North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Ham Jones, Ante-Bellum Southern Humorist: An Anthology by Willene Hendrick; GeorgeHendrickReview by: Joseph M. FloraThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1990), pp. 453-454Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23519137 .

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Book Reviews 453

book is about free blacks, black education, and civil rights. It is obvious that the

author has engaged in thorough research on the county's black populace, its

churches, and business community. Perhaps readers would be better served had

Parker written his book on that subject. Cumberland County: A Brief History is one of a series of short county histories

that will, most likely, prove popular with area citizens. Although the absence

of an index diminishes its usefulness as a reference, the book is a vast

improvement over John Oates's Story of Fayetteville. It remains steadfast to a

chronology and attempts to address several topics that constitute the political,

economic, and social history of Cumberland County. Despite its weaknesses, this

book will serve as a good introduction to the county's history.

Division of Archives and History

Karen L. Cox

Ham Jones, Ante-Bellum Southern Humorist: An Anthology. Edited by Willene Hendrick and George Hendrick. (Hamden, Conn: Shoe String Press, Inc., 1990. Introduction, note on text, note on arrangement, acknowledgments, glossary. Pp. 137. $23.50.)

Although his contribution to the humorous sketch is credited in The History

of Southern Literature (1985) and in Literary North Carolina (1986), there is no

entry for Hamilton (Ham) Jones in Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary

(1979) or in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989). The name Ham Jones

is scarcely first to the lips when someone is asked to discuss antebellum humor

ists of the South. Instead, the respondent will discourse on the likes of Johnson

Jones Hooper, George Washington Harris, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and Thomas

Bangs Thorpe. But the Salisbury, North Carolina, lawyer had a brand of humor that repre

sents his period attractively. His most famous piece, "Cousin Sally Dillard," was

a favorite of Abraham Lincoln's, and his other humor pieces were frequently identified as by the author of "Cousin Sally Dillard." Jones wrote less for fame

and more for pleasure and did not have much time for writing such tales. In

addition to being a lawyer, he was a newspaper editor, legislator, plantation

owner, and father of six children. He was something of a "ham" as well and could

recite "Sally Dillard" and other stories in compelling style; in the postbellum South he might have made his way as a king of the platform.

The body of Jones's work is not extensive, and it has come down to modern

readers largely secondhand. "Cousin Sally Dillard" was first printed in

Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post on August 6,1831. Other pieces made their

way into W. T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, the New York journal. In 1832 in

Salisbury, Jones founded the Carolina Watchman, a newspaper to counter the

Western Carolinian, which was anti-Federalist and later anti-Whig. Thereafter,

Jones had a means of furthering his own Whig position and of promoting the

art of the humorous sketch, though primarily in North Carolina.

"Cousin Sally Dillard" and other pieces by Jones may certainly claim the

attention of any student of southern or American humor, and having the first

collected edition of Jones's work will be a convenience to those students. But

VOLUME LXVII, NUMBER 4, OCTOBER, 1990

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454 Book Reviews

North Carolinians especially are served by this anthology, for it provides a valuable means to experience something of the flavor of earlier times. Although born in Virginia (August 23, 1798), Jones spent virtually all of his life in North Carolina. He was educated in Chapel Hill and studied law in New Bern with William Gaston, the state's most distinguished attorney, before settling in

Salisbury to practice law. He was a good observer and a good listener, as humorists should be. He supported the cause of the Confederacy, though he had foreseen that the conflict would be horrible. He did not live to see much of the

postbellum world, dying in September, 1868, an honored citizen.

By bringing together all known sketches by Jones, the Hendricks provide the best memorial to Jones so far. In addition to gathering Jones's stories and

sketches, his omnibus pieces published in the Carolina Watchman, and some miscellaneous pieces, the anthology contains four humorous selections that Jones probably wrote. A sample of five stories that Jones reprinted in the Carolina Watchman reveals the kind of humor he liked and reminds readers of the relaxed newspaper practices of the period. Willene and George Hendrick give their readers helpful introductions to the various sections of the anthology as well as a good summary of Jones's career. Their goal is to introduce Jones to a new generation of readers and storytellers. It is good to have their scholarly anthology to clarify and to commemorate Jones's place in the galaxy of antebel lum southern humorists.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Joseph M. Flora

Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808. By Rachel N. Klein. (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro lina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., 1990. Acknowledgments, maps and tables, abbreviations, introduction, appendixes, index. Pp. xii, 331. $34.95.)

This fine book traces the social, political, and religious history of South Carolina from the days of the Regulators through the revision of the state constitution in 1808. The closing date is particularly significant, for it was only then that the backcountry achieved what the Regulators had demanded in the 1760s: legislative representation in reasonable proportion to the white popula tion of the region. Previous historians have attributed the state's political unification to the spread of cotton agriculture to the backcountry, a development that forged ties of common interest between inland slaveholders and the older aristocracy of the coast. This argument has tended both to obscure the complex divisions of South Carolinian society and to create a false division between the history of the colonial and Revolutionary eras and that of the early national and Jacksonian periods. Rachel N. Klein's account allows the reader to understand that there never was a simple division between aristocratic low country and yeoman backcountry—there were instead at least three distinct low-country and two backcountry regions, each with its own interests and its own elite—and to appreciate the essential continuity of South Carolina's development from the

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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