Magnolia Journey: A Union Veteran Revisits the Former Confederate States (review)

BOOK REVIEWS285 in South Carolina and Oklahoma as a lawyer, school teacher, college professor and educational administrator. The life of Johnson Whittaker, as told by Marszalek, certainly merits publication. The author has adequately presented the life of a fascinating personality who became momentarily a symbol in the struggle among politicians seeking ways to modify or maintain race relations as they had emerged out of the Reconstruction period. Marszalek's writing is strongest when characterizing Whittaker, his friends and adversaries , or describing the intricacies of court room maneuvering. He is less effective when constructing a larger historical framework. Both the Gilded Age and the broader black experience are often cast in brief and overly simplistic language, such as when Marszalek writes that "in 1865 the black man, in America since 1619, found himself a citizen for the first time" (p. 3). Such a comment distorts the complex reality of black society in the nineteenth century and particularly ignores the previous thirty-year fight by such black citizens as Frederick Douglass , David Ruggles, James Forten and Martin R. Delaney to overthrow slavery. Throughout the book, Marszalek avoids pursuing a more sophisticated treatment of black social structure or Negro public opinion ; instead, the author focuses primarily on white racial underpinnings during the Gilded Age. Also, Marszalek should have included a bibliography to help the reader clarify the varied sources used in the footnotes. In spite of these shortcomings, Court-Martial is fascinating reading and worth a close appraisal by both the general reader and the specialist. Ronald M. Johnson Georgetown University Magnolia Journey: A Union Veteran Revisits the Former Confederate States. By Russell H. Conwell. Edited by Joseph C. Carter. (University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1974. Pp. x, 190. $6.75.) Magnolia Journey represents an arranged and edited version of twentyfive feature articles Russell H. Conwell wrote for the Daily Evening Telegraph of Boston while touring Civil War battlefields as that tabloid 's correspondent during 1869. The volume possesses both positive and negative facets. The positive characteristics of this book include a touchingly perceptive description of war's impersonal carnage. Specifically, the reader discovers how human scavengers collected unclaimed skeletons from former battlefields for sale as fertilizer, while farmers a short distance away plowed up troublesome remnants of deceased soldiers in preparing their fields for cultivation. The sectional tensions that typified the postwar era find vivid expression when abolitionist Conwell describes the "traitors" who supported the "rebellion (p. I)." The author projects this pro-Northern attitude further by drawing an unfavorable compari- 286CIVIL WAR HISTORY son between what he visualizes as the unproductive "lazy" (p. 166) rebels and the industriously successful Blacks and Yankees who worked in the South after the holocaust. Finally, the last half of Magnolia Journey contains some excellently descriptive stories and passages. The negative side of the balance sheet cannot help but consider the laboriously repetitive and deadening emphasis the first half of this book places on the physical condition of former battlefields, the number of unmarked as compared to marked graves and the relative aesthetic appearance of Confederate as opposed to Union cemeteries. The realization that this volume offers little in the way of new information only increases such irritation. Editor and arranger Joseph C. Carter, with the exception of a weak introduction, has done a commendable job that only occasionally reflects preoccupation with nonessential minutia. Unfortunately the printing of this selection was obviously hindered by the necessities of economy . One wonders if the exclusion of the extraneous material from the earlier sections could have provided for a physically more attractive product. S. F. Roach, Jr. Kennesaw Junior College Sentinel of the Plains: Fort Leavenworth and the American West. By George Walton. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Pp. xii, 210. $8.95.) In this volume of Prentice-Hall's American Forts Series, George Walton has written (with enthusiasm) a history of Fort Leavenworth. Founded in 1827 and named for its founder, Colonel Henry Leavenworth , the fort endured from a frontier outpost built to protect Whites from Indians to a training school for a complex army establishment in the twentieth century. In between it has gone through a number of changes reflecting the development of the nation...