A detailed journal of local, national, and foreign news,
agricultural activities, the weather, and family events, from an
uncommon Southerner Most inhabitants of the Old South, especially
the plain folk, devoted more time to leisurely
activities--drinking, gambling, hunting, fishing, and just
loafing--than did James Mallory, a workaholic agriculturalist, who
experimented with new plants, orchards, and manures, as well as the
latest farming equipment and techniques. A Whig and a Unionist, a
temperance man and a peace lover, ambitious yet caring,
business-minded and progressive, he supported railroad construction
as well as formal education, even for girls. His cotton
production--four bales per field hand in 1850, nearly twice the
average for the best cotton lands in southern Alabama and
Georgia--tells more about Mallory's steady work habits than about
his class status. But his most obvious eccentricity--what gave him
reason to be remembered--was that nearly every day from 1843 until
his death in 1877, Mallory kept a detailed journal of local,
national, and often foreign news, agricultural activities, the
weather, and especially events involving his family, relatives,
slaves, and neighbors in Talladega County, Alabama. Mallory's
journal spans three major periods of the South's history--the boom
years before the Civil War, the rise and collapse of the
Confederacy, and the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
He owned slaves and raised cotton, but Mallory was never more than
a hardworking farmer, who described agriculture in poetical
language as "the greatest [interest] of all."
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