BOOK REVIEWS

Messrs. William Pepperrell: Merchants at Piscataqua. By BYRON FAIR- CHILD. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Published for the American Historical Associa- tion by Cornell University Press, 1954. xiv, 223 p. Illustrations, bibliography, index. 13.50.) How was the succulent codfish cured in early New England for shipment to codfish-starved Spaniards, Haitians, and Barbadians? Who, in 1700, inhabited the desolate, rocky sand banks of the Isles of Shoals, redolent of little save the penetrating fragrance of lightly salted hake, so refreshing to State-of-Mainers and so revolting to effete residents of the hinterland? Why did brigs from Maine—the delightfully named Charming Molly, for ex- ample—ignore the precept that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points and sail out to mid-ocean to a point where the northeast trades slid them downhill to the "inconspicuous freckle that marked Barbados on their charts"? The first William Pepperrell moved in from the sand spits and the codfish flakes of the Isles of Shoals to the more sheltered waters of Braveboat Harbor and Kittery, just as Maine lobsters abandon deep bottoms for coastal ledges when Maine's west winds grow warm and favorable. That, however, is not to say that the Pepperrells were like lobsters in any other respect. The story of that first Pepperrell and his son, admirably told by Byron Fairchild, is the undiluted essence of seafaring New England: the tale of why it grew and how it grew, an account of the sort of probity, dar- ing, independence of thought and action that motivated the Americans who lived an "amphibious life" and thought in terms of roaming the seas instead of building another motel and littering every roadside with beer bottles. Those days are gone, but there are still sermons in them, sermons, in particular, in the inordinate number of ship captains—mere boys, most of them—and "the tremendous responsibility, trust, and discretion resting in the master under the conditions of colonial trade. Not only was he respon- sible for everything relating to the navigation of his vessel, but he was also personally accountable for the cargo." Even today one can feel keenly for Captain Clampitt and his experience with the insularity he encountered in the West Indies, far, far back in 1718. He sailed Pepperrell's Bonetta to Barbados, arriving in March of that year, and found himself, through no fault of Pepperrell or his own, obliged to den up in that tropic paradise. Three seamen in succession "took the canoe," as mariners then referred to desertion. Then a Barbadian on whom he depended "went to Bermuda for a change of air." Then the ship sprung a 495 496 BOOK REVIEWS October leak, the cargo had to be unshipped and the vessel repaired—and Captain Clampitt's delightful stay in Barbados was prolonged almost to August. He discovered, as so many have discovered since, that New England has charms that are far superior to anything that a tropic island can produce. "I was never," Captain Clampitt wrote, "I was never so weary of any place in my life." From beginning to end of Fan-child's book there are hints of stories crying out to be told in greater detail. Take the affair of PepperrelPs sloop, the Hannah and Sarah. One of Pepperrell's North Carolina business associates had been disbarred because the governor of North Carolina disliked him. So when Pepperrell's Hannah and Sarah put into a North Carolina port, she was seized, condemned, and sold. "Colonel William received the news with a violent outburst of indigna- tion. 'Such a barbarous action I do think never was known amongst those that pretend to be Christians,' he wrote to Moseley. 'I have traded to your country about thirty years and had always a design to serve the country as well as myself, but such proceedings make a whole country's character suffer.' If he were not given satisfaction in the matter, he declared, he was 'resolved to carry it home.' He had, continued William, 'upwards of a thousand pounds there and a good friend able to manage that affair to advantage; and I will spend every penny of it, but I will have justice done me.' Having obtained certificates from Barbados testifying that Captain Walker had legally cleared when he sailed, and finally denied the oppor- tunity of compounding with the local Carolina authorities, Colonel Pep- perrell appealed to the High Court of Admiralty in London. On February 15, 1725, three years after the seizure of the sloop, the appeal was heard; but the registrar of the North Carolina court refused to transmit the records of the original trial to England. Although the Court of Admiralty held the North Carolina official guilty of contempt and made an effort to obtain the records, Colonel William was still in search of satisfaction five years later." The Pepperrells were fighters, as was handsomely proved later when the second William successfully urged an expedition against the supposedly impregnable French pirate-nest of Louisburg on Cape Breton and led that expedition to glorious though slightly drunken victory. Every voyage their vessels sailed was a venture, and every venture, in a way, was a fight—a fight to make certain that the ship captains sailed the proper course, and were properly paid for their cargoes. There were days when English merchants complained about the quality of New England salt fish, and declared that "plain dealing seems to be fled away from the earth" —a British complaint that the Pepperrells countered by sending their ves- sels to trade in Cadiz during periods "when Spanish privateers were off the coast of Portugal as thick as herring." The Pepperrells even had to fight their own captains who "were given to sighting pirates with as great a propensity as Cotton Mather and old 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 497

