Georgia Voices: A Documentary History to 1872 (review)

276CIVIL WAR HISTORY Georgia, though born and educated in New York, is apparendy considered a scalawag because he served with the Confederacy, and thus is not a candidate for being a carpetbagger. But the book's main point is well made. And it effectively lays the groundwork for a further and more careful study of political carpetbaggerism . It is a frankly exploratory and suggestive volume, not a definitive one. The tiiree governors chosen are indeed different people, and Professor Current convincingly lays to rest a number of myths about reconstruction: that all carpetbaggers were associated with waste; that all carpetbaggers appealed to the Negro vote; that all carpetbaggers were helped by Federal bayonets; and that carpetbaggers were rootless wanderers who never identified with the Soudi. Teachers will find this volume a useful and well written tool to introduce students to the wilderness of reconstruction historiography. Current's three governors come across as real figures stripped of myüiical caricature. Richard B. Drake Berea College Georgia Voices: A Documentary History to 1872. By Spencer B. King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 370. $6.95.) Almost every compiler of a book of readings finds himself faced with the question of what approach to use: whether to put together a volume whose selections are few yet lengthy to gain depth, or one whose excerpts are numerous and short in order to gain breadth and variety. In this present volume Professor King, chairman of the department of history and government at Mercer University, has elected to do the latter. Comprised of thirteen chapters, the book has well over three hundred and fifty selections, the great majority of which run to no more than one or two paragraphs in lengtii. Drawn from official records, newspapers, travelers' observations, memoirs, letters, sermons and the like, they present a comprehensive view of Georgia from the time it was under Spanish claim through the close of Reconstruction in the state in 1872. The results are curiously mixed. On the one hand the editor has excelled in his choice of documents to illustrate the multi-colored nature of life and society in Georgia during its three centuries of existence. We see it as one of the most loyal of the English colonies and as one of the most reluctant to raise the sword of rebellion against the mother country; as a battleground during the Revolutionary War; and as an active participant in forming the new Union. We learn also of the varied nature of life in the state during antebellum times: of the status and treatment of Indians in the state; of "politics and pistols" among the gentry of the day; of agriculture and Negro slavery; of literature, religion, and education; and of such things as the primitive condition of taverns and inns. Yet the whole, somehow, does not equal the sum of its parts. There is, for one diing, the unattractive format. Besides being dull and unimaginative, book reviews277 it tends also to be confusing through its failure, in typography, to distinguish more clearly between the editorial introductions and the selections themselves . In addition, the excerpts, the compiler's comments, and the subheadings within each chapter are so numerous that the narrative assumes a considerable disjointedness. It is difficult for the reader to gain any real sense of unity from the whole of die work. More serious is the point of view occasionally expressed by the editor. This reviewer, for example, cannot but question die propriety of terming the state's involvement in the Civil War as "Georgia's Second War for Independence," if by that term Professor King is implying a parallel between the conflict of die 1860's and the Revolutionary War. Even more unsettling is what he has to say about the freedmen of the reconstruction era. At one point he quotes C. Mildred Thompson to the effect that 'Vagrancy and loafing" were "natural reactions" among the Negroes when "the restraint of slavery was removed" (though noting that Miss Thompson, in turn, was quoting from the New York Times) . At anodier he cites a passage from Bret Harte (who was on a lecture tour in 1874), as perhaps "the best characterization of...