Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (review)

268CIVIL WAR HISTORY Shves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana. By C. Peter Ripley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Pp. 237. $10.95.) W. E. B. DuBois once termed Radical Reconstruction a "splendid failure." According to C. Peter Ripley's Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana, Radical Reconstruction never showed such promise. Ripley, a Lecturer in Afro-American History at Yale, argues that the future of Reconstruction had already been shaped by Federal policies initiated during the war. In wartime Louisiana Federal agencies mediated social and economic relations, administered labor contracts and supervised freedmen courts, all predating the work of the Freedmen's Bureau. Ripley also maintains that the policy evolving in Louisiana between 1862 and 1865 would be "as much a determinant of subsequent Reconstruction policy as was the Rehearsal for Reconstruction in the Sea Islands of South Carolina ." The state became a testing ground for Lincoln's conservative program of Reconstruction. Designed to woo support from native white planters, wartime policy was formulated to keep Louisiana blacks on the plantations where they could more easily be controlled. By Christmas, 1865, Ripley suggests, many of the post war issues vital to the state's black population had been determined . Their economic future, for example, "held little more than annual labor contracts, sharecropping, plantation stores, and debt peonage." Ripley's major contribution, therefore, has been to systematically document the continuity between the war period and Reconstruction . His most persuasive and creative chapter, published earlier in The Journal of Southern History, deals with the black family. Using certificates of marriages performed in Union-occupied Concordia Parish in late 1864 and early 1865, he demonstrates the strength and vitality of the slave family. Most of the slave marriages had lasted until death or force terminated them. Ripley avoids the pitfall of attributing such strength in the black family to a benevolent slavery. Although Ripley makes a strong argument for continuity between the war period and Reconstruction, he tends to exaggerate continuity and ignore change. Radical Reconstruction, influenced by Federal policy during the war, did not bring real freedom to blacks. But it did propose to establish a process, the suffrage and black participation in government, through which the former slaves might eventually have achieved full freedom. Had Radical Reconstruction succeeded, the emergence of a really "New South," which we are now witnessing, might have occurred decades earlier. BOOK REVIEWS269 DuBois was correct in describing Radical Reconstruction as a "splendid failure." Edmund L. Draco The College of Charleston Confederate Arkansas: The People and Policies of a Frontier State in Wartime. By Michael B. Dougan. (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1976. Pp. vii, 165. $8.50.) There must be something anomalous about a review of a book about Confederate Arkansas when the reviewer is an unreconstructed Texas historian whose one Civil War ancestor gloried to the end of his days in recollections of how thoroughly his regiment sacked Arkansas during that conflict. Then again, such irregularities dot the wartime chronicle of a southern state whose people by a large majority supported neither side in the greatest war in American history . Like neighboring Texas, Arkansas was dominated by factions of the Democratic party in the ante-bellum period. The party leaders who ruled the state were known as "the Family," and were bound by ties of friendship and kinship. Only one Whig from Arkansas ever held national office, while none was elected on the state level. Democratic political rule was complicated by an exaggerated localism between the small farm northern and plantation-slave southern areas of Arkansas. Added to this confusion was a personal factionalism of non-Family Democrats, who were loosely grouped and labeled "the Opposition." Under the leadership of Thomas C. Hindman, then Henry M. Rector, the Opposition secured the governorship with the election of the latter in 1860. Dougan sees Union sentiment as a crucial factor in Rector's victory, although the new governor soon became a secessionist leader. The politics of the secession era were more confused than before; Arkansas sent four separate delegations to the Democratic conventions, voted for Breckinridge, seized federal installations and arms, and refused to secede until after the firing on Fort Sumter...