The internal diversity of the nineteenth-century South is simultaneously one of the most widely invoked and least explored themes in southern history. Whereas earlier generations were content to focus chiefly on the Black Belt and then extrapolate their findings to the entire South, since the 1970s scholars have been increasingly uncomfortable with such an approach, recognizing that it might exaggerate regional uniformity and lead to a distorted understanding of small-farm sections. The result, first manifested extensively during the 1980s, has been a marked interest in the social and economic development of areas outside of the Black Belt, most notably the Upcountry areas of Georgia and South Carolina and the remote recesses of southern Appalachia. Despite such recent work, however, our understanding of the socioeconomic bases of southern internal diversity is still primarily impressionistic. Like blind men groping an elephant, scholars have begun to describe different parts of the whole but as yet have no systematic basis for comparing them. Although scholars now frequently maintain that plantation and nonplantation areas differed in social and economic structure, explicitly comparative studies that explore such differences are rare.

In this book I have attempted to fashion such an explicitly comparative study by investigating and measuring the diversity of social and economic structure among rural Tennesseans during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps no other state exhibited greater agricultural diversity on the eve of the Civil War than did Tennessee.