Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System, 1865-1933 (review)

book reviews173 and a more than ample ego, on the other" (vii) and will consider A Politician Goes to War an interesting, if limited, view of the war from Geary's unique perspective. J. Tracy Power South Carolina Department of Archives and History Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System, 1865-1933. By Milfred C. Fierce. (Brooklyn: Africana Studies Research Center, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1994. Pp. xiv, 290. $15.00.) After the abolition of slavery, convict leasing became the major form of social control for Southern blacks. Every former Confederate state but Virginia established a leasing system and each one was characterized by untold abuses (sexual and otherwise) and unimagined horrors that degraded both black men and women. Although a host of published and unpublished works have appeared in the past fifty years on this Southern phenomena, a synthesis that would encompass all this material has never been written. Based almost solely on secondary studies, Slavery Revisited is a weak composite ofwhat we know aboutthe history of this institution and fails to move beyond the ideas and frameworks provided by previous historians Fierce sees the shadow of slavery in all social and economic transactions between whites and blacks—peonage, convict leasing, and the chain gang. The repetitive nature of various themes and information is poor compensation for the lack of analysis. Much of the earlier material in the monograph is wellknown and can be conveniently ignored. Several Southern states established primitive antebellum leasing arrangements, but Fierce neglects to tell us that most of these convicts were white. What he does well is set the stage for the advent of convict leasing in the postwar era with excellent discussions of Vardaman and terrorism; but by now we have completed one-fourth of the treatise over very well-worn ground In 1865, Southern penology drastically changed. Whereas before the war whites comprised the majority of inmates and lessees, after the conflict blacks performed the same role. What Fierce fails to make clear in this book is that until the close of the Civil War, the Southern states generally did not incarcerate blacks. Occasionally they might send a free black or runaway slave to the penitentiary, but it was not a frequent occurrence. There is no argument that during the first years of freedom, the prison color line was transformed. (For example, blacks comprised more than one-half ofthe inmates in Texas eighteen months after the war ended). Fueled by Southern racial fears, leasing quickly became brutal, nasty, and excessive. This book has several flaws. The background material is too extensive, and although the secondary research is impressive, there are still major works that Fierce missed. He has given us an informative, if pedestrian, study of convict 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY leasing, with little investigation of manuscript sources. What is necessary is for an individual to select one state and intensively explore the records, including prison papers, and build an interpretation from this base. As yet, we do not have a solid and imaginative investigation of leasing in any state. Fierce has attempted to leapfrog this stage and synthesize the available studies. Historians may find a few sections worthwhile, but for the most part the information will be well-known to scholarly readers. Barry A. Crouch Gallaudet University Lee's Adjutant: The Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 18621865 . Edited by R. Lockwood Tower, with John S. Belmont. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. 343. $29.95.) The most historically useful letters of Civil War soldiers tend to lie at two poles: they let us eavesdrop on decision making at headquarters, or they make us slog with enlistees through bouts of boredom, fatigue, sickness, and combat. The reader comes to this well-edited collection of 1 10 letters from Walter Herrón Taylor expecting the first sort, since this young Virginian officer served on General Lee's small staffthrough the entire war and since the book's dustjacket promises "an intimate look atRobert E. Lee" by an "insider." But Colonel Taylor doesn't oblige. Written as relief from piles of military paperwork, these are letters Taylor used to recover his spiritual bearings and to woo...