South After Gettysburg. Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Potomac 1863-1865 (review)

58 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION less concerned to give their children a guarded religious education of the peculiarly Quaker type. Additional chapters discuss educational work of Friends among the Indians and Negroes, the special subject of religious education, and rehabilitation work done in North Carolina and Tennessee. The book shows an impressive labor by Friends in the cause of education ; for while most of the schools were given up, they served the purpose of creating interest in education and paving the way for a sound system of free public schools. This book is both a source book and a narrative. It is a source book in that it makes available to later students an immense quantity of hitherto inaccessible data, with references to more that can be had—the bibliography and index are veritable mines of concrete information— ; it is a narrative, and a history, in that it organizes the facts chosen into an orderly presentation of a large and complicated subject. Much of interest in the life of the monthly meetings themselves is incidentally portrayed as their educational ventures are recounted.T. K. B., Jr. South After Gettysburg. Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Potomac 1863-1865. Edited by Henrietta Stratton Jaquette. Philadelphia , University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937. xiii+173 pp. $2.00. Illustrated. ' I ?? FOUR pages of introduction written by the editor hold the promise of a lively and engaging character to be presented in the letters which follow—and the promise is abundantly fulfilled. The letters show only a brief period of Cornelia Hancock's life—but this brief period appears to have supplied the impetus that started her on a career comparable with that of Elizabeth Fry. She became a leader in Negro education in the South, in modern social work in her home region (her brother-in-law was instrumental in the founding of the present Family Society of Philadelphia), in Children's Aid, and in the problem of housing, which she interpreted in terms broad enough to include what we should call community building. The letters are sprightly, charming, illuminating. Not without a certain artless egotism, they nevertheless reveal a person who must have appeared to be an angel of mercy to the wounded and dying whom she tended, and an efficient worker and assistant to the surgeons in charge. There is the suspicion of a romance with one of the young doctors—one regrets that the record, and the actual facts in life, went no further ; there is the interest of meeting interesting persons, big and little, from Lincoln down ; there is the excitement of marching under danger of guerilla shooting from the side, and of shell fire during a larger engagement; there is evidence that Cornelia Hancock soon made an honored and respected place for herself in the councils of the government at the time of a great national crisis. I ITEMS FROM PERIODICALS59 The letters form a natural group and make an artistic whole. The editor's brief introduction whets one's appetite for more of the life of this able, intelligent, and charming person.T. K. B., Jr. ITEMS FROM PERIODICALS By Thomas E. Drake The Friend (Philadelphia) N THE issue of 12 mo. 17, 1936, pp. 217-225 is an interesting article by Leonard S. Kenworthy on "John Bright—Nineteenth Century Humanitarian." It has been reprinted in book form by the Book Committee of the Representative Meeting of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Arch Street). In the same issue (pp. 225-227) Professor Edward D. Snyder reports the discovery of the original manuscript letter of John G. Whittier to President Thomas Chase of Haverford College, on the occasion of the Semi-Centennial of the College in 1883. A corrected version of the letter appears with the article. The history of the Friends Boarding School near Barnesville, Ohio, is told in brief by the former Principal, J. Wetherill Hutton, in the issue of 3 mo. 11, 1937. The year 1937 marks the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of a Boarding School by Friends in Ohio. William B. Harvey has a brief historical sketch of Westtown School in the issue of 5 mo. 20, 1937, pp. 429-431. An...