Charles E. Heller. Portrait of an Abolitionist: A Biography of George Luther Stearns, 1809-1867 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Charles E. Heller. Portrait ofan Abolitionist: A Biography of George Luther Steams, 1809-1867. (Westport, Conn: GreenwoodPress, 1996. Pp. xii,248. $59.95.) Drawing from widely scattered manuscript collections, Charles Heller reconstructs the public life of George Luther Stearns, an influential Boston manufacturer , a generous philanthropist, and a radical reform organizer. Stearns emerges as an articulate exponent of free labor ideology, particularly that aspect of it which insisted that the organizing principles of industrial capitalism created the means by which slavery could be destroyed, equal rights established, and Northern men and methods exalted in the land. Stearns was eleven when his father died and fifteen when his family's financial needs required that he enter the world of business as a clerk. With a keen eye for business opportunities in New England's expanding economy, Stearns soon emerged as a successful manufacturer, first of unseed oil and later of lead pipe. By the 1840s, Stearns was one of the wealthiest men in New England. He also enjoyed social prominence and formed close personal relationships with reform-minded intellectuals, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and Lydia Maria Child (his wife's aunt). By 1859 Stearns's circle of friends included the wealthy paper manufacturer Francis W. Bird and the politically powerful members of the "Bird Club." Stearns gained entry into this elite group through his work with the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, procuring supplies and weapons for free-state settlers in Kansas. This work also brought Stearns into close and friendly contact with John Brown. With Howe and other friends, Stearns became one of the "Secret Six" conspirators who helped to plan Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War Stearns turned his organizing talents to the recruitment of black troops. He traveled across the North to find the men needed to fill the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the black regiment that fought with stunning heroism in the failed federal assault on FortWagner, South Carolina, in July 1 863. Commissioned a major in the United States Army, Stearns went on to recruit over thirteen thousand black men for the Union cause. For reasons that Heller does not explore, Stearns's two draft-aged sons never entered military service. With the destruction of slavery, Stearns believed that the lessons and experiences of the free-state struggle in Kansas could be applied to the entire South. Northern capital would revive the cultivation of Southern cotton on free labor I58CIVIL WAR HISTORY principles. Stearns himself invested in a plantation near Murfreesboro, Tennessee . To promote a radical reconstruction of the South, Stearns joined in the founding of the Nation (1865) as the largest single investor. When it became clear that the journal's editor, E. L. Godkin, opposed radical reform, Stearns launched the Right Way to challenge him. By then, however, failing health and declining financial fortunes soon brought his reform career to an end. Heller's biography is thorough, competent, and welcome. However, the author does little to connect his subject with the substantial body of secondary literature on antebellum reform and emancipation. Readers are left on their own to locate Stearns in the larger antislavery cause. Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis Rebel Storehouse: Florida in the Confederate Economy. By Robert A. Taylor. (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1955, Pp. 232. $29.95.) Few battles of significance were fought in Florida, and Tallahassee, the capital, was so remote that it was the only southerly capital not to fall to Union forces. Even so, the state was crucial as a place ofConfederate supply. As armies clashed elsewhere, important efforts in Florida were underway on behalf of the South. Those activities are the subject of this generally sound study. The author maintains that the production and export of salt represents Florida 's greatest economic contribution to the Southern cause. Accounts of its production and distribution provide arguably the strongest chapter in the book. So much salt was shipped out that Florida residents had difficulty keeping the item. Across the South, patriotic-minded (and neither were they blind to profits) citizens provided what the Confederacy required to prosecute the war. It was no different in Florida, where opportunity and...