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48Quaker History The character of the letters has changed by 1830. Barton has apparently lost some of his need for self pushing, and, possibly by correspondence with men greater than himself, has developed his rudimentary humor and enriched his content, although his literary taste (and his own verse) has not improved. His comment on Martin Chuzzlewit is that "you could hardly throw the book aside," but "it is a harrowing, revolting, & excruciating Book." More interesting, however , are his comments on painting. His vocabulary here is more concise and telling; he collected Cotman, Constable, and Old Crome, and wrote with exclamatory marks to a friend, "Edward Fitzgerald has picked up a Titian LandscapeV.l" The reason for the greater verve of the later letters is surely that most of them were written to men from whom he had nothing to gain, and whom he saw frequently as they met about in each others' houses to talk literature and painting. In his introduction, Mr. Barcus gives a wider view of Barton's interests, especially of his Quakerism, than the literary letters in this volume show. Here one finds no great understanding of the vital issues of his time, nor of the deeper significance of his religion. Mr. Barcus tells us, however, that the other than literary letters show him interested in doctrinal questions and out of favor with the British Friend for his hetorodox opinions. Nonetheless, we close this volume with a feeling of satisfaction aroused by the record of Barton's friendship with three country men, a local parson, the crotchety son of the poet Crabbe, William Fitch, the local chemist, a man of antiquarian and collector's tastes, and Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of The Rubáiyát as well as the owner of the Titian. Their happy fellowship and their genial and witty intercourse is brought alive for us. As Barton wrote in 1845, the four friends had the habit of meeting in "clouds of tobacco smoke," having at one time "one continuous spread," "Cold Lamb . . . CucumberBread & cheese . . . Oil at that corner Vinegar & Pepper yonder—there put the jug of Cream & that glass of butter in the middle . . . Porter, Ale, Wine, Brandy, Cigars." Two years later he closed a letter to Crabbe as follows: "We are a funny set, take us all in all, whether we sing Gregorian Chants or prose it after the fashion of us Quaker folk." Moylan, PennsylvaniaElizabeth Cox Wright Dear Ones at Home: Letters from Contraband Camps. Ed. Henry L. Swint. Nashville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. 1966. 274 pages. $6.95. When President Lincoln declared all Negro slaves to be "contraband" in the war between the North and South, he created many difficult problems for both sections of our country by freeing the slaves from their bondage. They immediately became "displaced persons," and the majority of them were unable to cope with their environment in this new-found freedom. They were dependent on charity from hastily organized relief agencies in the North or from the Northern armies in the South. Book Reviews49 Although their labor was somewhat utilized of necessity by both the Southern and Northern armies after Lincoln's declaration, they became the wards of the United States Government or of organized religious and humanitarian groups. The Religious Society of Friends was especially active in these enterprises. Two daughters of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Quaker Chase family were at Craney Island, Virginia, in January of 1863. Though they had been considering offering themselves as nurses in the Union Army, their final decision was to serve as teachers and dispensers of relief, furnished by the New England Educational Commission and organizations of New England Friends. Henry L. Swint, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, has selected the letters to be used in this volume and has carefully annotated them and indexed the collection. Although Professor Swint in his Introduction writes that "not all the friends of the freedmen considered the words relief and education to be merely humanitarian effort, for to them the Civil War was the continuation of a religious crusade, a grand step toward the complete nationalization of the country ," he states definitely that the "militant concept of reform or renovation" was not what...

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