The Juhl Letters to the Charleston Courier: A View of the South, 1865-1871 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 The Juhl Letters to the Charleston Courier: A View of the South, 1865-1871. Edited by John Hammond Moore. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974. Pp. vii, 391. $12.00.) The Juhl letters were written by Julius J. Fleming of Sumter, South Carolina between July 1865 and August 1871. Fleming had a varied career before the Civil War as a school teacher and principal as well as a minister, first for the Methodists and then, after a jurisdictional dispute , for the Baptists. Although only 37 when the war began, as a clergyman Fleming was exempt from military service. He remained at home and performed necessary civic functions including magistrate and deputy clerk of the courts. Because of this experience, Fleming became increasingly involved in law to such an extent that by 1880 he listed his sole occupation as lawyer. Following the war Fleming contributed these occasional pieces to the Charleston Courier describing conditions in Sumter and elsewhere in the South. Since Fleming's letters are so impressionistic any reader's views also must be. On the surface one reads of scalawags and carpetbaggers, shiftless and uppity blacks, continual bad prospects for the cotton crop, ignorant freedmen voting for corrupt legislators and all the usual ravages of a defeated but still defiant South occupied by the infamous hosts of the North. Yet one needs to penetrate beneath the surface to discover the real meaning of the Juhl letters which serve to remind us that in this age of revisionism Fleming's impressions, albeit one-sided, were the views of educated white southerners who endured the era. All the revisionist writings together would not have convinced Fleming that his views were myoptic. What is equally clear from these letters is that the southern spirit never was subdued by the war and would eventually prevail. Almost miraculously the cotton crop is planted and harvested in 1865 as are all the later crops. The southern people quickly rebuilt their lives and were but little bothered by the presence of the federal army. While the author constantly complains of idle blacks, he scarcely comments on those who worked the farms under a new form of slavery—debt peonage. Although much is made of black violence, hardly a comment is found of white. It is a lopsided picture—the picture upon which historians too long had relied, but it raises for us once again the question of myth versus reality. Fleming's most important perception was to recognize that a new South would dawn almost from the start. His future South is the "New South" of Henry W. Grady who accompanied Fleming on a tour of the mines and industries in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. As early as 1866 Fleming saw that the future success of the South would lie in a more diversified agriculture and a firm commitment to industry. Like the Redeemers of the future he too welcomed the North's capital while shunning its politics. Fleming too foresaw that the best mortar to re- 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY build the Union would be a mixture of northern capital and southern industry. Unfortunately not enough space is available in such a brief review to do justice to the rich variety of the Juhl letters such as the descriptions of Florida which Fleming recognized would become a northern haven, the dismal but valuable coal mines of Tennessee and the rich Alabama iron works which he predicts will someday surpass those of Pennsylvania. Of all the primary accounts of the period recently republished this will stand as one of the most readable and important. Edward K. Eckert St. Bonaventure University A History of Iowa. By Leland L. Sage. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1974.) Leland L. Sage, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa, has written what amounts to a political history of Iowa. Unlike certain recent histories of other states (e.g. Elwyn B. Robinson 's History of North Dakota) the Sage book is devoid of any over-all theme or interpretation of Iowa history. In the eight chapters that focus on the period from the 1840s to the turn of the twentieth century, Professor Sage covers adequately most of the...