Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868 (review)

274CIVIL WAR history a railroad bridge so train passengers could strike them as they passed by. George Pickett, whose charge failed at Gettysburg, executed twenty-two members ofthe Union 2d North Carolina Infantry on desertion charges, leading to an investigation of Pickett for war crimes (which was prevented only by the intercession of his West Point classmate, General Grant). And at Fort Pillow, the well-known massacre of blacks by Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops was accompanied by the murder of 127 loyal white Tennesseans, who were shot down in cold blood. If Lincoln's record in the area of civil liberties can be criticized, the Davis government's actions, which are usually ignored, were apparently worse. During the era of Reconstruction, the sacrifices of Southern loyalists along with the contributions of black troops were quickly forgotten. Either they became Republicans, who were discredited by their cooperation with the socalled carpetbag-scalawag governments, or else they resisted Reconstruction and identified with the ex-Confederates. They no longer wished to be remembered as one-time comrades of men whom they now looked on as blackloving Yankees. It is little wonder that they became the forgotten soldiers. One final statistic is compelling. If somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred thousand Confederates fought in the Civil War, then the loyalists deprived the South of 10 percent of its manpower. In reality, this was a 20 percent deficit, since every Southerner who served the Union was a double loss. If the state's rights tendencies of the Confederacy were a significant factor in its ultimate demise, so was the presence of these armed and dedicated loyalists within its borders, as this brilliantly conceived and executed study so clearly demonstrates. Thomas R. Turner Bridgewater State College Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 18541868 . By Richard H. Abbott. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Pp. x, 294. $32.50.) Wealthy Boston businessmen such as Edward Atkinson, Amos A. Lawrence, and John Murray Forbes and other members of the Boston elite such as John A. Andrew and Edward Everett Hale would seem to be unlikely ardent reformers . But they were. As Richard H. Abbott's meticulously researched and well-written analysis makes amply clear, these men devoted a great deal of time and considerable sums of money to the antislavery cause, to agitation for the recruitment of black soldiers in the Union army, and to the enfranchisement , education, and equal protection of former slaves after the war. Nevertheless, although active and energetic reformers, they were conservatives —as Atkinson put it, "rashly conservative ofthe principle offreedom and honesty" (218). Indeed, this conservatism kindled their humanitarian hatred of slavery and injustice and motivated their reformism. But they grounded their lofty principles in very practical considerations—a fervent be- BOOK REVIEWS275 lief in a free-labor society and, more specifically, in laissez-faire economics. Uke so many Northerners, they saw no contradiction between "practical economic considerations and personal moral concerns"; rather, they considered the two as "mutually reinforcing" (5-6). If this combination of practical and moral principles led the Boston businessmen to support such reforms as the abolition of slavery, the recruitment of black troops, the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the enfranchisement of blacks, it also led them to oppose other reforms. They opposed confiscation of Rebel lands and their distribution to former slaves, and they wanted sharp limitations on the amount of aid given former slaves. The blacks, they insisted, had to be treated fairly, but they had to earn their own way, and this meant working in the fields producing the South's staple crops. Only in this way would blacks become productive free workers instead of a new self-sufficient peasantry making little contribution to the nation's wealth and providing little in the way of a market for manufactured goods. Other features of their conservative reformism stemmed from their very direct and immediate interests, putting them in conflict with some of their fellow Republicans. They opposed the Republican high-tariffpolicies and favored a quick return to hard money, justifying their position in moral terms; the tariff kept food prices for workers artificially high, and soft money gave profits to...