In Old Virginia

In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker. Edited by Claudia L. Bushman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xix, 292. Appendices. Cloth, $44.95.)In Old Virginia is a welcome addition the growing shelf of studies of small planters in the antebellum South. From 1824, when John Walker commenced farming at the age of thirty-nine, until shortly before his death in 1867, Walker kept a daily record of farm activities, expenses, and social activities concerning his plantation operations in King and Queen County, Virginia. Claudia Bushman's meticulous examination of the two-volume diary, supplemented by two other personal diaries and local records, is divided into thirteen topical chapters, plus a brief introduction and a conclusion, which look at crop routines, farm economies, agricultural improvements, slavery, community, Methodism, health care, the Civil War, and other subjects. Two appendices provide family genealogies and annual information about every slave mentioned in the diaries. Eschewing the historiographical controversies that mine the landscape of southern history, Bushman hews close the text to provide a historical panorama without contemporary judgment (xv), allowing readers draw their own conclusions about the significance of Walker's life. Therein lie both the book's value and its limitations.Diaries are intensely personal constructions of a world writ small; one learns not the whole of a person's life, but only the concerns and obsessions of the diarist. Born in 1785 into a gentry family whose ancestors had settled the county seven generations earlier, Walker worked in the family's milling business before moving Nashville, Tennessee, where he converted Methodism in 1818. Returning Virginia, Walker sold his share of the enterprise and purchased a portion of the family plantation. A calculating farmer, exacting slaveowner, penurious husband, devoted Methodist, practitioner of Thomsonian medicine, litigious neighbor, and reluctant Confederate, Walker produced a diary that is rich on these topics but is much less revealing about family life, women's labor, community events, or local politics.Walker's life both confirms and informs much of the recent Old South scholarship. Slavery proved adaptable mixed farming, but required careful deployment of laborers in dozens of different tasks throughout overlapping crop cycles. Even small planters like Walker, who had only a dozen enslaved workers, managed complex operations, and in one of the most original chapters Bushman describes seven distinct economies: market, farm, women's household, slave, neighborhood barter, hired slave, and paper investments. Despite the scant references women's labor in the journals, another chapter examines the importance of housewifery the plantation. As Bushman notes, Walker belies simple dichotomies that divide farmers into subsistence or commercial operators; both were integral components of highly diverse agricultural economies.The journals also illuminate how rural Virginians survived the long depression from 1819 until the early 1850s. Walker constantly cut expenses become as self-sufficient as possible, such as increasing textile production; he selectively adopted improved farming practices, applying manure and fertilizers maintain soil fertility and purchasing horse-drawn machinery increase labor productivity; he expanded crop production by clearing new ground and purchasing a second plantation in 1850; and he hired out a skilled slave. Only men with inherited land and slaves survived, and even they enjoyed but modest prosperity, consuming most of what they produced. Bushman perceptively concludes that it was the daily calculations of labor deployment, the annual gamble on the crop mix, and the determination make ends meet and leave patrimonies sons that motivated small planters like Walker

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