Explorations in Class and Gender in the Old South: Review of The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the South, ed. Charles C. Bolton and Scott P. Culclasure.

Authors

James M. Denham, Florida Southern CollegeFollow

Date of this Version

12-1999

Document Type

Article

Citation

Documentary Editing, Volume 21, Number 4, December 1999.

ISSN 2476-1796 (electronic); ISSN 2167-1451 (print)

Comments

1999 © the Association for Documentary Editing. Used by permission.

Abstract

The two lives depicted in these accounts represent two dramatically different versions of life in the Old South. As the privileged daughter of a well-to-do slaveholder, Cornelia Jones Pond of Liberty County, Georgia, encountered. none of the hardships and experiences of Edward Isham-who represented a class of people that contemporaries and historians have labeled "poor white." Pond's world was a place of supportive parents, balls, dashing suitors, and loyal servants. Edward Isham's world, on the other hand, was one of bad whiskey, knives, firearms, and poverty. Their lives offer two striking contrasts of white experiences in the antebellum South.