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324CIVIL WAB HISTOBT ship. Specifically: Mobile, Alabama, is not on the Black Warrior River; the mountain people in I860 had not resisted lowland domination "often with armed violence" for a hundred years; not all southern secession conventions had strong anti-secession minorities; many antislavery societies did not exist in the 1860 South (although Beats is correct in holding that originally the movement was strongest in the South); there is no authentication of a pro-Union secession convention in northwestern Alabama; the correct spelling is Marion not Marin County, Alabama; the counties which formed West Virginia did not pay a majority of Virginia's taxes in I860; generally Mississippi Presbyterians were not more pro-Union than their fellow religionists ; it is untrue that southern slaves refrained from wartime uprisings "because so many troops were always present"; it is doubtful that before the war most slaves "were dressed in rags" and "lived in the filthiest hovels"; as wartime cotton cultivation diminished, the average planter did not kick his slaves off the land; Bacon's Rebellion occurred in 1676 not 1675; Hugh Thomas Letter's name is not spelled Leffer. Beals's stated purpose is to remove "the veil" that has shrouded "the real Southern heroes," the pro-Union, anti-Confederate men of the seceded states. Yet he finds little to applaud in the "conspiracy," "revolution," and "act of war" by which they created West Virginia. He assumes that "Northern conquest halted, or at least distorted, an inevitable social process" (i.e., the dominance of non-slaveholders), an opinion rejected by the best contemporary scholarship. Moreover, he castigates Reconstruction, confusing the process itself with Redemption and failing to realize the significant role played by bis heroes in the anti-Negro movements. Hugh C. Bailey Howard College Mask for Treason: The Lincoln Murder Trial. By Vaughan Shelton. (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1965. Pp. 480. $14.95.) Here is another weary "web of conspiracy" whodunit. It is no more illuminating , reliable, or useful than those which have preceded it, except perhaps that instructors in historical method may employ Mask for Treason as a rich source of horrible examples. Consider, as one instance of the author's technique and standards, the description of the scene in the War Department where Edwin M. Stanton asked Lincoln not to go to "the" theatre. Unverifiable and undocumentable processes take Mr. Shelton at once to the conclusion that this was a gambit on Stanton's part: "... a neat bit of negative psychology that made Lincoln determined to go." I suppose that as Stanton's biographer I should be grateful that Mask takes him off the major conspiratorial hook where the late Dr. Otto Eisenschiml mistakenly placed him, to substitute no more convincingly Lafayette Baker. But it is all nonsense. So many basic historical facts are incorrect in Mask that the structure lacks any firm foundation. As an example, the BOOK BEVIEWS325 author describes the North of early 1865 as suffering a military despotism. Yet in November, 1864, the United States for the first time in recorded history offered the world the example of a nation involved in civil war holding free elections that the party in power might weU have lost which would have meant victory for the Confederacy. Even Great Britain in World War ? suspended elections. The mid-nineteenth century European world was expert in authoritarian regimes. No onlooker there, and except for Copperheads no commentator here, mistook the internal security processes of Lincoln's administration for a dictatorship. Mr. Shelton also does not know, or if he has read them does not understand , the accumulating réévaluations of Lincoln's wartime reconstruction policies. He is abysmally unacquainted with or in gross error about the personal and administrative relationships that obtained between Lincoln, several cabinet officers, and the second echelon of war-emergency officialdom including Baker. The whole story of the assassination, minus the conspiracy excrescences, was recently far better told by the article by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip H. Kunhardt Jr., in American Heritage (April, 1965). The real point is that Mask for Treason is a "non-book," not a serious historical inquiry. After reading it (not an easy task considering the turgid prose and shock subtitles...

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