Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS75 also noted the presence of large proportions of unchurched voters. There has also been skepticism of the contention that voters can be as neatly pigeon-holed into ritualists or pietists (or equivalent categories) as some writing has suggested. There is a basis of fact in such contentions but most are in some degree answerable. Kleppner's response to the criticisms of recent electoral history is both implicit and explicit. Qualifications appear recurrently in his narrative. But when he addresses the critics directly, he is ungenerous, perhaps even arrogant. They have misread his work along with that of Benson, Samuel P. Hays, Jensen and Formisano and falsely proclaimed the existence of an "ethno-cultural" school or model. "Observers," he maintains, "have perpetuated in the literature a figment of their own imaginations" (p. 359). Although the nature and tone of Kleppner's response is unfortunate, this is an impressive book; every American political historian will have to come to grips with it. At the same time, it will leave unresolved questions in the minds of some readers. Does it satisfactorily answer earlier criticisms? At what point does the growing list of exceptions to the pietist-ritualist schema render that particular aspect of electoral analysis unrewarding? And if the exceptions are shrugged off, is not Melvyn Hammarberg's suggestion that the political agreement within religious groups reflects their significance as communication networks rather than specific doctrinal positions worthy of more serious consideration? Although this book is ostensibly based on massive quantitative analysis, assertion is often substituted for quantitative evidence and the quantitative exhibits in the book are sometimes unsatisfying. One does not find extended time series here showing election by election changes in the partisan allegiance of key religious groups nor extended analysis of their specific contribution to party voting totals. The author's use of longitudinal means is sometimes frustrating and categories of illustrative counties selected for presentation appear to represent relatively small proportions of the electoral universe. Although the author maintains that he has been misunderstood in the past, some of his prose may suggest that diis was inevitable. But in the final analysis, this book is a major contribution to the revolution that its author, along with many others, has worked in our understanding of American electoral history. We can never return with any sense of satisfaction to the standards or analytical style that prevailed among political historians during the 1940's and 1950's. Allan G. Bogue University of Wisconsin— Madison Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862-1865. By William M. Messner. (Lafayette, La.: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1978. Pp. xvi, 206. Paper, $6.00.) This is a study of how Yankee occupiers sought to emulate Southern 76CIVIL WAR HISTORY efficiency. "Slavery," writes Messner, "at least in theory, had been predicated upon die stability which it imposed uponworkers." What the generals of the Union army sought to impose on Louisiana was an orderly and prosperous economy, but the problem, in practice, was that those workers werenot altogether happy about their workingconditions and started looking for better ones. "Given General Butler's stated policy of maintaining civil order and attracting local propertied interests to the Unionist cause, the necessary corollary was to stem the tide of black migration into Federal lines." When his exclusion orders failed (to Butler's secret delight, one guesses) and once deportation was ruled out, 80,000 people in Louisiana were slaves no more. But if not slaves, what kind of workers were they? Nathaniel P. Banks, Butler's successor, was determined to have "an efficient plantation labor program" and, to the horror of Northern abolitionists as well as local laborers, ordered the contrabands back to work on the plantations. Meanwhile, by making Louisiana an exception, the Emancipation Proclamation embarrassingly restored these people to slavery. Even Banks knew that restoration could not be enforced; instead, as Willemina Kloosterboer has observed in her study of emancipated peoples world-wide, die vagrancy principle was invoked, and black freedmen, as drifters, were assigned, under the law, to involuntary labor. The workers protested and so did some of their white friends, most notably Thomas Conway, who is given insufficient credit for learning from his experiences...