Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (review)

358civil war history useful comments about how Tammany benefited from the riot's negative impact upon the Peace Democrats, the subsequent rise and fall of William Tweed, postwar trade union developments, the wave of strikes in 1872 for an eight hour day, and their defeat through a combination of employer intransigence and police pressure. What is troubling is that he does not heed his own admonition: "One should here be careful not to place too much weight on the draft riots as a means of explaining post-war phenomena" (243). Too often he does just that, in part to justify the original conceptual framework. Bernstein has thoroughly explored the relevant primary sources and made imaginative use of the existing scholarly literature. His most obvious, and readily acknowledged, intellectual debts areto Sean Wilentz and David Montgomery. In a sense, what he has set out to do is bridge the gap between Wilentz's treatment of the period before 1850 with Montgomery's account of the late 1860s and early 1870s. One's final judgment of the book will depend upon whether one agrees that class analysis explains as much as Bernstein, Wilentz, and Montgomery think it does. James F. Richardson The University of Akron Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. By David W. Blight. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Pp. xxi, 270. $27.00.) Frederick Douglass continues to fascinate American historians, as recent studies by Waldo Martin, Allison Davis, Peter Walker, Nathan Huggins, and Dickson Preston demonstrate. Recurring throughout these studies is the theme of Douglass's struggle to reconcile the dualities within his life. His public and private self, being black and being American, leading blacks while dealing with whites—in these and many other ways Douglass exemplified what W E. B. DuBois characterized as the "double self" of black identity. Now David W Blight offers a penetrating discussion of Douglass and the causes, conduct, and consequences of the American Civil War. It is a study in tensions and ambivalence, of weighing pragmatism against principle. The result is a rich, subtle, and thoughtful portrait, merging soul and mind, making the complex understandable without resorting to simplification or reductionism. In the 1850s, Douglass suffered from a crisis of faith in the promise of America. Hope and despair cohabited in his mind as he contemplated the future of blacks. He welcomed the intensification of sectional confrontation , for the resulting turmoil represented a wedge of opportunity for blacks to take advantage of circumstance and the necessities of war. As he had hoped, the conflict ignited a revolutionary transformation of book reviews359 the status of blacks in American society, and, while he cheered on advances, he kept pushing for more, making it clear that he was not yet satisfied. Yet Douglass could never escape the fact that whatever the personal predilections of white politicians, notably Abraham Lincoln, black advancement was rarely their foremost policy priority, but rather one among many considerations. And, just as a war between whites opened the door for the abolition of slavery, the quest for reconciliation between whites closed the door to post-emancipation hopes for equality. The black future always seemed a hostage to the white present. Some of Blight's arguments encourage further inquiry. While he recognizes the dilemma faced by black leaders in retaining credibility and influence with both white leaders and black followers, we never quite find out how much influence Douglass exercised over blacks. One also yearns for more discussion of Douglass's postwar activities, when he was far more of a symbol than a leader, losing whatever ability he possessed to shape events (a matter of debate throughout the book). One example must suffice. Having made clear Douglass's opposition to prewar and wartime schemes for black emigration, Blight is at a loss to account for the black leader's enthusiasm for Ulysses S. Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo, although the president pushed his pet project in part to offer Southern freedmen a place of refuge from violence and oppression. To explain Douglass's support as mere jingoism, as Blight does, is unsatisfying. In other places Blight seems far more understanding of the dilemmas confronting Douglass...