Swamp Water and Wiregrass: Historical Sketches of Coastal Georgia (review)

362CIVIL WAR HISTORY excitementwith eye-witness accounts of the Civil War and of life in both the Confederate and Union armies. The most interesting aspects of the recollections, however, concern the "Great Hanging" at Gainesville, Texas, wherein more than forty Unionists were hanged (lynched is a more accurate word) by Confederate supporters. Clark's father was one of the victims who did not have the benefit of real justice and whose only "crimes" appear to have been heated conversations critical of the Confederacy and what it stood for. James Lemuel's account of the Great Hanging is powerfully moving and is factually consistent with several other primary sources which outline the same story. I am somewhat versed about the events leading to the troubles in Gainesville, about the hangings themselves, and about their aftermath (see James Smallwood, "Disaffection in Confederate Texas: The Great Hanging at Gainesville," Civil War History 22 [December 1976]: 349-60). As a matter of fact, I used Clark's reminiscences in manuscript form as one of the sources from which to prepare that "Great Hanging" article and can therefore fully attest to the accuracy of the work that L. D. Clark had edited. This excellently edited volume is a noteworthy contribution to Texas and Southern history. The material on the "Great Hanging" is particularly useful. Such evidence adds much to our knowledge of Unionist sentiment in the South during the Civil War. I would recommend this book to any serious scholar or student concerned with the Civil War and/or Texas and Southern history. James Smallwood Oklahoma State University Swamp Water and Wiregrass: Historical Sketches of Coastal Georgia. By George A. Rogers and R. Frank Saunders, Jr. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984. Pp. ix, 253. $19.95.) Local and regional histories often uncover vital facts and sometimes serve as the basic building blocks of broader general works. Sometimes they challenge existing generalizations—the conventional wisdom of the historical profession. Certainly regional history is popular now, and this volume is a useful addition to the growing genre. Most of its thirteen chapters have been previously presented or published , and a majority deal with a single entity, Liberty County, an area already made famous by Robert Manson Myers's study of the elite family of the Reverend Charles Colcock Jones entitled The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War. Overlap and repetition occur, especially in the Liberty County sketches, but, overall, both the general reader and the scholar will find this volume worthwhile. The coastal region between Savannah and the mouth of the Altamaha River near Darien has long been something of a backwash within Geor- BOOK REVIEWS363 già, which developed more vigorously in the piedmont, and these separate sketches are, as the authors write, "not unified by time, character, or plot." Still, they provide revealing if brief glimpses of a region which changed slowly and often grudgingly. The early Puritan settlement of Liberty County is described clearly but adds little that is really new. Neither do chapters on the Reverend Jones's missionary efforts among the slaves and General Sherman's destructive operations in the same county. However, the sketches describing the postbellum educational efforts there by the American Missionary Association in general and Eliza Ann Ward in particular will interest many readers. The evolution of agricultural practices in Liberty County and the timeless life of the broad Altamaha River are described effectively. The sketch of early botanist Stephen Elliott is adequate as is the chapter on "tilts"—contests by antebellum and postbellum horsemen to see who was best at piercing a ring and slashing a stuffed bag with a saber. However , the chapter on the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Milien and the sketch of a rebel P.O.W. in a Yankee prison are a little thin. The best two chapters deal with Henry Ford's attempt at agricultural, medical, and educational reform at Richmond Hill in Bryan County during the 1930s and 1940s and the "Christ Craze" in Liberty County in 1889. This latter event briefly mobilized hundreds of poor blacks, mostly women, in a cult which seemed bizarre and even dangerous to established leaders, blacks as...