Samuel Francis Du Pont: A Selection from his Civil War Letters (review)

170CIVIL WAR HISTORY antebellum southern cities carried over into the Confederate era, or did urban segregation lessen as a result of mushrooming population growth or the wartime movement to ameliorate the treatment of slaves? How efficient were Negro artisans? Was their labor given willingly or grudgingly, and if morale problems existed, how successfully did employers cope with them? These are admittedly difficult questions, but we need the answers if we are to understand fully the history of the Confederate Negro. In the few places where Professor Brewer makes an interpretative statement concerning morale and efficiency, he claims that most blacks worked diligently and on the whole rendered faithful service to the southern cause. He states in a footnote (fn. 20, p. 170) that the key "desertion problem" lies outside the scope of his study, but he nevertheless maintains that "there is. . . . little evidence to sustain the position that Virginia Negroes, free or slave, showed an appreciable disposition to desert or to impair the war effort." Yet considerable evidence exists that Virginia's black industrial workers did flee in sufficient numbers to damage war production. The proprietors of the Tredegar Iron Works noted in June, 1863, that "the demoralization among the negroes here and at our [blast] furnaces is a source of much disquietude to us. . . . ," and they reported near the end of the war that 1864 had been "a rather disastrous year for the hirers and owners of slaves, so many having run off to the Yankees, a large portion from within the fortifications of this city [Richmond]." Professor Brewer has worked the Tredegar Papers, so one assumes he either missed or chose to ignore these statements. The most logical explanation for the apparent willingness of many slave artisans to labor for the Confederacy would seem to be that they were not inclined to risk the loss of their improved living conditions (such as urban residence and the opportunity to earn high overtime wages) until they saw a reasonably good opportunity for successful escape. The book would have profited from an additional revision that would have tightened and clarified the writing and culled out occasional factual errors (for example, William Smith, not John Letcher, was Virginia 's governor in 1864 [p. 82]). Yet even with its flaws, Professor Brewer's monograph should be welcomed by Civil War scholars for the significant new information it provides on history of the Negro in the Confederate South. Charles B. Dew University of Missouri, Columbia Samuel Francis Du Font: A Selection from his Civil War Letters. Three Volumes. Edited by John D. Hayes. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. Pp. cxvii, 425, 553, 562. $45.00.) A few years ago this reviewer had the task of preparing the naval section of Allen Nevins, James I. Robertson and Bell I. Wiley (eds.), Civil War BOOK REVIEWS171 Books: A Critical Bibliography. One of the rather surprising discoveries was that the best, most interesting (but not necessarily the most reliable) writing was done by participants during the war rather than by formally trained historians at a later date. Any one of the thirty volumes of Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion is a better bet for either serious or casual reading than any thirty conventional books on the Civil War navies taken at random. This is not to say that reading or writing later histories or biographies is useless; after all, thirty volumes is quite a stack and anyway, modern scholarship at its best has advantages of its own. Modern scholars do have available the gleanings of more than a hundred years of their predecessors' harvests , and the advantages of the analyses by many different kinds of minds and interests. Nevertheless, there is a special thrill in reading the words of participants and in getting the sense of immediacy that they felt. Certainly Samuel Francis Du Pont: A Selection from his Civil War Letters gives these sensations. John D. Hayes, himself a retired rear admiral, carefully selected and edited letters from or to Samuel Francis Du Pont during the Civil War to make one of the truly great additions to Civil War history in recent years. In importance this work...