Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (review)

book reviews179 condensed, clear, and evenhanded summary of a particular campaign would do well to consult this volume. Given Simpson's own research interests, it is not surprising that there is much attention given to Ulysses S. Grant and that Confederate strategy is sometimes given rather short shrift. Yet the general focus on Northern initiatives with some attention to the Confederate responses drives the narrative forward. Included are enough quotations, anecdotes, and details— albeit most ofthem familiar to readers of this journal—to keep the story moving. Books like this can become too predictable or too idiosyncratic, but Simpson generally avoids these extremes. He refuses, for instance, to exaggerate the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and also avoids oversimplifying wartime diplomacy. He also nicely weaves questions of labor policy into a discussion of AfricanAmerican soldiers. In one ofthe most provocative sections ofthe book, Simpson downplays the Battle of Gettysburg as a turning point in the war and then proceeds to argue persuasively that 1864 was in many respects the most important year of the conflict. The chapter on the homefront includes a briefbut useful discussion ofthe role played by newspapers, illustrated weeklies, letters, and photographs in conveying news, opinion, and emotion. Simpson pays considerable attention to wartime Reconstruction and in several instances questions or qualifies various neorevisionist arguments on the growing "radicalism" of Lincoln's policies. To some degree his attention to the homefront and social history is grudging because he concludes that the North's superior political and military leadership ultimately decided the outcome. A twelve-page bibliographical essay, including both classic works and the most recent scholarship, serves as a brief and helpful guide to a voluminous literature. America's Civil War will be a useful supplemental reading in survey courses and a solid short text for courses on the war itself. Occupying an important niche between the single-chapter accounts of the American history textbooks and the much longer single-volume treatments by James McPherson and Peter Parish, Simpson's book admirably fulfills the goals of Harlan Davidson's American History Series. Anderson University George C. Rabie Delia Websterand the UndergroundRailroad. By Randolph Paul Runyon. (Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Pp. x, 259. $29.95.) DeUa Webster, a Vermont-bom, Oberlin-educated schoolteacher at a female academy in Lexington, Kentucky, first achieved public attention when she was arrested in September 1844 for assisting Calvin Fairbank, a visiting minister, to spirit slaves Lewis Hayden and his family across the Ohio River to freedom. Protesting her total innocence in publications during her trial and later incarceration in the Kentucky Penitentiary, she denied any link to abolitionists. Pardoned in 1845, sne explained away her denials and in 1849 moved to Madison, i8oCIVIL war history Indiana, an attractive location for crossing the Ohio surreptitiously. There she taught the children of Newton Craig, the keeper of the Kentucky Penitentiary who had become infatuated with her. Acquiring land across the river in Kentucky in 1 854 with the help of a sizable loan from Craig, she set up a free labor farm that her neighbors quickly concluded was being used for slave escapes. The controversy eventually caused a break with Craig as well as numerous acts of vandalism that led to the abandonment of the farm. Failing to establish a school on the property even during Reconstruction, Webster finally moved from the area. She eventuaUy died at the home of a niece, the first female graduate of the medical school of the University of Iowa, in 1904. Because her deceptions have left a confusing trail, historians have largely ignored Webster. Even her aboUtionist contemporaries preferred the more outspoken and martyred John Brown to symboUze the war against slavery in the borderland. Attracted to Webster's unusual story, however, Randolph Paul Runyon, a Kentucky resident whose field is French literature, has undertaken to clear up what Webster and her associates really felt and did. Pursuing every shred of documentary evidence, he has assembled a credible account. His assessment of contradictory sources is superb and his background in literature proves useful in careful textual analyses of the ways in which Webster presented herself to others. He estabUshes, for example, that a letterWebster wrote...