Joe Brown's Army: The Georgia State Line, 1862-1865 (review)

284civil war history Innovation was to be the handmaiden of stability. Profits werethus to be steady rather than spectacular. The Associates werewilling to pay comparatively high wages to a female and, hopefully, docile labor force in an effort to limit the disruptive consequences of the factory system. And all of their other interlocking investments were directed primarily at insuring the health and, especially, thelong-term stability of their textile mills. Thus, they created the Suffolk Bank to provide their firms with capital; they financed the Boston and Lowell Railroad; and they used the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company as a trustee to ensure continued family control of the companies they had founded. These same values and objectives also motivated the Boston Associates ' other activities. For example, philanthropy and class self-interest went hand in hand. Thus, the Associates supported the Massachusetts General Hospital, which was to help restore the sense of community which industrial growth threatened at the same time that it provided secure, respectable medical careers for their sons who were invariably educated at Harvard, and whose governance and finances the Associates themselves dominated. After 1845, however, the security of the Associates and their class was increasingly threatened by the consequences of rapid economic growth and the slavery issue. American femalemill workers werereplaced byIrish Catholicswho personified the industrial ills which the Waltham-Lowell system had sought to avoid. Philanthropy seemed unable to tame the apparently intractable evils of Boston's Irish proletariat. And the collapse of the Whig party in Massachusetts threatened the political order which the Associates had used to protect their interests. The state's Democrats attacked the Associates' economic power at the same time that the emergent Republicans supported unrestrained economic growth which, in the Associates' view, only threatened to produce more social instability. By 1860 the Associates found diemselves uncomfortably paired with the "Slave Power" of the South as the "Money Power" of the North. Thus, in creating the innovations of the Waltham-Lowell system in order to achieve their conservative goals, the Associates in fact unwittingly unleashed forces which threatened the very interests they sought to protect. Dalzell's book is thus essential for those interested in antebellum northern business leaders and the broad social and political milieu within which they operated. Besides, it's a good read. Henry B. Leonard Kent State University Joe Brown'sArmy: The Georgia State Line, 1862-1865. By William Harris Bragg. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987. Pp. xi, 175. $25.95.) Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, whose first and deepest loyalty was to his own state, presented the Confederate government in Rich- book reviews285 mond with anumber of challenges, but surely the thorniest involved his resistance to the conscription of Georgia soldiers to serve outside the state. Thisbriefbook is the history ofa small military force, the Georgia State Line (to give its official but rarely used title), which was Brown's most lasting effort at creating a modest army exclusively for the state's own uses. The State Line grew out of two companies ofa railroad Bridge Guard, created in early 1862 to protect the state-owned Western and Atlantic Railroad in north Georgia; but its larger origins were in Brown's opposition to Confederate conscription and his conviction that the Richmond government was not prepared to defend Georgia against federal incursions . In late 1862 the legislature approved Brown's request to enlarge the railroad guards into two regiments of troops, with a strength of two thousand men. The regiments held their first musters in early 1863 and thereafter were involved in a number of military operations. They continued their railroad service and also attempted to track down deserters; in the spring of 1863, they were sent to Savannah, then to Charleston, to defend against a suspected federal assault; they saw duty with Braxton Bragg at Chattanooga and with the Army of Tennessee in the Atlanta campaign, suffering heavy casualties in 1864. In the latter phases of the war the State Line troops were engaged in defensive maneuvers after the fall of Savannah and ended up fighting in the Battle of Columbus in April, 1865. On a number of occasions Brown was willing to place these...