Tommy Craig Brown. Deep in the Piney Woods

In Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800–1865, Tommy Craig Brown has written a straightforward account of the often-neglected piney woods region of southeastern Alabama from American settlement in the 1810s to Reconstruction, with almost half of the book’s pages devoted to the Civil War. Brown’s rather perfunctory sketches of the social, economic, and political structures of the antebellum years give way to a livelier and richer evocation of the excitement, hardship, and chaos of war. The piney woods had a reputation as being home to reluctant Confederates and outright Unionists, but this book offers a more complex portrait of the trials and tribulations of soldiers and the families they left behind. Settlers began moving into Alabama’s southeastern tier of counties after the War of 1812, to take advantage of the acquisition of Creek lands in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Most owned few or no enslaved laborers, since the poor soil and limited river shipping discouraged cotton production. Brown, however, expands the boundaries of what was traditionally known as the piney woods area by adding the Black Belt counties of Butler, Pike, and Barbour just to the north. He justifies that inclusion by arguing that they exerted political influence over their neighbors to the south and served as trading centers. He makes a case for the political affiliations but does not clearly explain the economic connections between the piney woods counties and their wealthier neighbors. Broadening the geographic scope does allow Brown to explore regional variations between yeoman counties like Covington, where only 14 percent of the households owned enslaved people in 1860, and Barbour, where 42 percent of the households did the same.

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