Freedom and Prejudice: The Legacy of Slavery in the United States and Brazil (review)

360CIVIL WAR HISTORY Hood's Texas Brigade. By J. B. Polley. (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Bookshop, 1976. Pp. 347. $22.50.) This book is facsimile number 37 published by Morningside Bookshop in their outstanding series of Civil War book reprints. Hood's Texas Brigade was one of the more famous fighHng units in the Army of Northern Virginia and was one of Lee's most dependable brigades. Hood's Texans fought in all of the major engagements of Lee's army except Chancellorsville , and it more than made up for its absence at that battle by fighting at Suffolk, Chickamauga, and Nashville. The brigade's casualHes were great and its desertions few. At Appomattox but 10 percent of its men were left to surrender. The greatest value of Polley's book is that it was written by a member of the brigade and thus is an eyewitness account by a person "who was there"—whether the book was written from diaries kept during the war or from recollecHons or reminiscences after the war is not clear. Polley, who rose to the rank of quartermaster sergeant of the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment, was an intelligent observer and better than average writer. He wrote a very readable book. However, Polley indulges in a great deal of "small talk" and changes from historian to folklorist on numerous occasions. Too, at Hmes, he inflates small events and skirmishes into major happenings and makes numerous mistakes in dates and Hmes. Polley's volume is parHcularly valuable for its biographical sketches, photographs, and muster rolls. An index and maps would have greatly facilitated its use by the reader, researcher, and writer. Dr. Richard McMurray's introducHon is concise and Hmely. Morningside Press must be complimented for making Polley's work available to modern-day readers; it is entertaining, as well as valuable. Harold Simpson Hill Junior College Freedom and Prejudice: The Legacy of Slavery in the United States and Brazil. By Robert Brent Toplin. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Pp. xxvi, 134. $23.95.) While scholarship on comparaHve race relaHons in the Americas in general supports Robert Brent Toplin's thesis that "modern-day race relaHons have been shaped, to a degree, by the history of slavery and its aboliHon" (p. xx), the specificnature of slavery's influenceremains problematic . Frank Tannenbaume seminal work, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in theAmericas (New York, 1946), asserted that slavery in IberoAmerica was relaHvely mild, compared to the United States, resulHng in more harmonious post-emancipaHon race relations. Revisionist studies, however, not only established conHnuities in American slave systems BOOK REVIEWS361 that belie Tannenbaume mild/harsh dichotomy, but also denied that contemporary Ibero-American race relations were devoid of race prejudice . Toplin's volume of essays, a part of this revisionist scholarship, contends that race and class relations which developed during slavery and emancipation helped determine contemporary racial attitudes in the United States and Brazil. Toplin has organized seven essays into three parts. Thethree essays in Part I consider how slavery's defenders, faced with abolitionist pressures , developed arguments whose racist basis endured the institution's demise. In Part II, the two essays examine how freed slaves not only suffered racial prejudice but also were trapped in a culture of poverty as a result of racial and economic inequities. In his final two essays, Toplin's analysis of twentieth-century race relations dismisses the simplistic explanation that while class factors determine Afro-Brazilian oppression, race factors oppress the United States'Afro-American population. Race and class prejudice, Toplin contends, operate in both societies to the black populations' detriment. Although Toplin's thesis is sound, his work's format precludes a closely argued justification. Five of the seven essays first appeared in scholarly journals (four of them in 1970-72), and a sixth draws extensively on the author's 1972 monograph on Brazilian abolition. Despite an introductory overview, Toplin's revisions of the essays fail either to give them overall coherence or to excise occasional repetitions and some dated analyses. Nevertheless, Freedom and Prejudice contains much of value. A useful synthesis of comparative race relations scholarship, which a succinct bibliographic essay supplements, accompanies the timely reminder that understanding racial oppression in the...