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BOOK REVIEWS275 lief in a free-labor society and, more specifically, in laissez-faire economics, like so many Northerners, they saw no contradiction between "practical economic considerations and personal moral concerns"; rather, they considered the two as "mutually reinforcing" (5-6). If this combination of practical and moral principles led the Boston businessmen to support such reforms as the abolition of slavery, the recruitment of black troops, the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the enfranchisement of blacks, it also led them to oppose other reforms. They opposed confiscation of Rebel lands and their distribution to former slaves, and they wanted sharp limitations on the amount of aid given former slaves. The blacks, they insisted, had to be treated fairly, but they had to earn their own way, and this meant working in the fields producing the South's staple crops. Only in this way would blacks become productive free workers instead of a new self-sufficient peasantry making little contribution to the nation's wealth and providing little in the way of a market for manufactured goods. Other features of their conservative reformism stemmed from their very direct and immediate interests, putting them in conflict with some of their fellow Republicans. They opposed the Republican high-tariffpolicies and favored a quick return to hard money, justifying their position in moral terms; the tariff kept food prices for workers artificially high, and soft money gave profits to speculators and middlemen at the expense of workers and manufacturers . But they were aware that the high tariff and easy money also encouraged dangerous competition from newcomers in the New England textile manufacturing enterprises in which they were involved or associated. Such views led them to support low-tariff Republicans in primary races and to favor a quick return to staple crop production in the South, which would increase exports and provide the income necessary for a rapid return to specie payments, and perhaps in the bargain provide Southern allies for low tariffs and sound money. A modern reader might find the high moral ground upon which the Boston reformers based their views on the tariff and currency questions to be cynical and self-serving, but Abbott convincingly argues that such views were completely consistent with their conservative humanitarian reformism. Abbott's fine study provides not only a splendid discussion of the ideas and motivations of an influential group of Boston businessmen reformers but also more general insights into the nature, sources, and limits of reform in the Civil War era. Harold D. Woodman Purdue University The Alabama Confederate Reader. Edited by Malcolm Cook McMillan. Introduction by C. Peter Ripley. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Pp. xxviii, 468. $24.95.) Malcolm Cook McMillan (1910-85) was one of Alabama's most prominent revisionist historians. His Constitutional Development in Alabama (1955) 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY was a brilliant survey that rescued the history of the state from racism and a hagiological approach to secession, civil war, and Reconstruction. His next major publication, The Alabama Civil War Reader (1963), was quickly recognized as a model sourcebook. The two works have continued to be of interest to historians, yet while Constitutional Development has been readily available in a reprint edition, the Reader has languished in the rare book collections of libraries. Now, thanks to C. Peter Ripley and the "Library of Alabama Classics," students of Southern, Civil War, and Alabama history can benefit from McMillan's mastery of Confederate sources. Opening The Alabama Confederate Reader, one is impressed by the diversity of voices McMillan employs. His view of the war is taken from a wealth of diaries, newspapers, memoirs, and personal and official correspondence. His reader is at home among Unionists and secessionists, in farmhouses and columned mansions, in clerks' offices and shops as well as camps and battlefields . McMillan is also remarkable for the evenhandedness with which he presents different sides of a question. In his coverage of the Federal occupation of the Tennessee Valley in the spring of 1862, for example, he quotes from reports which show that many citizens welcomed Federal troops as deliverers (140-44). Likewise he shows (from sources Northern and Southern) how a scheming and ineffective Federal commander, Gen...

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