Michael T. Bernath's "In a Land of Strangers"

Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of American history at the University of Miami.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South, with the following results:

At its core, In the Land of Strangers seeks to understand where the idea of the South came from, when it emerged, and what it contained, and, to do so, I focus on the thousands of northern women and men who worked in the South as teachers, tutors, and governesses throughout the antebellum period. Living withing slave-owning households, these northerners were simultaneously part of and apart from southern society, and they wrote home constantly about the profound differences they perceived. In so doing, they helped to construct the idea of southern distinctiveness and to substantiate a sectional narrative that led to civil war and still lingers to this day.

Page 99 falls near the beginning of Chapter 3, “Studying the South,” which explores the many differences these teachers identified between North and South and the larger significance they assigned to those differences. Away from home, many for the first time, these mostly young, middle-class northerners were eager to document what made the South so strange in their eyes. This page mainly deals with teachers’ reactions to the southern climate. The heat and humidity, of course, were what they expected, and dreaded, but they were much more surprised and troubled by the cold. During the winters, southerners kept their houses much colder than these northerners were accustomed to, and they suffered severely and complained vociferously as a result. The baffling but universal southern custom of leaving exterior doors wide open at all times of year was particularly blamed, often attributed to the constant in-and-out of enslaved attendants as well as bizarre southern notions about air circulation. Many northern teachers struggled to convince their southern employers that they really came from a much colder climate as they sat visibly shivering in southern classrooms and parlors.

Within the larger scheme of the book, this is a relatively minor point. But while the Page 99 Test does not capture the book’s broader focus or its larger arguments, it does showcase just a few of the many differences that for these northern teachers defined the South and differentiated it from the North. Embedded, opinionated, outside observers, these northerners watched closely and commented extensively on all aspects of southern culture, society, and especially slavery, and by doing so they articulated the South in ways and with an authority that few other 19th-Century Americans could.

Learn more about In a Land of Strangers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Confederate Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue