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

278CIVIL WAR HISTORY was an active participant at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 186768 and served one term as a state senator in 1869-71 . Thus, Teamoh is able to provide a rare insider's view of these events. He looks critically and candidly at a number of important issues, including the role played by AfricanAmerican delegates to the state convention; his efforts as a state senator to promote equitable work policies at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard; and the factionalism within the Republican party that led to his defeat. One wishes only that Teamoh had written more. The entire autobiography runs a mere 101 pages, making it a very brief narrative for a man with such a rich and varied story to tell. Roughly one-third of the discussion focuses on the especially important Reconstruction period. While Teamoh's comments on politics are lengthy and instructive, at times they merely whet the reader's appetite; Teamoh alludes to his involvement with the Union League and the initial stages of the black political community's mobilization, for example , but he never delves fully into the matter. Essays by the editors of the narrative partially offset God Made Man's brevity and deserve a special note ofpraise. F. N. Boney and Richard Hume's introduction paints a clear and finely textured portrait of the world surrounding Teamoh, making the narrative more accessible and more meaningful for scholars and general readers alike. Rafia Zafar, a literary scholar andTeamoh's descendant, provides an additional point of reference through a close comparison of Teamoh's autobiography with other slave narratives. Stephen Vincent University of Rhode Island The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. By Bruce Levine. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 378. $34-95) This book brings a much-needed transatlantic and bottom-up perspective to a study of the radical democratic movement among plebeian German Americans . It can be seen as a long overdue counterweight to Carl Wittke's work on the Forty-eighters, which concentrated almost exclusively on liberal bourgeois elites. In two chapters focused on the German side, Levine traces the deteriorating position of artisans (and rural smallholders, as well) in the decades before 1848 and documents their presence alongside bourgeois liberals in the revolution , both on the barricades and in the political councils, where they often attempted to push the movement in a more radical direction. The overthrow of this divided revolution brought to America many plebeian rebels along with their better-educated and more famous comrades in arms. While the New World brought a fundamentally different political system, there was much that was familiar in the economic plight of immigrants, especially in the artisan branches where Germans were most heavily concen- BOOK REVIEWS279 trated. The rapid industrialization of the 1840s and 1850s brought with it "increasing wholesale production, the intensification and division of labor, stepped up competition, and declining skill requirements" (67). Immigrant workers often drew upon European traditions and experiences to deal with these challenges. But while a small Communist movement did spring up, "the handful of Marxists were overwhelmingly outnumbered by adherents of . . . radical democratic 'red republicanism' " (142), an ideology owing more to Thomas Paine than to Marx. However, internal divisions, vestiges of guild loyalties, and ambivalence toward the wage system limited the successes of both strikes and cooperative ventures by German workers. The last 120 pages, dealing with German American politics from 1854 through i860, hold the greatest interest for readers of this journal. WhUe its outlines will be familiar to many, Levine adds more than just nuances to the story. Particularly valuable is his detailed, grassroots-level examination of German responses to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. He goes on to trace the interaction of sectional, class, and ethnocultural issues down to the Civil War. Two interesting sidelights also emerge: rank-and-file Germans showed more racial idealism than they have been credited with; the Turnerian safety-valve theory, at least in relation to immigrant urbanités, deserves resurrection certainly as an ideological and perhaps as a socioeconomic factor. The work occasionally suffers from selectivity of evidence. The author cites coppersmith Nicholas Schwenck several...

pdf

Share