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

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 303 On Harper’s Trail can also serve as a jumping-off point for real adventures . The exhaustive bibliography offers multiple avenues for exploration in literature, both scientific and otherwise. Historians will discover that there is a treasure trove of Harper material archived in the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama, which has made part of his considerable store of railroad timetables available online. Botanists can follow the trail to the New York Botanical Garden, where Shores found catalogued close to six hundred plant specimens that Harper collected. The Botanical Garden’s virtual herbarium includes digitized images of many of them, complete with his notes, sketches, and habitat photographs. Just as Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island may have prompted young Roland Harper to explore unknown places, On Harper’s Trail might lead conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts to the Okefenokee Swamp or Broxton Rocks, both preserved in part because of Harper’s efforts. Better still, readers may be inspired to join efforts to restore the longleaf pine forest, one of the most endangered ecosystems in the country. In 1919 Harper wrote, “there is perhaps no purer pleasure than that derived from the contemplation of nature’s masterpieces, and a world in which some of them are within easy reach of everyone ought to be a happier world than one wholly dominated by commercial motives” (p. 93). Today more than ever, Harper’s words resonate for those concerned about the future of our natural landscapes, including the longleaf pine forests of the Southern Coastal Plain. MARY PATTEN PRIESTLEY Sewanee: The University of the South A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 329 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8078-3304-9. In the weeks and months immediately following the Civil War, traitors lurked around every corner—or so, according to Mark Wahlgren Summers, many Americans believed. Summers’s new work takes a fascinating departure from much of the existing literature on the postwar era. In the midst of historians’ preoccupations with punishing rebels, enfranchising freedmen, and remaking the Constitution, Summers suggests, many scholars have overlooked the central purpose of Reconstruction from the perspective of those who lived through it: to ensure the survival T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 304 of the Republic. Congressmen and newspaper editors, fearful that one misstep could bring about another war, magnified every threat into a crisis and sometimes manufactured threats where none existed. To understand the early years of Reconstruction, Summers argues, historians must acknowledge that it “was shaped not simply from politics, principles , and prejudices, but also from fears, often unreasonable, phantasms of conspiracy, dreads and hopes of renewed civil war, and a widespread sense that four years of war had thrown the normal constitutional process dangerously out of kilter” (p. 2). Within this context Summers places the many conflicts between President Andrew Johnson and Congress. None was so menacing as Johnson’s suggestion that, with the war over, a Congress lacking representatives from all of the states was unconstitutional. Could Johnson dissolve the Republican-controlled Congress if it failed to admit the southern states? Could he create a new Congress? As Summers notes, Republicans used these fears to maintain their majorities in the 1866 elections, but that victory failed to offer much comfort when the southern states, to the president’s delight, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment (pp. 150– 53). With Johnson and the former rebels seemingly allied to undo the Union, congressional Republicans had no choice but to pass the Military Reconstruction acts. Yet it seemed that the greatest threat was brewing not in the former Confederacy, but in Maryland. The state’s governor, Democrat Thomas Swann, suspended Republican election officials and then sought military aid from Johnson to keep his newly appointed judges in place—and Johnson seemed inclined to help. General Ulysses S. Grant opposed this move and helped broker a compromise. In this light, congressional Republicans saw Johnson’s request for Secretary of War Edwin...

pdf

Share