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BOOK REVIEWS281 by an ex-abolitionist and a Republican officeholder. Their hostility built a wall around North. After three years of effort to pierce it, he gave up and departed for California, where in more congenial surroundings he founded two more colonies (at Riverside and Oleander) before his death. The Tennessee episode—which covers only thirty pages of this book—is the portion of greatest interest to Civil War historians. It illustrates Stonehouse 's contention that the carpetbaggers, so-called, were not "evil opportunists peculiar to one time and place." Rather, their descent on Dixie was "a westward movement, temporarily diverted southward," inspired not only by the yen for profit, but by the "evangelical humanism that flourished in the English-speaking world, save only in the slave-holding South." But the South would have no part of a program for regenerating mankind in schoolhouse and factory if it came from "outsiders," and especially outsiders who rejected the code of absolute white supremacy. The carpetbaggers were defeated in the end—their tragedy, but the South's as well. Stonehouse's study is well worth reading, though it is fussily crowded with extraneous detail, and written in a style only intermittently free of dullness. (The book needed a heavier editorial hand than it got, and someone should tell the author that sarcasm is no substitute for real wit.) For what emerges from the manuscripts at the Henry Huntington Library is a richly human figure. Perennially optimistic, ceaselessly promoting, forever indebted but undaunted, North is a Beriah Sellers with a Methodist conscience , a grand combination of do-gooder and pitchman. He comes across as a nineteenth-century American whose like we should better understand, if we would know ourselves, for it is the conflict between his ldnd of mentality , which we have inherited, and contemporary reality in all its bitterness that racks the current national psyche. Bernard A. Weisberger University of Rochester White Protestantism and the Negro. By David M. Reimers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. ix, 236. $5.00.) As the tide implies, David M. Reimers surveys the problem that the Negro posed for American Protestant churches. He first discusses the splitting of the various Protestant denominations over the moral question of slavery in the antebellum period, then moves on to illustrate how the churches wresded with the question of accepting the Christian freedmen in the postwar era. Segregation was the rather prompt answer of the southerners, and while the northerners hesitated a bit, they too accepted segregation. This device remained, virtually unquestioned, as the solution to the race problem in Protestant churches until the second decade of the twentieth century. Then, in the 1920's and 1930's a timid series of interracial movements represented a questioning of the segregation policy, but little more. In the 1940's Protestant churches opened an attack on segregation , largely verbal, occasionally practiced. By the 1950's and early 282CIVIL WAR HISTORY 1960's Protestant leadership had become pretty well integrated, but more often than not this did not extend to the congregations. The movement toward interracialism since World War II, within individual churches, met with most success in the North and West, practically none in the South. Among Reimers' conclusions are first, the obvious one that "fundamental to an understanding of the race problem in Protestantism is the fact that the churches are social institutions that are shaped by the culture in which they exist," and second, "it is difficult to assess the role of theology as a factor in the history of race relations" (was it theology or regional mores that was the more important, he asks). This reader rather suspected that environment might shape church policy, but at the same time was disappointed at the author's failure to venture a very positive opinion on the second point. One must infer from the author's tone that he disapproved of the way American Protestants handled the whole matter of race. Emphasis is placed upon the Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Baptists, with much less attention to other sects. With his focus on Protestantism, the author neglects the influence of non-church groups on church affairs, most notably the N.A.A...

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