Pacific Circle 2: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (review)

80CIVIL WAR HISTORY Pacific Circle 2: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association. Edited by Norman Harper. (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1972. Pp. 166.) Norman Harper's preface is a cogent statement on the legitimacy of this seemingly obscure book. Now that the United States has replaced Great Britain as a major arbiter in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand are quite rightly concerned about the emerging American role. Harper notes that both Australia and New Zealand have a vital interest in the American presence "not only from a military point of view" but also the deeper realization that its influence on the post war world has been powerful. That a mutual understanding is sought among these three countries is not only logical, but demanded. An important vehicle for this mutual understanding was the creation of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association in 1964. The American studies approach lends itself quite well to interdisciplinary sharing, and in this context to international exchanges as well. As the age of the specialist ceaselessly expands, the need for the generalist becomes even more important if for no other reason than to give meaning to our atomized and chaotic world. Of the ten articles, three relate most directly to Civil War History: "The Pastoral Ethic," by R. L. Heathcote, a geographer at Flinders University of South Australia, "Abraham Lincoln," by A. Conway of Canterbury University, New Zealand, and "The Vocation of Social Prophecy," by Allen Weinstein of Smith College. Professor Heathcote, in examining the pastoral ethic in Australia and America, concludes that even though the two countries share a similar historical and geographical experience, there was a marked difference in their approach to land tenure and differing national policies towards the range. Despite these differences, however, Heathcote adequately demonstrates that both countries harbored individuals that embraced a common "pastoral ethic." In grossly over-simplified terms, Heathcote is saying both the American and Australian cowboy are revered folk heroes while also sharing similar attitudes toward the land they exploited. Professor Conway's judicious essay on Lincoln is well worth reading as a concise survey of the Lincoln image in America. As Conway correctly observes, the stature of Lincoln in the popular mind is so noble, tied as it is to the American ethos, that to critically evaluate him is to chip away at a major pillar of the Republic. Conway is undeterred by such groundless fears, offering a readable critique rising from the "stomach turning prose" of Robert S. Harper to the higher accuracy of Frederick Douglass. Allen Weinstein's article on the social activists of the late nineteenth century is a stimulating essay centering around the shared frustrations of the reformers. He admirably demonstrates that after experiencing BOOK REVIEWS81 personal failure these social critics were thrust into a compensatory role as social prophets. By sharing a sense of doom the critics of the Gilded Age, both secular and ordained, came to empathize with the majority of Americans who lived in urban blight and rural squalor. It was through this process of personal agony that the reformers achieved a mutual consciousness in order to redeem America. James G. Banks Cuyahoga Community College From Contraband to Freedmen: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865. By Louis S. Gerteis. (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1973. Pp. xii, 255. $11.50.) Louis Gerteis tells a melancholy story. In tracing the evolution of Union policy toward the blacks from Benjamin Butler's acceptance of the first three "contrabands" at Fortress Monroe in May, 1861, to the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865, he finds few heroes and many victims , much disruption but no revolution. Not only was emancipation a belated and secondary Northern war aim, but, as Gerteis demonstrates, federal policy toward the former slaves deliberately maintained their subordination. The Union army wanted no part of a social and economic revolution. Moreover, the wartime decisions on the treatment, status, and employment of blacks "shaped postwar policies toward the freedmen and in large measure precluded the possibility of radical social reconstruction in the South" (p. 7). Organizing his material regionally rather than chronologically, Gerteis...