A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen's Community (review)

BOOK REVIEWS181 was more disorganized by victory than was the defeated army" (pp. 138-139); "by leaving Richmond uncovered the enemy might march into the city" (p. 159); "The president's selection of the first commissioners . . . were singularly inappropriate" (p. 166). "My biography of Jefferson Davis," the author states (p. 315), "is based on manuscript sources to a much greater degree than any previous biography." The bibliography lists 59 manuscript collections in 17 different locations. Fewer than 80 of the more than 800 notes refer to manuscripts in those collections, and the citations provide little if any information that is both significant and new. The book is based primarily on Davis's published writings and on secondary works, including the author's own distinguished contributions to Southern history. This may well be the best of the Davis biographies, but there is still room for, and a need for, a much better one. Richard N. Current University of North Carolina, Greensboro A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen's Community. By Edward Magdol. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Pp. xiv, 290. $16.95.) This book is strong in details because it is based on solid research, but weak in its interpretive contribution because the author is given to schematic and tendentious argument. Magdol's central purpose is to refute Stanley Elkins's thesis of slave infantilization and lack of autonomy. Accordingly, in chapters dealing with the slave community , contraband camps during the Civil War, black leadership during Reconstruction, the quest for land, and the black village and migration movements, he argues that blacks formulated adaptive strategies by which they resisted exploitation; created an ethos of mutuality; constructed, and after emancipation reconstructed communities ; maintained a strong self-concept; asserted themselves; made decisions for themselves; profoundly desired land; and tried to change Southern society. They were unsuccessful in their attempt, but by forcing their Northern white liberal allies to adopt radical democratic principles, Magdol concludes, they "kept the democratic faith and put America in their debt" (p. 223). One hesitates to be uncharitable toward a book that takes such an eminently "correct" point of view on questions involving race, but with all due respect it must be admitted that most of what Magdol says by way of interpretation and analysis is well known. Except for a chapter showing the artisan class background of black leaders, his work is derivative at best. It is not that his conclusions are unsound, but rather that they are so familiar as to be near cliches if not 182CIVIL WAR HISTORY truisms. After all these years of criticizing Elkins is it really necessary to insist, as Magdol does, that blacks' "self-concepts arose from their independent thought processes based on their interactions with masters and employers and with slave and free artisans, laborers and others" (p. 7)? It seems faintly patronizing for Magdol to make so much of the unsurprising fact that when war disrupted plantation society and sent the masters packing, slaves took advantage of the circumstance to gain their freedom. Alert to every sign of black assertiveness and autonomy, Magdol's account also evinces the highly developed moral sensibility of a historian of the working class. Presenting the quest for land as an agrarian class conflict, Magdol with controlled reverence writes that the freedmen "were a working class of people seeking social justice" who "acted out of an understanding that they must transform the world into which they were born so that they and their children could have a better one. This was their passion" (pp. 15, 148). The most significant feature of Magdol's book is his thesis of slave self-emancipation. At the outset he states that his work is guided by the concept of slaves emancipating themselves. Although he seems to think otherwise, the meaning of this concept is not self-evident. Magdol comes closest to explaining it when he says that slaves, accustomed to deciding things for themselves, decided when the chances were good for their release from bondage and "seized the moment" (p. 16). Knowing the road to freedom was open when the masters fled, the slaves ran away and became free. If this is all that Magdol means...