The Pursuit of a Dream

By Janet Sharp Hermann

Book Overview

The story of a utopia created by Mississippi freedmen on a white man's former plantation.

"A marvelous story for all readers with a taste for the ironies, the ambiguities, and the surprises of history"--C. Vann Woodward

"Historical writing at its best"--David Bradley New York Times Book Review

This fascinating history set in the Reconstruction South is a testament to African American resilience, fortitude, and independence. It recounts the story of the experiment at Davis Bend, formerly Joseph Davis's plantation along the Mississippi near Vicksburg.

After the war the slaves who had toiled in these fields belonging to the Confederate president's brother became the owners of his lands, some of the most fertile cotton acreage in America. From their utopian communitarian haven rose the third most successful cotton operation in the entire South from Reconstruction to World War I.

This miracle at Davis Bend occurred when blacks were accorded the opportunity to pursue th

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578061296
• ISBN13: 9781578061297
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Reconstruction Reconstructed

Joins the ranks of books such as Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstruction and Melvin Patrick Ely's superb Israel on the Appomattox as case studies of near-utopian experiments in the midst of the madness of the Civil War and so-called Reconstruction. I recently read (yeah, really read, cover to cover) the fifth volume of the documentary history of reconstruction ably put together by Ira Berlin and his team and successors, and what struck me the most was the absolute lack of foresight on the part of the "radicals", including Lincoln. Now Lincoln did not get to "see" or implement Reconstruction, but he appears to have left nothing of his thoughts (to Sumner, to Johnson, to us) about what a slave-free America would look like, as if he could not contemplate such a thing. The "Redeemers" surely had a thought on what that would be, just a minor variation on slavery itself (and so it played out). What Professor Hermann has done here is shown an alternative, nearly visionary approach, with the visionary himself being the unlikely Joseph Davis, and the agents the remarkable Montgomery's. How can a document such as The Emancipation Proclamation get written without serious thought to its consequences? Emancipation and the assimilation of freedmen became as a result a pretty chaotic mess--- much more attention paid to the secessionists' future than to the freedmen's--- and this is no slur upon the black reconstructionists, who did their best, but--- much more significantly--- did SOMEthing for which they and all other former slaves were, deliberately and calculatedly but sometimes inadvertantly, completely untrained, a situation never remedied except in noble experiments like Davis Bend and by noble men like the Montgomerys.