My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era (review)

180CIVIL WAR HISTORY in the 1880 census yield impressive evidence. She interprets the labor crises of 1877 as a sort ofpublic announcement that a new social order had emerged and all sides in Maryland recognized it. James C. Mohr University of Maryland My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civü War Era . By Jean-Charles Houzeau. Edited, with an introduction by David C. Rankin. Translated by Gerard F. Denault. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pp. xvi, 168. $20.00.) The publication of this account of events in New Orleans from 1863 through 1868 by a participant in those events, Jean-Charles Houzeau, accompanied by an extensive introduction on the life of Houzeau, is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Houzeau was a Belgian journalist and astronomer of aristocratic family, who came to the United States in 1857. His Enlightenment beliefs in progress and the importance of the environment over heredity appear in his writings and influence his actions throughout his life. Residing in Texas when the Civil War began, he made his way to Union-occupied New Orleans in 1862. He soon was writing articles for L'Union and then the Tribune, newspapers published by free persons of color in New Orleans. In November 1864, he became editor ofthe Tribune. Many who were not closely associated with the Tribune assumed that Houzeau was black, and he made no effort to indicate otherwise. He was active in two associations which helped freedmen obtain land. He supported the reconvening ofthe 1864 Louisiana constitutional convention and was present when the New Orleans riot of 1866 occurred. (A previously unknown account of the riot, written by Houzeau in a letter to his brother just six days after the riot, is reproduced in an appendix.) In the spring of 1868, Houzeau resigned as editor and went to Jamaica for several years and then returned to Belgium. He wrote several scholarly books, became director of Belgium's Royal Observatory, and eventually served as president of the Royal Academy before his death in 1888. My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune appeared in pamphlet form in 1870 and was published in the Revue de Belgique in 1872. It is Houzeau's account of his role at the Tribune and in Louisiana politics from 1863 through 1868. It has been used by a few scholars of Reconstruction in Louisiana but not by most. It is useful to have it in print and in English, so diat future scholars will have easy access to it. The footnotes include lengthy historiographical discussions on' L'Union, the Tribune, and Houzeau's pseudonyms, clearing up confusions in the literature on many details relating to each. BOOK reviews181 This book would have been strengthened by a bibliography, especially a bibliography ofworks by Houzeau. David C. Rankin displays, however, a fine command ofthe secondary literature and he has utilized the extensive Houzeau correspondence currently residing in archives in Europe. The student of the history of Louisiana, of Reconstruction, and of blacks in America will want to read this book. The general reader will also find My Passage interesting. Judith Fenner Gentry University of Southwestern Louisiana Dear Brother Walt: The Letters ofThomasJefferson Whitman. Edited by Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1984. Pp. xxxvii, 202. $27.50.) This small, well-edited book publishes all the extant letters of Walt Whitman 's younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, who gained a national reputation as a civil engineer. Ofthe 106 letters, 77 were written to Walt, the others to a friend or other members ofthe family. The title repeats Jeff Whitman's most common salutation to his brotìier. The letters span the period from 1848, when the Whitman brothers were living briefly in New Orleans, until 1889, shortly before Jeff's death in St. Louis. Although JeffWhitman commented on life in New Orleans, Brooklyn , and St. Louis, and on Civil War politics, most ofthe early letters relate to family matters and the later ones to Jeff's work as an engineer in St. Louis, where he moved in 1867 to become chief engineer of the Board of Water Commissioners. There...