North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidental Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (review)

book reviews189 more "popular" literature than ever before. These returning soldiers also appreciated the free access to reading material and they were often found at the forefront ofthe public library movement in their communities. In this book, David Kaser carefully documents the reading habits of the soldiers on both sides in the Civil War, and studies the type ofmaterial they read and how they obtained it. In order to present this picture, Kaser has drawn heavily upon the published and unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs ofthe soldiers themselves. It is a colorful, convincing, and moving picture indeed. The book is organized in four central chapters, with a fifth, "Aftermath," which looks at how the reading experience ofthe war affected the future. Chapter one summarizes what is known about "Reading by American Men in I860" and describes what skills, expectations, and interests these men brought with them to the army. "What Civil War Soldiers Read" is discussed in the second chapter, with much attention given to "purposeful" and "religious" reading, newspapers and magazines, and reading for escape, while the settings (camp and battle, libraries and reading rooms, hospitals, and prisons) in which diis reading was done is described in chapter three. "The Sources of Soldiers' Reading Matter," chapter four, is the longest chapter in the book, and provides a wealth offascinating information on military, personal, commercial, religious, and charitable sources. Especially detailed are die accounts of die soldier newspapers and dieveryimportantwork ofthe United States Christian Commission. Each of these chapters is thoroughly documented, there is a 146-item bibliography of books, periodicals, manuscripts, and theses and dissertations , and a full index is provided. Dean H. Keller Kent State University North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidental Reconstruction, 1865-1867. By Roberta Sue Alexander. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985. Pp. 238. $29.75.) During the last three decades, Reconstruction historiography has undergone a revolutionary transformation, as the Dunningite interprétation gave way to revisionism, which in turn ceded some ofits intellectual territory to post-revisionism. Initially, revisionist scholarship focused upon national policymaking. Only gradually did historians scrutinize the state studies of Dunning's students, which had provided the backbone of their mentor's interprétation ofthe era. Even today, for some states like North Carolina, the only statewide study of the entire Reconstruction era is J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton's Reconstruction in North Carolina (1914). Two excellent books—W Mckee Evans's study of the Cape Fear region during Reconstruction and Otto H. Olsens biography ofAlbion Tourgee—serve as par- 190CIVIL WAR HISTORY tial correctives. So does Roberta Sue Alexanders new, fact-filled study of race relations in North Carolina during the crucial first years after emancipation. Alexander treats race relations comprehensively. She examines white and black attitudes toward emancipation, legislation on the freedmen's status, the black family, religion, economic change, the legal system, and education. In all ofthese areas, she argues, "whites and blacks battled over the future status ofthe races and their place in southern society" (p. 169). These conclusions will be familiar to students of Reconstruction. As the Civil War came to an end, North Carolina blacks quickly asserted their freedom by leaving their masters, at least temporarily, though most were employed by year's end. Driven to organization by white resistance to their freedom, blacks held local and statewide conventions to petition whites for equal civil rights, black education, and the removal offormal and informal economic disabilities. North Carolina's white political elite, committed to maintaining a poorly paid agricultural labor pool and racebased caste distinctions, ignored the black appeal. The rejection ofblack efforts to obtain some semblance ofindependence and equality radicalized black political activists in 1865 and 1866. By 1866, they were demanding, not petitioning for, the right to vote in addition to educational and economic opportunities. The right to vote, they were convinced , was their only defense against white discrimination. Concerned not only with political and civil rights, blacks sought to build their own community from within. Studying the black family, religion, and community activities, Alexander supports Herbert Gutman's arguments about the persistence of the black family and shows how blacks expressed their independence by leaving white churches and engaging in a...