North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The Barrow Family and the Barataria and Lafourche Canal: The Transportation Revolution inLouisiana, 1829-1925 by Thomas A. BecnelReview by: Percival PerryThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 2 (APRIL 1990), pp. 256-257Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521260 .

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256 Book Reviews

a frontier region on the make. White Texans convinced themselves of the light ness of slavery, stifled all discussion, and by 1860 developed a siege mentality on the subject, reinforced when a wave of fires led to a series of slave lynchings. So tenacious was slavery in Texas that the institution continued after the end of the Civil War.

This richly researched book of twelve chapters covers other important themes such as family life, religion, working conditions, and free blacks. Throughout, Campbell is judicious and restrained, rarely carrying an argument farther than his evidence will allow. Appropriate maps and charts will help those unfamiliar with Texas. The only major omission is that of photographs.

Arkansas State University

Michael B. Dougan

The Barrow Family and the Barataría and Lafourche Canal: The Transportation Revo

lution in Louisiana, 1829-1925. By Thomas A. Becnel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1989. Chronology, illustrations, bibliographical essay, index. Pp. xiii, 202. $27.50.)

The Canal era, 1790-1840, was the first important effort to improve trans

portation between regions of the United States, as exemplified by the North

Carolina-Virginia Dismal Swamp Canal in the 1790s and by the Erie Canal

joining New York City with the Great Lakes in 1825. Louisiana, with its numerous lakes and bayous, also sought to develop an inland waterway system with connecting canals. In 1829 the state chartered and subsidized the Barataria and Lafourche Canal to unite New Orleans with the western

Attakapas region, by way of Houma, to Bayou Teche. These areas produced sugar, cotton, seafood, and lumber. The canal's drain on state finances led to its sale in 1859 to private investors, with Robert Ruffin Barrow the principal owner.

Barrow, a North Carolinian who had migrated to Louisiana after the War of

1812, became a wealthy landowner with several large sugar plantations and over 700 slaves. He wanted the canal as a shipping route to New Orleans for his and other planter's produce. An astute, irascible, sometimes unethical

businessman, he achieved considerable success. A Whig in politics, he opposed secession, and in the aftermath of the Civil War, by ingenious financial

maneuvering, he retained possession of his plantations and the canal. Barrow died in 1876 and his son Robert Barrow, Jr., assumed management

of the canal. He, too, was an astute, irascible, successful businessman who

improved, extended, and made the canal a profitable enterprise. In the twentieth century, spur line railroads from the intercontinental

Southern Pacific invaded the region and canal traffic declined. The building of the intercoastal waterway in the twentieth century by the United States Corps of Engineers also offered an alternate route. In 1925 the federal government bought a portion of the Barataria and Lafourche Canal, and also the Harvey Canal, and united them with the intercoastal waterway.

The Barrow family's connection with the canal for almost a century provides continuity for Thomas A. Becnel's account. The book is well researched and

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 257

documented for those interested in transportation, business, and financial

history. It is not for the casual reader because intricate business transactions fill its pages.

Wake Forest University

Percival Perry

Science and Medicine in the Old South. Edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Preface, acknowledg

ments, contributors, index. Pp. xii, 370. $37.50.)

It has been more than a half century since the publication of Scientific Interests of the Old South, Thomas Cary Johnson's vigorous defense of Old South science. This new volume of fifteen essays by well-known scholars redresses the

major shortcoming of the Johnson study: it places southern science and medicine in a national context. The book is divided into two sections with six essays on

science, nine on medicine. While pursuit of science in the Old South lagged behind that of the nation,

the region was not a scientific Sahara. Some advances were made, especially in

agriculture. Small scientific and natural history societies, established in New

Orleans and Charleston in 1853, contributed to the professionalization of sci

ence, although their effect was short lived. At southern colleges science was as

important in the curriculum as in northern institutions. Absence of an urban

culture, however, retarded rigorous scientific thought, and slavery, traditionally blamed for the region's ills, kept the South's ironworks too primitive to help the

Confederacy. Thus slave ironworkers, Charles B. Dew observes, unwittingly

helped to pave the way for their own freedom. If scientific pursuits affected only a small portion of the population, medicine

affected everybody. Southern physicians claimed that the warm, humid climate

of the South made the medical problems of the region unique. Three African

imports—falciparum malaria, hookworm, and yellow fever—took a particularly heavy toll, a fact K. David Patterson calls the slaves' "biological revenge." For

genetic reasons or because of long exposure slaves had some immunity to these

diseases. It was yellow fever that gave rise to the South's notoriety as the

unhealthiest region of the United States. Treatment of disease in the South was not so different from elsewhere.

Southerners, like all Americans, suffered the excesses of heroic medicine. Blood

letting was more restrained than in cooler regions, but calomel was

administered in even larger doses. The South had its share of Thompsonians,

homeopathic and folk practitioners, and slaves often relied on conjurers to cure

their ills and inflict harm on their oppressors. Elliott J. Gorn's account of slave

folk medicine is one of the most fascinating chapters in this interesting and

useful book.

Longwood College

Elizabeth W. Etheridge

VOLUME LXV11, NUMBER 2, APRIL, 1990

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