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256CIVIL WAR HISTORY enter a written contract with him, all of which may dramatize the freedmen 's new assertiveness. Significantly, McKinley names a new stallion "Ku Klux" but comments no further. He refers disparagingly to Tunis Campbell, the local black leader, but when he learns of the death of Scott, the "camp servant" who nursed him when he was wounded during the Civil War, McKinley recalls that Scott was as "true as steel" and "one of the few negroes who was a friend of the whites" (36). An excellent introduction by Russell Duncan, an authority on Reconstruction Georgia, helps place McKinley's Journal in the context of the times. One disappointing aspect of the book is its lack of photographs of persons mentions in the narrative and their magnificent, pristine surroundings. Recommended for scholars and anyone interested in the natural beauty of coastal Georgia, McKinley's Journal is indeed a timely publication. Readers will be reminded that the logging operations now allowed on Sapelo by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources only can be harmful to the fragile ecology of this now-state-owned island that Archibald McKinley once worked and loved. Walter J. Fraser, Jr. Georgia Southern University A Mexican View ofAmerica in the 1860s: A Foreign Diplomat Describes the Civil War and Reconstruction. Edited and translated by Thomas D. Schoonover. (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. Pp. 271. $39.50.) This is the second volume of Matías Romero correspondence to be edited by Schoonover. The first volume, Mexican Lobby: Matías Romero in Washington, 1861-1867 (1986), included 133 memorandums written by the Mexican chargé and minister to the United States. The new volume provides 126 summary reviews of political and military events in the United States during 1860-67. Schoonover selected and translated both the memorandums and the reviews from ten previously published (187092 ) but relatively rare volumes of Romero correspondence. Schoonover's second volume differs strikingly from his first. The memorandums in the first volume detail Romero's own diplomatic activities. They refer to personal conversations with men like Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, Charles Sumner, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant and discuss diplomatic maneuvers in both the United States and Mexico. Over 60 percent of the memorandums fall into the postwar period, and Schoonover's editorial comments are limited to synopses of political events for each year. The reviews in the new volume, 80 percent of them written before or during the war, provide summaries of public events rather than a record BOOK REVIEWS257 of Romero's personal experiences and observations. Unfortunately, the material seldom provides information that could not be found in the daily newspapers, which is where Romero probably culled most of his information. The reviews lack the drama and insider's view that one finds in the memorandums. Schoonover tells us this is intentional, that the new volume seeks to underscore the links between domestic events and foreign policy by revealing those domestic American events that Romero considered important for furthering Mexican interests in the United States. In this light, the reviews will be useful to students of Mexican-American relations during this stormy period. Schoonover does a more thorough editorial job in the new volume, particularly in relating events in the United States to Romero's diplomatic mission and Mexico's interpretation of the situation abroad. He also supplies notes and a bibliographical essay on current historical literature concerning events and people mentioned by Romero. The first volume had neither. On the other hand, as in his first volume, Schoonover fails to make any but the most basic internal editorial changes in the Romero text, and he never ventures to correct errors made by Romero. For instance, Romero states that Leroy R Walker replaced Braxton Bragg as Confederate secretary of war. Sixteen pages later, he correctly identifies Judah R Benjamin as the new secretary (although who Benjamin replaced—Walker or Bragg—remains unclear), but then proceeds to make Braxton Bragg (rather than his brother Thomas) the new attorney general. Elsewhere, Romero has Gideon Pillow, Simon Buckner, and Albert S. Johnston being captured at Fort Donelson. When he corrects this error by having Pillow and Buckner retreat from Donelson six pages...

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