Real Southern Sport

 

A review of Maxcy Gregg’s Sporting Journals, 1842-1858 (Green Altar Books, 2019) Suzanne Parfitt Johnson, Editor. Foreword by James Everett Kibler, Jr.

The exploration of everyday life in a given historical period is often based upon the letters, diaries, and business ledgers and journals of the past.  Historians in the last four to five decades have also incorporated the findings from other fields of learning such as architecture and archeology to reconstruct the textures and rhythms of the lives of the people of the past.  The antebellum South, not unlike ancient Greece, was primarily an out-of-doors culture.  This was not only true of the countryside but held true for many city folk as well.  Climate certainly played a role in this, but so too did the roots of Southern culture be they in the agrarian backwaters of the British Isles or the river valleys and coastal regions of Africa.  Until the advent of air conditioning (a device whose origins are to be found in the infernal regions), most Southerners who found themselves indoors wanted to be outdoors.  Southerners, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Bayous of Louisiana were avid sportsmen, hear I mean the blood sports of hunting and fishing, who were also keen naturalists and observers of the natural world.

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