Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (review)

216civil war history is impressive, in most instances, in analyzing the realities and perplexities facing the Lincoln administration and the free-state faction in Maryland during those crucial years before the fate of the Union and slavery were irrevocably decided. Especially vivid is Wagandt's picture of slavery in Maryland—a picture in which he portrays slave, master, and non-slaveholding conservative as victim. He paints an almost FauDmerian portrait of violence, decay, and irrational fear which dehumanized white as well as black. Possibly this explains why Wagandt is able to view the opposition of conservative unionists to emancipation with calm detachment and a higher degree of objectivity than most previous writers have been able to attain. Make no mistake, Wagandt's sympathies Ue with the Radicals; but he does not disort the position of conservatives by portraying them as "traitors," "Southern sympathizers," or "quasi-secessionists." Rather he views them as victims and captives of a dying social order who were unable to break through the walls created by fear, prejudice, and a myth of "magnolia and moon mist" that never was. Quite clearly, the editors of the Johns Hopkins Press have not exaggerated by saying that the "author's account is certain to gain acceptance among the general history of the United States"—not only for its scholarly contents, one might add, but for its lively style, which at times should create a twinkle even in the eye of Alfred A. Knopf. Richard O. Curry University of Connecticut Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. By Willie Lee Rose. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Menill Company, Inc., 1964. Pp. xviii, 442. $6.50.) On November 7, 1861, a date the slaves of the South Carolina Sea Islands were to remember as "the day of the big gun-shoot," Commodore S. F. du Pont's Union fleet sailed into Port Royal Sound and bombarded the Confederate shore batteries. The next day troops landed, and the local planters and their families fled, leaving behind some ten thousand slaves. All at once the old plantation society had come to an end, and no one knew what kind of new order was to take its place. Northern abolitionists had ideas of their own, and soon, in March, 1862, a "Gideon's Band" of more than fifty arrived, the first of several hundred antislavery missionaries who were to visit the Sea Islands before the war was over. These missionaries disagreed among themselves, and they ran into conflict with army men, with Treasury Department agents, and even with some of the leaders who rose among the Negroes. There was the issue of what to do with the abandoned lands, whether to divide them into farms and settle Negro families on them, or sell the lands to the highest bidders, including white men, or ultimately return them to their original owners. There was also the question of military service, BOOK REVIEWS217 the question of whether to draft Negro men or let them work the land, develop homes, and attend schools. Even after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, there remained a question whether the slaves were ever to be completely free, and as the war ended, the issue of political rights arose. In the course of events, many of the Negroes acquired at least an elementary education (with the aid of devoted teachers such as Laura Towne), some were given farms, and a few rose to positions of political influence and responsibility. Yet the high hopes of the missionaries and the aspirations of the erstwhile slaves were to be realized only partially and temporarily. Actually, the Port Royal experiment was a "rehearsal" for Reconstruction only in presenting problems later to be faced on a wider scale and in providing experience for some of the people who were later to deal with the problems. The wartime reconstruction of the Sea Islands produced no pattern, no set of lessons, to be applied in the postwar era in the South as a whole. Though the outlines have long been familiar, the Sea Islands story has never before been so fully and expertly told. Willie Lee Rose is at once objective and sympathetic in her treatment of both missionaries and Negroes . Her deft...