Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (review)

BOOK REVIEWS87 often significant contributions to our understanding of a variety of important subjects and suggest potentially fruitful areas for further exploration . The editors and the press have served students of the postbellum South well in making these studies available in a single volume rather than scattered in ahalf-dozen periodicals. Dare we hope that this publication will also stimulate our profession to give greater attention, support , and recognition to studies that are unabashedly local in scope? Leonard P. Curry University of Louisville Black Politiciansand Reconstruction in Georgia: A SplendidFailure. By Edmund L. Drago. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xii, 201. $16.95.) Drago's book on Georgia's black leaders searches desperately for an identity. Although it has elements of a variety of studies, it is not a statestudy of blacks during Reconstruction (à la Vernon Lane Wharton or Joel Williamson); neither is it a study of the social consequences of emancipation (à la Peter Kolchin or Jonathan Wiener); nor is it strictly a close examination of black political leaders (à la Thomas Holt). Instead of filling a historiographical gap, the book falls through the cracks. Drago's one contribution lies in identifying and providing crude biographical data for the sixty-nine blacks who served in Georgia's Reconstruction constitutional convention and state legislatures. He also presents some useful information on the political lives of the sixty-nine, before, during, and after their tenures in office. But, given the dismal record ofblack Reconstruction in Georgia, it is unfortunate that he chose to focus so narrowly on black officeholders. As a result, other black leaders—ministers, schoolteachers, and political leaders who did not hold office, just to mention the most obvious—get short shrift. Moreover , Drago repeats all the stereotypes that have kept the study of Southern black leaders so unproductive: the "conservative" influence of black ministers; the "elite" status of black professionals, proprietors, and artisans ; and the dichotomy between the leaders, nominally preoccupied with civil and political rights, and the masses, nominally preoccupied with economic concerns. Consequently, he does little to advance the understanding of Southern black leaders during Reconstruction. A chapter on the postbellum labor system betrays Drago's fear that the question of black leadership is merely one aspect of the larger question of emancipation. The fear is well-founded. But the chapter is superficial and, in fact, is not interwoven into the rest of his analysis. Like the other chapters, the one on labor touches upon various facets of the experience of Georgia blacks during Reconstruction; but nowhere does Drago systematically explore the relationship between the economic, political, and social aspects of freedom. As a result, he never achieves an understanding of black leaders within the broader context: the adjust- ööCIVIL WAR HISTORY ment that emancipation forced upon slaves, masters, free blacks, and nonslaveholding whites alike. Although Drago makes effective use of public records, newspaper accounts, and, particularly, the Congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, his sparse use of the Freedmen's Bureau records at the National Archives constitutes a serious flaw. No modern study of Southern blacks during Reconstruction can risk neglecting such an invaluable source. Joseph P. Reidy University of Maryland Godand General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind. By Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. 158. $12.95.) To Professor Connelly and Ms. Bellows the Lost Cause is the "essence" of "the southern mind"—"an awareness of defeat, alienation from the national experience, and a sense of separation from American ideals" (p. 137). In this slender volume of four chapters they survey and analyze the Lost Cause "mentality" in many manifestations, from 1865 to the present. As readers of Professor Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (1977) will recall, unreconstructed Confederate veterans (mostly Virginians) tarred Lee's lieutenant, General James Longstreet, with culpability for the Gettysburg disaster, thereby clearing Lee from association with defeat. The next generation of southern writers and historians represented Lee as the embodiment of the Old South's noblest virtues and simultaneously as a paradoxical "nationalist" (for he hated slavery and hesitated to leave the federal army in 1861...