William Stoughton had for seeing witches, and that a shipmaster also could be fallible on such an occasion was demonstrated by an experience of Colonel Pepperrell's nephew, William Frost. On returning to Piscataqua from a voyage to Antigua, Captain Frost told of being chased along the coast for three days by a large sloop. When he finally managed to outsail the sloop, so his story ran, she hoisted a black flag and stood in for Block Island. The incident was duly reported in the Boston News-Letter as a narrow escape, but the sequel to Captain Frost's story, appearing in the next issue of the paper, proved that not every black flag sighted off the coast was the 'Jolly Roger/ 'The sloop that was tho't to be a pirate which we mentioned in our last/ the News-Letter stated, 'is since arrived here, being Captain Hardy from Maryland who only endeavored to come up with Captain Forst's [sic] brigantine to speak with 'em, and what Captain Forst took to be a black flag was a great-coat which they had hung up to dry.' " "In 1718 George Jaffrey purchased four gallons of rum from Colonel Pepperrell at a cost of eight shillings per gallon. Eight years later another Portsmouth merchant, Henry Reese, bought some three hundred gallons of rum from the Pepperrells at six shillings. In 1732 the Pepperrells made one sale at six shillings per gallon, another, of 'choice Barbados,' at seven shill- ings, and a third at ten shillings; and in 1736 they sold Barbados rum at nine shillings per gallon. Elsewhere in New England the price of rum followed a similar trend, although apparently on a somewhat lower level. During the 1720's the domestic product was priced in eastern Massachusetts at four to five shillings per gallon and rose to six shillings sixpence in 1735. New England rum was also quoted at four shillings ten pence in that year, and Barbados rum at five shillings nine pence." Rum, sugar, molasses, corn, osnaburgs, cotton, wool, nails, cod hooks, kerseys, lead, lumber, cordage, sal soda, shingles, tobacco, masts, naval stores, large duckshot, coral duck for small sails, "a piece of broadcloth of a fashionable color as good as can be bought for twelve or thirteen shilling per yard with shalloon mohair buttons and silk suitable to make it up," five Negro slaves, wine from Madeira, salt from Cadiz, and rum, always rum. William Pepperrell owned thirty-five vessels at the time of his father's death in 1734, and no shipment was too insignificant to be rejected—rum, planks, more rum, rugs, furniture, silver buckles, spectacles, table silver, oil; "carry as much fish as possible to make the cargo valuable"; "desks, tables, chairs, iron pots, pails, earthenware, English goods, gunpowder and shot, salt, osnaburgs, axes, two pairs of steel yards, a barrel of blubber, a few quintals of dried cod, and the ever-present rum, molasses and sugar." The detailed information in Messrs. William Pepperrell gladdens the heart of one who spent years in collecting similar information from divers sources, a large part of them unreliable. Here are all the details to be had by merely consulting the bibliography and the index. "The schooner loaded 32^ 'lasts' of salt, which was entirely legal. The rest of her cargo, however, 498 BOOK REVIEWS October consisted of 100 boxes of lemons, 20 barrels of raisins, and 32 jars of olives, 6 quarter casks and 2 jars of oil, 7 casks of sherry, and 20 dozen silk hand- kerchiefs, all of which should have gone to America only by way of England. The return cargo of the Betsey cost only 7500 reales. The balance that re- mained from the net proceeds of the goods landed at Cadiz, amounting to 10,700 reales, was paid over to Captain Oram." The Pepperrell triumph at Louisburg was complete—until after the war, when jealousy, envy, and gossip did its usual dirty work, and when Louis- burg, with customary after-war idiocy, was given back to the French, neces- sitating further waste, war, misery and loss of life. "All the bells in Boston were set ringing when word arrived that Louisbourg was taken. The streets were as crowded as on election day; and at night the townspeople continued the celebration with fireworks and bonfires, while lamps and candles flick- ered at every window. Many, and no doubt interminable, were the thanks- giving sermons preached. In London, the news was announced by the firing of the Park and Tower guns, and 'the joy of the city,' in the words of Christopher Kilby, 'was expressed by a general illumination, with bonfires and an excess of all the usual concomitants.' Nor was royal approbation wanting. As a mark of applause and reward of merit King George commis- sioned William Pepperrell colonel in command of a regiment in the regular army and conferred upon him a baronetcy." To the very end, Messrs. William Pepperrell is full of literary meat. Andrew Pepperrell, Sir William's chosen heir, was graduated from Harvard in 1743. "Not long after his graduation Andrew had made an offer of mar- riage to Hannah Waldo, Samuel's daughter. Hannah was willing, and the parents of both approved, but for one reason or another Andrew found it impossible to agree on a wedding date and kept putting it off for more than four years. Early in 1750 a date was finally set. Then, a few days before the wedding, Andrew wrote to Hannah asking that it be again postponed. The patient Hannah had endured too much. Waiting until, on the appointed day, the wedding party was all assembled, she announced that the cere- mony was to be postponed once more, and this time permanently. Six weeks later she married Thomas Fluker, secretary of the province." This contribution by Byron Fairchild and the American Historical Asso- ciation is of the greatest value to American letters.

