Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (review)

188CIVIL WAR HISTORY Confederate soldiery and their motivations for joining the war effort. He argues that both Northern and Southern soldiers enlisted forthe same sorts of reasons: excitement of the moment, adventure, protection of their way oflife, and defense oftheir perceived rights. Both sides depicted themselves as the torchbearers of the Founding Fathers and Revolutionary patriots and believed that the leaders in the other section had duped their masses into pursuing this needless war. Nevertheless, both sides had depicted their enemy as savages, a common psychological technique to lessen the guilt over killing fellow human beings . Begun in the years prior to secession and accelerating rapidlyafter the incident at Fort Sumter, this technique also fit in nicely with the soldiers' perceptions that the enemy threatened their way oflife. Defeat would result in the imposition ofthe enemy's barbaric practices, values, and institutions. Here, Mitchell is at his best. Although the author discusses a change in the mind-set ofthe Civil War soldier as the fighting extended from weeks to months and years, he does not emphasize it with the same force that Linderman does. Mitchell believes that wartime experiences toughened the men physically and psychologically . Soldiers on both sides developed a grudging respect for one another, due primarily to military prowess, and they had no use for anyone at home who was not aiding or supporting the war effort. Yet in contrast to Linderman, Mitchell sees the massive destruction ofthe South as an effort to eliminate Southern savagery and remake the South in the Northern image . Moreover, had Confederates the opportunity to destroy the North on a widespread scale, as they actually did during the invasion of Pennsylvania , they would have taken advantage of it. Unlike Linderman, Mitchell relies on a considerable number of manuscript collections to highlight his arguments, but like Linderman, he has ignored a number of important books on the Civil War written in the last seven years. Overall, though, Civil War Soldiers offers us a valuable piece of the great puzzle known as the American Civil War, and both scholars and enthusiasts should read it. Joseph T. Glatthaar University of Houston Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterprelation. By Richard Nelson Current. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 475. $24.95.) At the age of seventy-six, Richard Current has just published his sixteenth book, an impressive study often ofthe most important carpetbaggers in the Reconstruction South. This remarkable output includes four biographies of major national statesmen (Henry Stimson, Thaddeus Stevens, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun) as well as three studies ofvarious aspects of the history of the BOOK REVIEWS189 state ofWisconsin. But the main focus ofCurrent's scholarship has been on two subjects in the period of Civil War and Reconstruction—Abraham Lincoln and the carpetbaggers. Current's interest in the carpetbaggers has developed in the years since 1966 when he moved to the University ofNorth Carolina at Greensboro, remaining there until his retirement in the early 1980s. Originally he had planned a collective biography of the several hundred Northerners who held office under the new Republican party that had arisen in the South as a result of Reconstruction. But he did not pursue this approach. Perhaps it proved too massive, if not impossible, an undertaking , or perhaps dealing with a group in the aggregate was uncongenial to a historian whose skill lay in writing narrative and whose fascination has evidently been with biography and the role of the individual in history. At any rate, his study of the carpetbaggers assumed a different shape. First, there was a seminal article, "Carpetbaggers Reconsidered" (1964), that reinterpretated the prevailing Dunningite stereotype of them as lowborn and self-serving men, bent on public plunder. Then, in 1968, he published case studies of Three Carpetbag Governors—Henry C. Warmoth of Louisiana , Adelbert Ames of Mississippi and Harrison Reed of Florida. Finally , with Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation, there appeared a full-scale study of the most influential and interesting among the group, including the three governors. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers is an account ofthe Reconstruction experiences often youngish Northerners who, after military service or wartime governmental assignments in the South, decided to make a new start for themselves by staying...