Civil War History

88CIVIL WAR HISTORY sters volunteered to become teachers at contraband camps, sites to which hordes of freedmen had been shuttled. When they arrived at Craney Island, Virginia, near the mouth of the James, in January, 1863, the sisters found two thousand bewildered Negroes, "homeless, hungry, and cold." The misery everywhere in evidence jolted the Quaker simplicity of the ladies. In the years that followed, the Misses Chase labored long hours and performed a variety of duties at contraband camps extending from Washington and Norfolk to Roanoke Island and Savannah. Fortunately for history, the sisters' long and descriptive letters of their observations have been preserved. They are printed here for the first time. The letters are as unique as they are revealing. They provide an almost unparalleled insight into the early life of freedmen. In the correspondence are pointed commentaries on a veritable host of topics: the freedmen themselves; the Freedman's Bureau; hospitals; the hostility to Negroes by northerners and southerners alike; social crimes; individual tragedies; and some amazing conduct by both conqueror and conquered. Professor Swint of Vanderbilt University has done a superb job of preparing the letters for publication. His annotation is extensive (though on occasion it tends to become exhausting). The index is a model. Only in the introduction does the editor seem to fall short. The preface is somewhat shallow; it treats too much of freedmen and too little of the Chase sisters, who supposedly are the main subjects of the book. It would have been helpful, for example, to know when the sisters were bom. The letters of Lucy and Sarah Chase are intelligenüy written, literate in content, and extremely revealing. The occasional and Quaker use of "thee" and "thy" for "you" and "your" adds to the charm of the correspondence . The inclusion of letters from various persons to the sisters enhances all the more a collection indispensable to the social history of the Civil War period. James I. Robertson, Jn. University of Montana The Reconstruction of Georgia. By Alan Conway. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966. Pp. viii, 248. $6.50. ) The best that can be said for this book is that it brings back into print an account of the reconstruction period of Georgia history, but not as good either in balance or interpretation as Dean Mildred Thompson's long-out-of-print Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social and Political —a book Conway has tried to replace. This author is a senior lecturer in American history at the University College of Wales, who was enabled to spend a year in the United States under a Rockefeller Foundation grant, confining his visit largely to Atianta. Conway's book is made up of eight chapters, the last one being his "Conclusion." The others follow a logical development from the latter days of the war, in which the destructiveness of Sherman's march is well set BOOK REVIEWS89 forth. He then continues with conditions at the end of the war, pohtical reconstruction , the "Black Legacy," social and economic problems, congressional reconstruction, and the regime of Governor Bullock. His basic sources are, of course, much the same as Dean Thompson's, with the exception of some enrichment in details got from manuscript collections which had not come to light when she wrote her book; but Conway's bibliography of only five pages compares quite unfavorably in completeness with Dean Thompson 's seventeen pages. Conway's zeal to join the school of revisionists has led him into a sort of crusade to denigrate Dean Thompson's book and to show his dislike for other writers who have ventured into this "highly emotional subject," about which he has made the attempt "to write a balanced account." This attitude of mind has led him to write into much of his narrative a biased account lacking that objectivity which he accuses others of not having. Now and then he has shown bad taste in attributing characteristics of mind not only to Dean Thompson, but also to other writers, using unwarranted assumptions and unsupported conclusions. In discussing the Ku Klux Klan he accuses Dean Thompson of revealing "a genteel cold-bloodness over the murder and mutilation of carpetbaggers and Negroes." He...