Personal footnote to Mr. Fairchild: Richard Nason (p. 12) was not a Quaker. He helped Quakers, and was my great-4X-grandfather; but he was guilty of displaying some extremely un-Quakerish qualities, such as drinking rum when he felt like it, profanely cursing when the occasion demanded straight talk, and (as ensign of the town of Kittery) fighting beyond the Amur River if that was where the enemy was hiding.

Kennebunkportj Maine KENNETH ROBERTS 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 499

The American Revolution, 1775-1783. By JOHN R. ALDEN. [The New Amer- ican Nation Series.] (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954. xx, 294 p. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $5.00.) In the past seven years five histories of the American Revolution have appeared. Three, including the present work, even issue from the same pub- lisher. One wishes to know what service the latest history renders, other than filling a niche in the new American Nation Series. In one sense it constitutes a remarkable achievement. It would seem impossible, from the stirring nature of the events and the monumental resources now available to us, to rob the Revolutionary struggle of its life and drama, but somehow Professor Alden has managed the feat. His chief weapon against the hopeful reader lies in a stiff and jerky style redolent of the textbook, which puts forth an endless array of leaden facts, in the attempt to cover military, diplomatic, political, and international develop- ments in less than three hundred pages. After the Battle of Saratoga the last semblance of narrative disappears, and the chapters on the southern cam- paigns and the movement for confederation disintegrate into an indigestible mass of notes. The few pages that discuss the Loyalists (pp. 85-89) can illustrate the author's deficiencies. A series of statements explains that the Loyalists are not neatly to be classified in one or another mold. Each possible fact is qualified by a contrary fact, and joined by cautious connectives: to be sure, truth to tell, contrariwise, nevertheless, on the other hand, on the whole, however (I count six howevers), with a generous sprinkling of perhapses, probablys, and possiblys. Such sparkling prose occurs as "they [the Loyalists] were pious, as was the Reverend Jacob Duche, and again otherwise." The parade of qualifications finally concludes with this serpentine and unco- ordinated conclusion. On the whole, it would seem that the Tories, admittedly not so formidable in arms as the patriots, were also many fewer [!] in numbers, and that the patriots, never pressed to their utmost military efforts, especially in New England, would not have been easily conquered, even though they had not received aid from France and Spain.

Even the simpler statements are constantly qualified: "It was a daring and splendid plan, and it was brilliantly executed, in part" (p. 109); "Cress- well's judgment is possibly too harsh" (p. 128 n. 19). Alden says that if Washington's army had been destroyed in 1776, the patriot cause might have collapsed—and again it might not have (p. 127). A difficult problem in so crowded a book is to make personalities and events plausible. Thus the author states that General Howe should have risked a major engagement, but that both times he gambled, he lost. Greene is introduced as "talented," but immediately displays "bad judg- ment." Washington is inept at Brandy wine and clever on the next page at 5OO BOOK REVIEWS October

