From Contraband to Freedmen: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS81 personal failure these social critics were thrust into a compensatory role as social prophets. By sharing a sense of doom the critics of the Gilded Age, both secular and ordained, came to empathize with the majority of Americans who lived in urban blight and rural squalor. It was through this process of personal agony that the reformers achieved a mutual consciousness in order to redeem America. James G. Banks Cuyahoga Community College From Contraband to Freedmen: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865. By Louis S. Gerteis. (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1973. Pp. xii, 255. $11.50.) Louis Gerteis tells a melancholy story. In tracing the evolution of Union policy toward the blacks from Benjamin Butler's acceptance of the first three "contrabands" at Fortress Monroe in May, 1861, to the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865, he finds few heroes and many victims , much disruption but no revolution. Not only was emancipation a belated and secondary Northern war aim, but, as Gerteis demonstrates, federal policy toward the former slaves deliberately maintained their subordination. The Union army wanted no part of a social and economic revolution. Moreover, the wartime decisions on the treatment, status, and employment of blacks "shaped postwar policies toward the freedmen and in large measure precluded the possibility of radical social reconstruction in the South" (p. 7). Organizing his material regionally rather than chronologically, Gerteis describes the freedmen's situation in the three main areas of federal occupation—Virginia and the Carolinas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Valley. Gerteis admits that his presentation results in some repetition, but given the complexity of the subject, his geographical approach seems sensible. Conditions for blacks were harshest in Louisiana where Generals Butler and Banks imposed a contract labor system that kept most freedmen on their old plantations in a condition of quasi-slavery and where both free blacks and black soldiers suffered frequent abuse. The freedmen in the East, especially those on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, fared better, as did some of the contrabands in the Mississippi Valley. But as Gerteis points out again and again, all freedmen's programs everywhere "remained subordinate to purely military needs" (p. 39). Union victory was the goal, the emancipation, employment, and mobilization of the blacks merely the means. The most idealistic missionaries and the most humanitarian programs bowed to military necessity. Even the noble experiments at Port Royal and Davis Bend came to naught. Of course no self-respecting nineteenth century Yankee ever held out the prospect of "idle" freedom to Southern blacks. The staunchest 82CIVIL WAR HISTORY friends of the contrabands warned them not to expect "charity." Freedom meant hard, faithful work and self-reliance. The sight of unemployed , "vagrant" contrabands horrified conservative army officers, radical Treasury agents, and humanitarian missionaries alike. The bitter War-Treasury Department struggle for control of freedmen's affairs involved details, Gerteis rightly concludes, not basic principles. Although Gerteis may underestimate the amount of social and psychological freedom the blacks achieved in spite of paternalistic and repressive federal policies, he convincingly documents the freedmen's continuing economic dependence. The real "rehearsal for Reconstruction " foreordained "the postwar emergence of tenantry and sharecropping as the principal forms of black agricultural labor in the South" (p. 154). For most Southern blacks Reconstruction failed before it began . Cam Walker College of William and Mary The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York During Reconstruction . By James C. Mohr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973; Pp. xv, 300. $12.50). Reconstruction was not a political program whose study can be limited to the South. Indeed, circumstances of its causes, course, and consequences were the result of the convergence of state interests, sectional pressures, and national politics. Events in the North were of great importance because no federal initiative could be undertaken and sustained in the former rebel states unless there was both interest and support for such efforts in the loyal states, as well as continued Republican control of the federal government. Thus, analysis of northern attitudes and actions helps to uncover the wellsprings of Republican motivation and the roots of political behavior which determined to a great extent national Reconstruction policy. With increasing realization of...