The Republican Party in Georgia: From Reconstruction through 1900 (review)

422CIVIL WAR HISTORY nothing is said about Negroes within the Confederacy, where the majority of them were during the war, and litde about the daily life, labor, and business enterprises of northern Negroes in this boom period. The selections, perhaps inevitably, overstress the opinions of the more articulate classes of Negroes. Development of the neglected themes would have required hard grubbing among new sources; it would also have meant a second book as distinguished as Mr. McPherson's first one. Within these limitations, there are many rewards for the reader. The editor suppb'es a conceptual framework for consideration of the documents in each chapter, and much biographical information which illuminates the documents. Among the unforgettable documents are Henry M. Turner 's account of the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the narrative of a reluctant "contraband" surrounded by the carnage of Missionary Ridge, and Sojourner Truth's integration of the Washington streetcars : "Sojourner rode farther than she needed to go; for a ride was so rare a privilege that she determined to make the most of it." This book is a useful supplement to the secondary works on the Negro in the Civil War by Bell I. Wiley, Dudley T. Cornish, Benjamin Quarles, and McPherson himself. Let us hope that m his next book the editor, like Sojourner Truth, will determine to make the most of it. Louis R. Harlan University of Cincinnati The Republican Party in Georgia: From Reconstruction through 1900. By Olive Hall Shadgett. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. Pp. Ix, 210. $6.00.) With Professor Shadgett's book, historians are treated to another bold thrust into that twilight zone which lies, as C. Vann Woodward has so felicitously phrased it, "below the threshold of living memory" and beyond the horizon of written history. It is not, of course, a completely novel thrust. Professors V. P. De Santis and S. P. Hirshon have effectively blasted the myth that northern Republicans conceded the South to the Democracy after 1877. Simultaneously, in the usual state-by-state progression of southern historiography, a literature of "Southern Republicans Face the Southern Question" has been growing out of such direct contributions as James W. Patton's pioneer article on die Republicans in South Carolina and such indirect additions as those made by Wharton, Tindall, Wynes, Logan, and Edmonds. Without doubt, this story of the Republican party in Georgia will add an important measure of depth to the synthesis of southern Republicanism which will soon be made. Within the limits which the author set for her study, there is litde of substance to criticize. Yet, voting figures are only casually given and there are no clear and systematic analyses of election returns. On the very important point of Negro voting, for instance, we are left foundering in near darkness. Looking particularly at the highly significant election BOOKREVIEWS423 of 1894, we find that many Negroes did vote the Populist ticket on the one hand and, on the other, that many did not. All of this we could have guessed. The writer, a trained political scientist of obvious capacity, owes us more. Some readers will also be disconcerted by the interjection of a chapter on the national party and the South near the end of a text which is otherwise closely chronological. Yet, the end result was rather pleasing-and must be so for those who have not read De Santis or Hirshon —and this result, perhaps, is justification enough for the author's solution of this minor organizational problem. One could also chastise the author for not including Hirshon in her considerations. This omission, it can be assumed, springs from the fact that Farewell to the Bloody Shirt (1962) was not fairly in the field before she was forced to surrender her manuscript to the press. As a detailed study of Republican politics in Georgia, Professor Shadgett 's work is a gem, but a good gem deserves at least a good setting. Admittedly, this story is not told in a vacuum, but it is also not carefully and deUberateh/ framed in the broad background of Georgian Ufe. For instance, what was the economic and poUtical miUeu in which this RepubUcan party existed? What was...