It is customary for authors of case studies to conclude by establishing the representativeness of their subjects and the broader significance of their findings. At that point, as I have long imagined but now understand experientially, there is a powerful impulse to overstate the results of one's work by generalizing broadly and uncritically to some larger historical universe – the nineteenth-century South, for example. Implicitly, scholars who yield to such temptation assume that the larger universe of interest was reasonably homogeneous and that in describing a portion they have also described the whole.

Although it is impossible to know in many cases, I suspect that the assumption of homogeneity – with regard to historical analysis, anyway – is more often than not inappropriate. In this particular instance I know it to be so, for it denies the very diversity that this book has sought to investigate. In closing, therefore, it is imperative to review briefly the conclusions of the preceding chapters and to suggest what implications they hold, if any, for the South as a whole and, by extension, for the future study of southern history.

If anything, this analysis of Tennessee in the Civil War era has shown the futility of blanket comparisons of plantation and nonplantation districts. On the eve of the Civil War, Tennessee's white agricultural population did vary considerably from region to region, most noticeably in dependence on slavery.