In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS281 black Americans who settled in Liberia between 1820 and 1861 as benficiaries of the American Colonization Society. This collection consists of 273 letters written from Liberia by former slaves. While some of these were written to officials of the American Colonization Society, readers will likely be interested most in those written to former owners and members of owners' families. The former slaves who wrote these letters were, as Wiley freely admitted in his introduction, "unrepresentative" (p. 8) of slaves as a class. Nearly all blacks who migrated to Liberia had been house servants, artisans , or recipients of various sorts of preferred status and treatment. As such, they reflected a level of learning, religious interest, and affection for their former masters which the field hand neither possessed nor could be expected to have. Thus, the sentiments expressed in these letters cannot be said to reflect accurately the feelings of all those kept in slavery, and Wiley did not intend that they be so taken. But they are an exhaustive and comprehensive account of virtually all that is known about how these transplanted Afro-Americans lived and thought as they adjusted to life on the continent of their ancestors. Every known extant letter written from Liberia to a former owner is contained in this volume. Thus, the mere encyclopedic nature of this work is staggering. Wiley grouped the letters in chapters, with each chapter containing letters written by former slaves who belonged to a particular family. Surely the best known of these was the Robert E. Lee family, which manumitted most of its slaves prior to the Civil War. One such black family, William C. and Rosabella Burke and their four children, emigrated to Liberia in 1853. Their affection for their former owners was especially manifest in 1858 when they named an infant daughter Martha Custis Lee Burke (p. 189). This volume is typical of the excellent scholarship forwhichProfessor Wiley was so noted. While many of the letters are somewhatrepetitive in their content, likely causing some readers to think that they might have been better treated in an article or a shorter book, the comprehensiveness of this work surely vitiates whatever cavils might be raised against it. Few indeed are the books which can claim such total completeness of purpose. As any historian would, Wiley must surely have taken pride in knowing that this sort of book would never again need to be done. It is a fitting final chapter to his distinguished career. Frank Allen Dennis Delta State University Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South 1861-1870. By Robert C. Morris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. xv, 314. $25.00.) Freedmen's educators have been variously viewed as courageous 282CIVIL WAR HISTORY heroes or meddlesome fanatics determined to "Africanize" the South: idealistic egalitarians or hypocrites who taught freedmen for ulterior reasons. Morris stresses a more accurate middle ground showing that while goals were often idealistic and lofty, practice was "tempered by pragmatism and an awareness of the need for sectional accommodation ." Teachers were much as other people: selfish, selfless, cowards, courageous, dull, and sensitive. But whatever their human failures, they were, as a group, far more sympathetic to blacks than was the country at large. Whether these educators advocated full equality orviewed freedmen as members of a lesser race, their underlying philosophy of black education tended to be moderate in tone, stressing obedience to law, respect for personal property rights, honesty, industry, economy, and social harmony. Social stability and order were major objectives, and Morris concludes that "most school officials hoped to achieve this goal by convincing blacks of the need for moderation and patience in pursuit of equal rights." Educators quarrelled over whether religion should be taught in the classroom, but they united in opposing Catholic schools. Some taught social equality; others accommodated themselves to southern sensitivities. But nearly all northern educators wanted to "Northernize " the South. The entire section, white as well as black, needed "popular intelligence and popular morality." Morris examines the organizations that managed the black schools, placing special emphasis on the Freedmen's Bureau. He treats in considerable detail the northern whites, southern whites and blacks who...

pdf

Share