Germantown, but the sudden change is not explained. Few kind words are allowed Washington in any case, while high praise is handed Professor Alden's hero and everybody else's buffoon, General Lee. To show Alden's treatment as it compares with that of his immediate predecessors, I take at random the fall of Savannah to the British in December, 1778. An unsatisfactory sentence in Alden passes on that meager fact. Montross and Wallace give meaningful details of the investment, and Ward devotes nearly two pages to military analysis. Miller provides but the bare statement, but clothes it with the lively contemporary quotations that distinguish his work. Alden merely repeats Van Tyne's bald comment of half a century before. It can be said that Alden condenses his military narrative to make room for condensed political and diplomatic narrative, but this decision only enlarges the area of darkness. The epic fight between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis gets squeezed into a passing sen- tence, and the wilderness march of George Rogers Clark into half a sentence. The text is fully documented and ends with an extensive bibliography. The general reader to whom the book is addressed may wonder why so much scholarship bears so little fruit.

Michigan State College RICHARD M. DORSON

The First Saratoga. Being the Saga of John Young and His Sloop-of-War. By WILLIAM BELL CLARK. (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1953. xii, 199 p. Appendices, bibliography, index. $3.50.) Once again William Bell Clark has recovered from oblivion a segment of the naval history of the American Revolution. Save for the laconic entry— The first naval vessel named Saratoga was a sloop of war of 18 guns, authorized by acts of the Continental Congress dated November 20, 1776, and July 25, 1777; built at Philadelphia, commanded by Capt. John Young, October 9, 1780, captured four British vessels; fought engagements with British armed brig Elizabeth; lost at sea March, 1781 — in the Navy Department's Ships' Data, U. S. Naval Vessels^ little, if any- thing, was known of this vessel and her gallant captain until Mr. Clark undertook one of his characteristic rescue operations. During the past three decades he has devoted such leisure as could be snatched from an active career in business to the systematic exploration of all possible sources con- cerning Revolutionary naval history. By combing newspapers, and by seek- ing out pertinent manuscripts, not only in the obvious repositories, but in the attics of private individuals, Mr. Clark has obtained data that gives him a unique position in this period of our naval history. As the official naval records in the National Archives are all too scanty for the period preceding the establishment of the Federal Government, there are many occasions 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 50I when the Office of Naval History cites information furnished the Navy Department by Mr. Clark, and by his equally indefatigable friend, Lieu- tenant Commander M. V. Brewington, U.S.N.R. (ret.), now of Cambridge, Maryland, but long a constant worker in The Historical Society of Pennsyl- vania. The universal admiration for John Paul Jones and the respect paid his remains at the Naval Academy have tended to obscure the repute of other valiant sea fighters. As Mr. Clark observes in his preface: "Some naval officers of the American Revolution deserve the honor history has accorded them. Others have attained celebrity of a sort through eulogistic biographers rather than by demonstrated merit. Still others, worthy of fame but neg- lected by historians and lacking advocates, have been relegated to ob- scurity." Mr. Clark has already aided students of the Revolutionary navy by pub- lishing biographies of John Barry, Lambert Wickes, and Nicholas Biddle. Now, from the unsurpassed materials in his possession, he has recalled the sea service of John Young, a New York shipmaster who was commissioned a captain in the Continental navy on July 23, 1776, and who commanded the small sloop Independence before assignment to the Saratoga. John Young has been so obscure a figure that his Christian name has seldom been correctly given by the few people who have mentioned him. He was lost at sea with his ship in the spring of 1781 under circumstances never ex- plained, and joined those "which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born." From this limbo the present book retrieves him and his vessel, whose name has been so proudly borne by later ships of the United States Navy. The First Saratoga, like all of Mr. Clark's books, is meticulously docu- mented. The Louisiana State University Press has presented it attractively.

