New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (review)

BOOK RENTEWS181 Graf of the University ofTennessee, whose thirty-year tenure as director of the Andrew Johnson Papers Project ends with the present volume and a forthcoming supplementary book entitled Advice AfterAppomattox: Reports forAndrew Johnson, 1865-66. His has been, like Johnson's military governorship of Tennessee, a difficult task, and a task done well. Albert Castel Western Michigan University New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp. Edited by Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish . (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Pp. 206. $19.00.) Few living historians have contributed as much as Kenneth M. Stampp has to the revision ofthehistory of slavery and race in America from the antebellum era through Reconstruction. Eleven of his former students have honored him with a collection of essays offering new perspectives on race and slavery in America. In a thoughtful introduction, Robert H. Abzug comments on the breadth of vision in Stampp's work and his sense of the tragic and the epic in American history. Whatever the subject of individual essays in the volume, each shows a spirit of inquiry and an effort to relate its topic to the consideration of racial issues—hallmarks of Stampp's work. The essays are grouped into four sections that deal with slavery in the South, race and slavery in antebellum northern politics, Civil War and Reconstruction , and the post-Reconstruction era. In the section on slavery, Robert McColley reexamines the initial period of slavery in Virginia by considering the language used to describe servitude with racial distinctions. William W. Freehling explores the complexity of master-slave relationships with an analysis of the Denmark Vesey slave insurrection plot and the trials of its participants. Considering the antebellum North, Stephen E. Maizlish and William Gienapp reexamine political rhetoric of Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Maizlish argues that in the 1850s Democratic politicians used race-baiting techniques only selectively and during crises rather than regularly as they did later. Gienapp maintains that the slave power conspiracy argument was central to the sectional appeal of the Republican party in the 1850s. For the Civil War and Reconstruction, Reid Mitchell studies the consciousness and culture of average Confederate soldiers and the legacies of their wartime loyalties in the postwar era. In considering the gains made by newly emancipated blacks, Leon Litwack sensitively describes the black ordeal of freedom from the Reconstruction era into the twentieth century. Reexamining Grant and freedmen, Arthur Zilversmit argues, contrary to Grant's most recent biographer, that Grant tried to do more for freedmen than historians have previously acknowledged. 182CIVIL WAR HISTORY In noting the continuity of the past into the present, James Oakes observes ironically that emancipation strengthened the political position of the planters in relation to the yeomen in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South. Moreover, the work of certain Progressive historians helped the process. For the South of the Second Reconstruction, John G. Sproat presents a fresh interpretation of white moderates in accommodation to desegregation in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s. To conclude the volume, Joel Williamson pens a thoughtful essay that ranges over a variety of themes in modern southern culture to lament the South's failure to reconstruct itself as a holistic entity following emancipation. These essays have tackled thorny questions in innovative ways, often seriously challenging previously established interpretations. In so doing, the authors have not settled issues but they have opened new channels for further discussion of race and slavery in America. Thus they provide a worthy tribute to Kenneth Stampp who, as much as anyone, realizes the crucial place of revision in the work of historians. Harriet E. Amos University of Alabama at Birmingham The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV. Defending the Union: The CivilWar and the Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863 . Edited by Jane Turner Censer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pp. xxv, 757. $40.00.) Volume IV of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted brings the career of the antislavery writer and landscape architect up through the midpoint of the Civil War. A majority of the letters, reports and journal entries concern Olmsted's work as Executive Secretary of the Sanitary...