Sound of Drums: Selected Writings of Spencer B. King from his Civil War Centennial Columns Appearing in the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph-News, 1960-1965 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS357 ruined the South while evidently stimulating the North. Many of these problems might have been avoided had Flynn made fewer large statements and rooted his work more firmly in Georgia soil; his failure to do so is serious. David L. Carlton Vanderbilt University Sound of Drums: Selected Writings of Spencer B. King from his Civil War Centennial Columns Appearing in the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph -News, 1960-1965. By Spencer B. King with a foreword by Henry Y. Warnock. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984. Pp. xi, 543. $32.95.) Spencer King's Sound of Drums—an anthology of his weekly Civil War Centennial columns from the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph-News—must be appreciated on two levels. He intended for his essays to constitute a memorial to Civil War combatants and civilians and to commemorate their sacrifices. Published twenty years after the articles were originally printed and seven years after the author's death, this volume is also an excellent monument to King and to his generation of southern scholars. Taken individually, each essay is a vignette on a widevariety of topics ranging from insights into battlefield strategy to the experiences of common soldiers to the trials of home folk. Written for an audience of white Georgians in the early 1960s, the work is saturated with a heavy dose of southern chauvinism. While Yankees were consistently portrayed as rude and threatening, Rebels were almost always brave, democratic , and pious. Reflecting upon the "many Christian soldiers of the Confederacy," King explained that the call of battle often interrupted devotional services. This led some, he wrote, "to die with the last strain of a familiar hymn on their lips." King felt compelled to defend the southern cause. Typical were his several articles softening the inhumanity associated with the infamous Andersonville prison camp. He eulogized its commander—Captain Henry Wirz—who was executed after the conflict for war crimes and urged the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to care reverently for his neglected monument. In response to King's appeal for Macon families to share letters and diaries saved from their Confederate ancestors, local residents provided him with a wealth of material. As a result, his columns often focused upon the war as seen by individual soldiers. Many letters and other items were printed in full. These inclusions should interest the general reader and provide useful primary sources for the Civil War historian. The book is a period piece published well past its appropriate time. In the early 1960s—before Vietnam—war still possessed a melancholy 358CIVIL WAR HISTORY romance. Printed in 1984, the volume serves to remind us that King represented that last generation of white scholars who knew the hoary veterans of the southern crusade and were still thrilled by their memories . In February 1961, he journeyed to Milledgeville, Georgia, to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the state's secession. "I joined in wholeheartedly with the fun," he told his readers, "and tried to lift my voice with the crowd in a Rebel Yell." Fred A. Bailey Abilene Christian University The Old South in the Crucible of War. Edited by Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke. (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. Pp. x, 110. $12.50 cloth. $7.50 paper.) This volume grew out of the Seventh Annual Chancellor's Symposium at the University of Mississippi. Using the work of Emory M. Thomas as a point ofdeparture, the symposium brought Thomas together with Paul D. Escott, Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne, Leon F. Litwack, Michael Barton, and Thomas B. Alexander "to examine the South during the four years of the Confederacy and to reflect on the theme of continuity , or lack of it" (p. viii). Thomas's essay "Reckoning with Rebels" opens the book with a brief restatement ofhis view that the war wrought great changes in the South. Highlighting the economic trends toward urbanization and industrialization , the increasing power of the central government, the questioning of old social structures, and a willingness in the end to let go ofslavery to forestall defeat, Thomas concludes that "Confederate Southerners made fundamental alterations in the institutions and ideas they had gone to...