First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 voters during this period hardly constitutes an "old and often-studied debate." The chapter on race relations might have been strengthened by information on interracial athletic competition and by an account of black efforts to retain public school desegregation after 1877. More serious, however, is Blassingame's occasional failure to apply the same rigid standards of scholarship to whites that he has applied to Negroes. His discussion of the "unbridled licentiousness of the planters" seems to imply that sexual exploitation of slave women by their masters was virtually universal in Louisiana, a verdict not wholly borne out by slave narratives or other reasonably trustworthy sources. The name of Henry Clay Warmoth, reconstruction governor of Louisiana, has been repeatedly misspelled "Warmouth." In lumping State Superintendent of Education Thomas W. Conway with other white Radical politicians as "self-seeking, avaricious, power-hungry . . . white supremacists ," Blassingame has rendered a rather unfair judgment. On the whole, however, Black New Orleans is a remarkably judicious, painstaking piece of scholarship. Its forays into economic and social analysis have indeed provided new insights into the complex world of New Orleans Negroes and in the process laid to rest many erroneous assumptions and timeworn stereotypes. It could well serve as a model for students of any ethnic group in any American community . Roger A. Fischer University of Minnesota, Duluth First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction. By Peter Kolchin. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972. Pp. 215. $10.00.) This book, the author writes, deals ". . . with the structure and behavior of the Negro community itself rather than with the actions of whites toward it, and with black social patterns rather than with race relations ." (p. xv). These questions are worthy of exploration, for they have been ignored in the voluminous body of Reconstruction literature to date. Nominally an examination of the response of Alabama's blacks to emancipation and Reconstruction, Kolchin believes that his study serves as a case study for the Deep South during the turbulent postAppomattox years. Through the use of census reports, Freedmen's Bureau records, newspapers, and other public and private records, Kolchin investigates black migration patterns, labor, the family, education, churches, social structure, and the awakening of black political consciousness . The author makes no startling discoveries, but there is something for everyone in this book. Blacks neither measured freedom entirely in terms of what it was for whites nor defined it as complete independence from whites. Rather, freedom was a little of both. For those who have pointed out that blacks were leaders in the post-War efforts 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY to make freedom a reality for the former slaves, Kolchin's analysis, as example, of blacks' attempts to establish black churches free of white control is most welcomed. Kolchin argues that black family structure and mores resembled white counterparts, a conscious imitation growing out of black awareness of the responsibility that freedom conferred and a consequent desire to do the "right" thing. Perhaps one of the most rewarding chapters is that dealing with the awakening of black political consciousness. Kolchin shows that white, northern Republicans were not alone in recognizing the importance of blacks to the Republican party in the South. Blacks, soon after they were enfranchised by the Reconstruction Act in 1867, began to take active part in party politics and became more militant and demanding as they recognized their value to the party and as white party leaders attempted to relegate them to minor elective positions. This shaky coalition controlled state politics by 1870 but disintegrated later in the decade. This book is not the definitive work, but it is an excellent beginning that this reader hopes the author will soon follow up with a fuller treatment. Catherine M. Tarrant Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System . By Mark T. Carleton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 215. $8.50.) In his study of the Louisiana state penal system from its origins in the 1830's through 1968, Professor Carleton has dug beneath the institutional surface to reveal some of the complex connections between "politics and punishment," and has found more evidence of continuities than...