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92CIVIL WAR HISTORY through prodigious research into many areas of Southern life—the family, society, and customs—as well as into the development and operations of Southern institutions. Honor, he shows, permeated Southern social relationships, defining the roles available to men and women in the society and cementing those definitions through such institutional mechanisms as education and the law. More darkly, Waytt-Brown also describes how honor justified the oppression of women and blacks in the South and contributed to those outbreaks of personal and community violence which marked the region throughout the antebellum era. The result is to deepen considerably our understanding of the culture of the Old South. Above all, Wyatt-Brown has put that culture into a larger historical context than is often done, showinghow the main tenets of a system of honor older even than the European colonization of the New World were maintained and adapted to Southern conditions, including to such a crucial element of Southern life as that of race. Although one may argue that Wyatt-Brown has undervalued the meaning of race as such in his analysis of the Old South—especially in his treatment of slave insurrections—his looking beyond the South for sources of the region's culture is a major corrective to the tendency to ascribe Southern character solely to Southern conditions. In illuminating this larger context, moreover, Wyatt-Brown has provided a valuable background for explaining Southern distinctiveness in a number of areas historians have identified—child-rearing, political styles, education, and the law, for example—as he argues that, in clinging to honor, Southerners continued to embrace an ethical system increasingly foreign to other antebellum Americans. Historians of the South and sectionalism would be unwise to ignore this book, and it is sure to inspire discussion and further research for some time to come. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. University of California, Irvine John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican from Illinois. By James Pickett Jones. (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1982. Pp. xii, 291. $00.00.) This is the second of two volumes on John A. Logan, civil war general, U.S. senator from Illinois, 1871-77, 1879-86, and vice-presidential candidate with James G. Blaine in 1884. The book rests on Logan's papers, those of his friends and enemies, and the local and national press. It contains some detail on Logan's family life, as well as on the great political issues of the day. Logan's contemporaries saw him as a major state boss, an opinion which his steadfast opposition to civil service reform reinforced. But the actual workings of this power in Illinois are not especially clear. The most arresting section of the book, however, is the BOOK REVIEWS93 delineation ofhis reelection to the Senate in 1885, whenhe confronted an evenly balanced state legislature. The deaths of three members resulted in the chance of producing a pro-Logan majority, and caused several months of byzantine maneuvering. This climaxed in the triumph of Logan's partisans in organizing one special election, work that was kept secret from the Democrats until it was too late for them to elect a member with the decisive vote. The book's strength lies in simply detailing an unknown story; its weakness is a lack of interpretation. Logan figured in all the great debates of the 1870s and 1880s and in the internal divisions of the GOP between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, yet itis difficulttoascertainhis real views, if any, on many of these matters. He did take a strong stand in favor of Negro rights, which somewhat softened the fact that he had been a Democrat before the war, but that also cost him some support both in Washington and Illinois. Just what groups supported him and why in Illinois is also unclear. Professor Jones alludes frequently to Logan's business activities, but does not delineate them. He did undertake many business speculations, all of which apparently failed. As the author notes on several occasions, Logan was typical of the second-level figure who was so prominent in his time but whom history has forgotten, and whose career illuminated the era's confused but fascinating development. His story also shows how...

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