Of Times and Race: Essays Inspired by John F. Marszalek ed. by Michael B. Ballard and Mark R. Cheathem, and: This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North ed. by Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (review)

Of Times and Race: Essays Inspired by John F. Marszalek was written in honor of the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Mississippi State University. The authors received their PhDs under Marszalek, to whom they admiringly refer in their preface as “the cheerful assassin” (ix).

Mark. R. Cheathem begins this volume with the debt-plagued life of planter, businessman, civic leader, diplomat, politician, and 1856 American Party vice-presidential nominee Andrew Jackson Donelson. His uncle, President Jackson, who raised him after his father’s death, was “the model that Donelson would try to emulate” regarding slavery, central to his lifelong ambitions (7). Through Donelson’s various life struggles we gain insight into American expansion, white justification of slavery, the secession movement, slave life, and how the war affected the southern planter class.

Thomas D. Cockrell’s chapter studies Mississippi unionists, many of whom feared losing their slaves should the North prevail in the war but who, especially outspoken clergymen, also feared for their safety from their fellow citizens, and thus often “chose to remain silent or reluctantly gave in” (34). Some unionists joined the northern army (including twenty-five thousand African Americans); others became spies. Their lack of unity frustrated Lincoln’s dream of using them effectively.

Stephen S. Michot examines African American fighters, some of whom were slaveholders, in the Lafourche region of Louisiana, “perhaps the first official . . . black union troops in a Civil War military operation” (preceding the Massachusetts 54th, celebrated in Glory) (59). Michot describes the abuse, and danger, they endured from their fellow white soldiers. Blacks “experienced a range of bondage and freedom over the span of the Civil War,” and “witnessed the war as both civilian and soldier” (66).

The relationship between Union soldiers and southern African Americans at Vicksburg was complex, Michael B. Ballard explains, and “certainly evolved, but with many nuances” (69). Each initially viewed the other with bewilderment. Union soldiers, fighting primarily to save the Union, were not pleased with the Emancipation Proclamation, though many were appalled by the poor condition of southern blacks and the actions of slaveholders, who often classified their half-black children as slaves. Yet Union soldiers’ “violent bigotry” predominated—military leaders even “re-enslaved blacks to harvest cotton”—and thus “emancipation did not mean freedom” (76, 81, 86).

Moving to the twentieth century, Horace Nash’s research on New Mexico’s World War I–era black boxers, many of whom were veterans, shows the potential of athletics to soothe racial divisions. Black athletic achievements, made in front of large interracial crowds, became a source of pride to the minority community. Similarly, Timothy B. Smith recounts the struggles of some of the thirty thousand African American World War I veterans who, as a result of the “bonus Army,” joined the CCC during the 1930s. He examines black life at Shiloh National Military Park at two segregated camps, where blacks worked (to the dismay of local residents) and endured “the racism that existed in . . . many New Deal agencies” (122).

Revisionist historians Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody’s challenge to the Dunning School is the subject of James Scott Humphreys’s research. Their South Carolina during Reconstruction, which won a major prize from the AHA in 1932, recounted the postwar era’s many progressive successes—especially in education, black religious culture, and voting policies—but also emphasized the period’s corruption, inefficiencies, and what they saw...