First book-length archaeological study of a nonelite white population on a Caribbean plantation

Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society is the first archaeological study of the poor whites of Barbados, the descendants of seventeenth-century European indentured servants and small farmers. “Redlegs” is a pejorative to describe the marginalized group who remained after the island transitioned to a sugar monoculture economy dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. A sizable portion of the “white” minority, the Redlegs largely existed on the peripheries of the plantation landscape in an area called “Below Cliff,” which was deemed unsuitable for profitable agricultural production. Just as the land on which they resided was cast as marginal, so too have the poor whites historically and contemporarily been derided as peripheral and isolated as well as idle, alcoholic, degenerate, inbred, and irrelevant to a functional island society and economy.

Using archaeological, historical, and oral sources, Matthew C. Reilly shows how the precarious existence of the Barbadian Redlegs challenged elite hypercapitalistic notions of economics, race, and class as they were developing in colonial society. Experiencing pronounced economic hardship, similar to that of the enslaved, albeit under very different circumstances, Barbadian Redlegs developed strategies to live in a harsh environment. Reilly’s investigations reveal that what developed in Below Cliff was a moral economy, based on community needs rather than free-market prices.

Reilly extensively excavated households from the tenantry area on the boundaries of the Clifton Hall Plantation, which was abandoned in the 1960s, to explore the daily lives of poor white tenants and investigate their relationships with island economic processes and networks. Despite misconceptions of strict racial isolation, evidence also highlights the importance of poor white encounters and relationships with Afro-Barbadians. Historical data are also incorporated to address how an underrepresented demographic experienced the plantation landscape. Ultimately, Reilly’s narrative situates the Redlegs within island history, privileging inclusion and embeddedness over exclusion and isolation.
 

“Well-researched and well argued, provocative and imaginative, In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett examines the image of the “pure” Appalachian Anglo-Saxons who furnished hope for the future, and the less flattering image of the degenerate, poverty-stricken mountaineers with blood on their hands. In a wide-ranging exploration that reaches from Teddy Roosevelt to JFK, Ian C. Hartman examines the idea of Appalachian exceptionalism over time and what that has meant for the region and for America.”
—James C. Klotter, state historian of Kentucky and professor of history, Georgetown College

Extending from the southern Appalachians through the rolling hills of Kentucky and Tennessee to the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri, the upland South emerged in American lore as the setting where Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and other rugged frontiersmen forged a modern nation and headed west to become the progenitors of what some viewed as a new and superior “American race.” Others, however, saw this region as the breeding ground of poor, debased whites—the “hillbillies” and “white trash” of popular stereotypes. These conflicting identities have long dominated public discourse about the region, as well as fostered a deep fascination with it.

In this compelling study, part political and part cultural history, Ian C. Hartman probes the late-nineteenth-century context from which this paradox arose and the array of personalities, expressions, and policies that sought to resolve it—or at least make sense of it—in the decades that followed. He begins by investigating the writings of “race theorists” including future president Theodore Roosevelt, whose multivolume The Winning of the West (1889–96) furthered the tale of a heroic and distinctly American stock who, “with axe and rifle,” conquered a continent. Hartman relates these myths to the rise of the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement, which sought to regenerate and purify a once proud but now impoverished and degraded people through policies that included forced sterilization to weed out “imbeciles.” Hartman goes on to showcase the surprising ways in which the contradictory identity of the upland South affected broader national debates about imperialism, crime and punishment, poverty and inequality, and the growth and decline of the postwar welfare state.

Whether considering the racial implications of a 1930s Appalachian folk festival, the stereotypical but often sympathetic portrayals of rural southerners in sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show, or the shifting perceptions of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett is a consistently provocative book that invites readers to ponder a fresh a set of ideas about America’s “race history” that have shown remarkable traction for more than a century.

Ian C. Hartman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, Appalachian Journal, and Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia, among other publications.