In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

? CIVIL WAR HISTORY source of difficulty, an object of derision, dislike or contempt and, above all, an enigma. David Donald's biography offers to this generation of Middle Period scholars the best explanation which it is likely to receive of the personality and career of one of the era's major figures. For years to come this will be the authoritative portrait of Sumner, that complex blending of the reformer, the intellectual, the orator and the politician. Happily, the physical state of the book is what might be hoped for a potential classic. This is a handsome volume, with footnotes conveniently placed at the bottom of pages, useful illustrations and a generally attractive format. Critics who reject Donald's Sumner because they somehow feel that a champion of human equality and world peace must have been a more pleasing person might consider how often principles are more appealing than are their advocates. Yet, as Fawn M. Brodie has shown in her biography of Sumner's contemporary Thaddeus Stevens, without such a sometimes unbalanced reformer, the black race might have lacked an influential national defender. On the other hand, for those who reject Sumner himself because of his personal qualities, this book supplies a telling rejoinder from Emerson. Wrote the Sage of Concord, "It characterizes a man for me that he hates Charles Sumner, for it shows that he cannot discriminate between a foible and a vice." Demonstrating Emerson's distinction, this biography reveals a man great in weaknesses but greater in strength. Frank L. Byrne Kent State University John Broten: The Sword and the Word. By Barrie Stavis. (South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Bames and Company, 1970. Pp. 190. $6.95.) To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Broten. By Stephen B. Oates. (New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Pp. xii, 434. $10.00.) Perhaps we are living at the right time to reexamine the life of John Brown. In the past, too many writers have viewed him either as a mad, bloodthirsty villain or as an heroic liberal whose goal to abolish slavery was correct but whose violent means were mistaken. With today's radicalism sharpening some of our perceptions, we can more readily discern the difference between villains and zealots, liberals and revolutionaries . Nevertheless, it still is a truism that distinguished historical scholarship requires careful and extensive research, imaginative and judicious judgments, and good writing. Barrie Stavis' biography of Brown is not scholarly. He is a playwright whose Harpers Ferry has been praised by drama critics, and he has written several other plays about historical figures. Like so many previous Brown biographers, Stavis promises to write for the general reader. With the unfortunate misapprehension which characterizes BOOK REVIEWS61 writers believing that good history cannot be written by professional historians, he exclaims: "I have not used footnotes; nor will the reader find a single ibid., op. cit., loe. cit., et al., vide or idem in the entire volume !" The absence of such scholarly apparatus, however, does not smooth the flow of a narrative too frequently interrupted by excessively long quotations from Brown. Where Stavis uses his own prose, he sketches a largely unanalytic and unoriginal portrait. He never answers satisfactorily, for example, his fascinating question: "Why should a man like John Brown speculate in land?" Arguing that Brown had not intended to start a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry but rather to establish a maroon colony nearby, Stavis ignores extant evidence and resorts to dubious logic: in 1863 the mountain population of western Virginia proved disloyal to the Confederacy. Instead of turning to Stavis, those fearful of footnotes can read W. E. B. Du Bois' John Brown (1909) for an heroic portrait or Robert Perm Warren's John Brown, The Making of a Martyr (1929) for an unsavory one. Stephen B. Oates' To Purge This Land with Blood is the first life of Brown written by a professional historian, although some fifteen biographies have preceded it. John Brown: A Biography After Fifty Years (1910, 1943) by Oswald Garrison Villard is its only competitor as a full-length scholarly life. James Malin's John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six (1942) rivals Oates' book...

pdf

Share