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280CI VIL WAR HISTORY past five years have rendered the concept of that adjective inapplicable to Civil War studies—however, the average reader will find it worthwhile. James E. Sefton San Fernando Valley State College John Wesley North and the Reform Frontier. By Merlin Stonehouse. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Pp. xiii, 272, $6.00.) He bore the name of Methodism's founder, and in his own eyes he was a faithful servant of God throughout a busy lifetime. The lifetime embraced a touch of school teaching, a bit of law, and an infinite quantity of land speculation, townsite developing, and promotion of enterprises as varied as sawmills and universities. Frequent debts and bankruptcies, and occasional warm seasons of profit were part of the pattern, too. To John Wesley North these things of the world were as holy as sacrifices, intonations , hymns, and sermons. For God blessed the American diligent in his calling, and whosoever made the nation thrive, at 5 or 10 per cent profitespecially when part of the profit was cast into the enterprises pleasing to God, such as temperance and antislavery societies, lyceums, newspapers, and the Republican party—truly, that man was about his Father's business. Thus lived John W. North for the first half century of his span. Bom in 1815 in upstate New York, he was a lawyer-abolitionist who, at thirtyfive , answered the westward urge in the blood and went to Minnesota. There he helped found Minneapolis, Northfield, and Faribault; the University of Minnesota; at least one railroad; and the Republican organization of the state. In 1861 he took his reward from Lincoln in the shape of an appointment as surveyor general of Nevada Territory; it was time to build anew, and leave old debts and quarrels behind. He became a judge, chairman of the constitutional convention of Nevada, an owner of mining stock and a quartz mill, among other properties and ventures. But in 1865, it seemed time to move again. And then, lo, the incomprehensible! This time North sought fresh woods and pastures new in defeated Tennessee. But somehow, the magic of advancement did not work as well. He had an iron foundry in Knoxville; he became an investor in, and part manager of, a turnpike company and a railroad; and he valorously promoted scheme after scheme to attract immigrants and capital to Tennessee. Yet he was boycotted, politically castigated , and lived in the chill of public disfavor. And the reason was, perhaps, that his public utterances revealed the attitude which he expressed privately by letter: "I have thought that after the war is over, I might aid a little in restoring the bloom and prosperity as well as the good society and good institutions to those portions that have been desolated by the war . . . to build Schools, and Churches, and factories to bless the people who are already there." There was the rub! The people of Tennessee did not want to be "blessed" BOOK REVIEWS281 by an ex-abolitionist and a Republican officeholder. Their hostility built a wall around North. After three years of effort to pierce it, he gave up and departed for California, where in more congenial surroundings he founded two more colonies (at Riverside and Oleander) before his death. The Tennessee episode—which covers only thirty pages of this book—is the portion of greatest interest to Civil War historians. It illustrates Stonehouse 's contention that the carpetbaggers, so-called, were not "evil opportunists peculiar to one time and place." Rather, their descent on Dixie was "a westward movement, temporarily diverted southward," inspired not only by the yen for profit, but by the "evangelical humanism that flourished in the English-speaking world, save only in the slave-holding South." But the South would have no part of a program for regenerating mankind in schoolhouse and factory if it came from "outsiders," and especially outsiders who rejected the code of absolute white supremacy. The carpetbaggers were defeated in the end—their tragedy, but the South's as well. Stonehouse's study is well worth reading, though it is fussily crowded with extraneous detail, and written in a style only intermittently free of dullness. (The book needed a...

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