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Book Reviews215 ity, boldness and timidity, vision and blindness. The knack of treating somany facets without confusion of detail, and at the same time retaining a clear picture ofthe whole, is the author's main success and the book's main strength. On the other hand this book adds little if anything to our knowledge of the Confederacy. Nor does it supersede Coulter's Confederate States (1950) or Eaton's Southern Confederacy (1956). It is no more interesting than either of these works, and not nearly as comprehensive and original. Because of its affinity to these books it invites further comparison with them. Coulter's book is a much fuller, more original, more exciting treatment of Confederate life. Roland's book is better balanced, mostly because it gives a better relative treatment of Confederate military and diplomatic activities. Still, if one wishes to read about Confederate social, political, and economic life, he will choose Coulter. Eaton's book is more nearly the size and scope of Roland's. Yet Eaton is much more original, more keenly interpretative, with fresher material and more perceptive insights. He has the balance of Roland and is more entertaining to read. The book at hand, for its size, has adequate maps and illustrations. The bibliography is highly selected and very useful. It is competently done, and as a volume covering so short a period in a multi-volume history of American civilization, it fulfills its purpose. Edward Younger U.S. Naval War College Ante-BeUum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Shvery. Edited, with an introduction, by Harvey Wish. (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1960. Pp. 256. Paperback, $1.35; hardcover, $2.50.) The publishing trade has caught on to the vogue for compact packaging, and in Ante-BeUum we have a three-for-the-price-of-one promotion, consisting of edited versions of George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South and Cannibals AU, and Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis. Professional scholars will be slightly chafed by editor Wish's failure to indicate his omissions, but this volume is, nevertheless, a good introduction to two odd, provoking men, both rather repetitive and disorganized writers, who need editing. Those whose interest in the Civil War lies in its battlefields should make the acquaintance of Fitzhugh and Helper, to learn something important about the forces that brought the armies to their various appointments with destiny a century ago. Both Fitzhugh and Helper were men of the rural South, self-educated in part by vigorous reading. Both shrewdly analyzed the flaws of the society around them. Fitzhugh, looking northward, saw how the growth of industry and "free government," so vaunted by the South's enemies, had begun to create a capitalistic oligarchy which put profit well ahead of justice. Helper, surveying his own South, that "agrarian paradise," saw the ignorance, de- 216civil wa r history pendence, and poverty of great masses of fellow whites. Both men, in short, had spotted weaknesses in the American dream; both were aware of a rising plutocracy and a declining agriculture fully a generation before these became major nationalproblems. Yet their solutions were fantastic. Fitzhugh believed that the North's answer to the conflict between labor and capital would have to be the adoption of slavery, which alone could identify the interests of the two. And Helper held that all the woes of the farming South would vanish with the immediate abolition of slavery, which lay "at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South." Both writers, otherwise shrewd, defended these gross oversimplifications with angry energy . Their intelligence failed to show them the infinite subdety, complexity, tragedy, and paradox of man's struggle to create just institutions. Mavericks though they were, in a sense, Fitzhugh and Helper shared these absolutes with thousands of their fellow nineteenth-century Americans. Thereby , civil war was brought closer. The crisis of the fifties became the war of the sixties, and this book will help readers to understand how the one grew inexorably into the other. Bernard A. Weisberger University of Chicago The Iron Brigade. By Alan Nolan. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1961. Pp. xvi, 412. $6...

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