"The Confessions of Edward Isham, a cleverly conceived and adeptly executed essay collection, is a rich addition to our ever-growing understanding of that shadowy world of southern poor whites. The range of insights and meanings these scholars have teased out of the life of Edward Isham, known only through his brief biographical statement, makes this book extraordinary. It is an example of how much skillful historians can make of single lives and even single incidents, particularly given the dramatic and even chilling story they focus upon here."
—John C. Inscoe, author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina

Description

This compelling collection of original documents and current scholarship sheds considerable light on the underside of the poor white experience in the antebellum South. In 1859, the Georgian Edward Isham, convicted in North Carolina of murdering a Piedmont farmer, dictated his life story to his court-appointed defense attorney. The autobiography left behind provides a rare look at the world of poor whites from the viewpoint of a member of this most elusive of the Old South’s social groups. A selection of essays accompanying the autobiography examines the meaning of the document from a variety of perspectives: crime, frontier life, gender relations, labor, and the genre of nineteenth-century confessional literature.