're still living with today.
Okay I'm just venting, but this is a good foundational, first-hand work if you want to parse out current events. Also, does anyone remember ever eating at the restaurant "Po' Folks"? I'm pretty sure there's a connection here somewhere...
Dennett wandered over the south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi) with no real clear agenda in mind save to meet local folks, talk to them, and gently prod them for their views on recent events, especially Emancipation. There's lots of great stuff here concerning the recently freed folk, and Dennett interviews them with clear sympathy and a rational head. What is most striking is the sheer ignorance and idiocy of the white trash morons that Dennett encounters at every turn and from virtually every walk of life. The most pathetic are the poor whites who suffer along their newly liberated black brethren but who for some reason can't get it through their stupid racists skulls that maybe they should team-up with them and get shit set right. Really nothing has changed in that respect. Dennett has little sympathy for these poor folks since they are simply the victims of the circular logic of their own racism which perpetuated slavery, denied them paid work (whose gonna hire in-bred crackers when slavery makes it all free?), and basically set the pattern that we're still living with today.
Okay I'm just venting, but this is a good foundational, first-hand work if you want to parse out current events. Also, does anyone remember ever eating at the restaurant "Po' Folks"? I'm pretty sure there's a connection here somewhere...
May 3, 2025
This would be an extraordinary book in any context, but especially in the contemporary context of hostility to DEI, and any honest or complete history of slavery and the period immediately after its end.
It's difficult to convey how deeply and thoroughly white Southerners after the Civil War despised formerly enslaved blacks. The prevailing view was that they were vicious, utterly unreliable, lazy, and improvident. Everywhere the author went, he encountered the most virulent hostility toward the political questions of the day as to whether blacks should be given the right to vote and give testimony against white men.
Into this cesspool of hatred, John Richard Dennett, a young journalist hired by the then-new publication The Nation, traveled through six Southern states to give readers a picture of the South as it was in the year after the Civil War ended. Dennett's sharp observations and deep compassion inform this amazing account. The last two chapters, in which, back in his native Boston he looks back on his travels, are particularly trenchant. I was struck by the way he tore apart the canard of laziness -- pointing out how recently freed slaves were more focused on traveling hundreds of miles ON FOOT, and destitute, to find loved ones they had been forcibly separated from during slavery.
This quote from the last page of the book is gasp-worthy:
"During the war the Negroes, of course, sided with the North. They believed that if the North should be successful they would be freed. And today, so far as they can understand the questions which agitate the people, they are of the Union party. But I hesitate to apply the name of loyalty to their feeling towards the Government. They have never had a country." [Italics mine.]
It's difficult to convey how deeply and thoroughly white Southerners after the Civil War despised formerly enslaved blacks. The prevailing view was that they were vicious, utterly unreliable, lazy, and improvident. Everywhere the author went, he encountered the most virulent hostility toward the political questions of the day as to whether blacks should be given the right to vote and give testimony against white men.
Into this cesspool of hatred, John Richard Dennett, a young journalist hired by the then-new publication The Nation, traveled through six Southern states to give readers a picture of the South as it was in the year after the Civil War ended. Dennett's sharp observations and deep compassion inform this amazing account. The last two chapters, in which, back in his native Boston he looks back on his travels, are particularly trenchant. I was struck by the way he tore apart the canard of laziness -- pointing out how recently freed slaves were more focused on traveling hundreds of miles ON FOOT, and destitute, to find loved ones they had been forcibly separated from during slavery.
This quote from the last page of the book is gasp-worthy:
"During the war the Negroes, of course, sided with the North. They believed that if the North should be successful they would be freed. And today, so far as they can understand the questions which agitate the people, they are of the Union party. But I hesitate to apply the name of loyalty to their feeling towards the Government. They have never had a country." [Italics mine.]
January 2, 2010
In 1865 the newly founded Nation magazine sent John Richard Dennett to travel through the South and write weekly columns describing his observations. This book is a collection of 36 of these columns, reprinted on the one hundredth anniversary of their original publication. Dennet is fair-minded and curious. The book is a wonderful complement to any reading about the Civil War. It doesn't have a plot to carry the reader along, but its graphic detailing of life in that time and place make it hard to put down. The most illuminating and troubling theme for me was Dennet's repeated encounters with white racism. If you have wondered how racism could hold our country in its grip for so long, you should read this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews