Slave and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox (review)

BOOK REVIEWS185 courts is too brief and fails to describe their day-to-day operations, and his treatment of the black codes and the contract system is neither original nor insightful. The author does contribute a useful account of the Bureau's attempts to protect the freedmen from the discriminatory practices of Southern law enforcement and judicial officers. Although the labor policy of the Bureau is analyzed at length, the book would have benefited from more careful attention to the recent literature on postbellum Southern agriculture. Nieman has more thoroughly examined the Bureau's headquarters and local records than any other historian. Yet his use of other sources is sketchy. For example, Nieman cited several collections at the Alabama Department of Archives and History but did not consult the important group of Wager Swayne papers which contains significant material on the Bureau in Alabama. It also seems strange that the author does not list a single Southern newspaper in his bibliography. The book is competently, though not well, written. Each chapter seemingly plods from state to state with little sense of organization. The overall contribution of this book to our knowledge of the Freedmen's Bureau is slim, and the author might have been better advised to have published his important findings from Chapters IV and V in a couple of journal articles. Reading this volume once again brings to mind that there is still a crying need for a modern and comprehensive treatment of the Bureau. George Rable Anderson College Sfove and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox. Edited by Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Pp. 247. $15.50.) In 1894-95 at the age of fifty-five, George L. Knox published his autobiography in weekly installments in the Indianapolis Freeman, the newspaper of which he was owner and publisher. Knox lived until 1927 and left no similar account ofhis later years, but the 1890's were the years when his prestige was at its height. In the autobiography, which was never published in book form, Knox, who was bom a slave in Tennessee, recounts how he "joined" the Union Army and came to Indianapolis in 1864 as thè servant of a Union officer. There he learned the barber's trade and opened his own shop in a small town nearby. In 1884 he moved to Indianapolis, where he became proprietor of barbershops which drew the color line, serving only a white clientele, but which gave employment to black barbers. In a few years he was the wealthiestbiar businessman in the city. In his shops he became acquainted with leadint white citizens, and, helped by these associations, he became the most influential black politician in the state. In 1888 he bought the Freeman and turned it into a Republican organ. Although he never held public 186CIVIL WAR HISTORY office, Knox was the only black named to the Republican state central committee. He functioned as an intermediary between the white power structure and the black community. His autobiography and the editorials in his newspaper reflect a racial and economic philosophy similar to that of Booker T. Washington, a philosophy which Knox developed and articulated before Washington's rise to power. Not surprisingly, the owner of the Indianapolis Freeman and the Tuskegee Wizard later became friends. The autobiography reveals Knox as a shrewd but vain man, impressed with his own rectitude and importance, who saw his life as a success story and himself as a kind of black Horatio Alger, but italso illuminates a variety of aspects of the black community and aspects of black-white relationships. The chief merit of this volume is found in the work of the editor. Gatewood's introduction and footnotes are the products of painstaking and meticulous research and perceptive scholarship. The introduction places Knox in the context of the times in which he lived and gives details of his life not depicted in the autobiography, including an account of the last three decades of his life. Emma Lou Thornbrough Butler University Patterns of Antishvery among American Unitarians, 1831-1860. By Douglas C. Stange. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977. Pp. 308. $15.50.) In proportion to their numbers, Unitarians...