Three Carpetbag Governors (review)

book reviews275 clearly delineated. Nugent also displays a tendency to avoid hard problems and to gloss over insufficient evidence by resort to platitudes. Readers are frequently told of reactions by "the people" (pp. 36, 53, 59) without receiving a clear or precise indication as to whom is being discussed. Nevertheless, this is a provocative little book. If the author's main purpose was to stimulate discussion he has partially succeeded. The volume makes a contribution to the revisionist view of the Gilded Age which seeks to reexamine the period in greater depth. Perhaps it was an era characterized by political corruption, materialism and artificiality; but it was also an age of great intellectual ferment and of great political and economic experimentation. Nugent's volume not only helps to convey a little of that sense of excitement that was a feature of the times. In addition, he provides us with some new insights useful to an understanding of the money question in post-Civil War America. Gerald D. Nash University of New Mexico Three Carpetbag Governors. By Richard N. Current. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Pp. xii, 108. $3.75.) This is a small, brief book—only ninety-eight pages of printed text—a ten page bibliographical note and no index. But it is a good book. In his three brief chapters—the Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University in 1966— Professor Current brings to bear data which obliterates a number of myths about reconstruction government in the Soudi. This will be even a quite influential book, a significant addition to the revisionist literature and a worthy member of the seminal Fleming Lecture Series in Southern History. In this volume Current's task is to examine in three case studies one of the most precious of the reconstruction myths of the Dunningite orthodoxy— the despicable carpetbag governor. By tracing the careers of three of the ten such governors—Harrison Reed of Florida, Henry Clay Warmoth of Louisiana and Adelbert Ames of Mississippi—the author presents a sympathetic and on die whole convincing picture of three very different individuals caught in quite different situations. Clearly, the glib generalizations which depict carpetbag governors as persons of a single type must be laid aside. Not diat Current's research here is exhaustive. It is not. But these three brief case studies tell sufficiendy different stories that accepted generalizations must be reconsidered. Some question might be raised concerning how typical the three governors selected were. The author does make note of the seven otiier carpetbag governors whose careers he might have traced, but he does not make a wholly convincing case for die selection of "his three." Certainly Warmoth is well enough known and has been so broadly vilified diat no argument should be raised against his inclusion. However, Professor Current overlooks a most fascinating yet revealing figure in the well-educated, enigmatic Daniel H. Chamberlain of South Carolina. And Rufus B. Bullock of 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY Georgia, though born and educated in New York, is apparendy considered a scalawag because he served with the Confederacy, and thus is not a candidate for being a carpetbagger. But the book's main point is well made. And it effectively lays the groundwork for a further and more careful study of political carpetbaggerism . It is a frankly exploratory and suggestive volume, not a definitive one. The tiiree governors chosen are indeed different people, and Professor Current convincingly lays to rest a number of myths about reconstruction: that all carpetbaggers were associated with waste; that all carpetbaggers appealed to the Negro vote; that all carpetbaggers were helped by Federal bayonets; and that carpetbaggers were rootless wanderers who never identified with the Soudi. Teachers will find this volume a useful and well written tool to introduce students to the wilderness of reconstruction historiography. Current's three governors come across as real figures stripped of myüiical caricature. Richard B. Drake Berea College Georgia Voices: A Documentary History to 1872. By Spencer B. King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 370. $6.95.) Almost every compiler of a book of readings finds himself faced with the question of what approach to use: whether to put...