Boston Athenaeum WALTER MUIR WHITEHILL

Traitorous Hero: The Life and Fortunes of Benedict Arnold. By WILLARD M. WALLACE. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954. xvi, 394 p. Illustra- tions, bibliography, index. $5.00.) This analysis of the career of Benedict Arnold is unquestionably authori- tative. Moreover, the author has done a rather remarkable piece of literary work in constructing an extremely interesting story from the results of his painstaking research among source records in England as well as in America. Many of these source records are so conflicting that it must have been most difficult to make an appropriate selection from the material at hand. Criticism has been voiced already in the press that the book is something of an apology for Arnold, the arch traitor. This reviewer positively disagrees with this idea. He feels that such an opinion stems from a mere cursory 5O2 BOOK REVIEWS October scanning of the text and possibly close analysis of one or two particular chapters, rather than from a comprehensive study of the book as a whole. What is clearly apparent after careful perusal is the evidence of abysmal stupidity on the part of so many leading figures, military, legislative, and civilian, in America during the entire period covered by the book. Just why the thoroughly dishonest and untrustworthy Arnold should have been handed one important post after another in the face of his record of defalca- tions and other irregularities is difficult to explain. Even Washington him- self was far from blameless in this matter. The only plausible answer can be that Arnold was, without doubt, one of the greatest personal leaders of troops this country has ever known. Surprisingly enough, Professor Wallace omits completely any reference to the psychological aspects of Benedict Arnold's influence over the talented, charming, yet effeminate Major John Andre. To the mind of this reviewer, the omission is unfortunate, for it was, without doubt, the intense, dynamic, virile personality of Arnold that led the young adjutant general to disobey the specific orders of his chief, Sir Henry Clinton, for the first time in his brilliant military career. While the wordage devoted to certain incidents and episodes, notably Arnold's court-martial for malfeasance in office in Philadelphia after the British withdrawal, may be criticized as excessive, it may also be defended as offering incontrovertible evidence of the power of the traitor's personal magnetism. Certainly, no other interpretation can be placed upon the utterly ridiculous conclusions arrived at by the court. This book speaks volumes as an example of what can be accomplished by a trained historian with the financial backing of such a splendid institu- tion as the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. We await with interest more historical works of similar type and quality.

West Chester HENRY PLEASANTS, JR.

Franklin's Wit & Folly: The Bagatelles, Edited by RICHARD E. AMACHER. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953. xiv, 188 p. Frontispiece, appendices, bibliography, index. JS4.00.) "This book," says the editor in his foreword, "constitutes a complete edition and establishes the text" of Franklin's Bagatelles. The text occupies eighty-two pages, or less than half the volume. The remainder is devoted to a historical introduction, textual notes, appendices, bibliography and index. The volume is dedicated to the late Carl Van Doren, whose brother, Mark Van Doren, has contributed an appreciative preface. The popularity of these little classics from the time of their first printing is well known, and it is therefore surprising that a complete edition has not been attempted before. Sparks printed seventeen. Moreover, a collection of 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 503 the essays was made soon after they came from Franklin's hand press at Passy. Apparently unique in having escaped the ravages of time, it found its way into the hands of that lover of Frankliniana, William Smith Mason, and now reposes in the Yale Library. It is this collection, discussed in Appendix A, that serves as the editor's text. As for establishing the text, that was done by Franklin himself. As Mr. Rosengarten wrote at the time the edition of Franklin's writings by Albert Henry Smyth was being projected: "Franklin's 'Bagatelles' were no inconsidered trifles, but were carefully written," revised with studious and loving care and chosen for printing in "that admirable form which . . . has commended them to readers of all nationalities from Franklin's day to our own." However, we are much indebted to Dr. Amacher for making them available to the general reader in so attractive a form, with what are, for the most part, appropriate and illuminating notes. On the other hand, this reviewer is disturbed at the somewhat over- zealous attempt to explain the references and allusions in the text. The political and cultural life of the last days of the ancien regime were ex- tremely complex, and, as a background for the Bagatelles, dangerous, not to say treacherous, terrain for the unwary. Evidence of this appears repeatedly in Appendix B, Textual Notes (pp. 142-162). Thus, in discussing the manu- script of the well-known "Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout," there are serious misreadings. Quoting Mme. Brillon's note directly under the title, Dr. Amacher writes: "Corrige et augments de plusieurs fauttes par un scavanty et voue de nottes critiques par une femme qui rCest point scavante" Checking this against the original manuscript in the library of the American Philosophical Society, "voue" which does not make sense, is plainly "orne" True, Mme. Brillon's handwriting is difficult, but it is consistent, while the style has a literary flavor which makes the errors in the editor's transcrip- tion of the notes rather unfair to the lady! In the same connection there is an unfortunate explanation of the last sentence of Mme. Brillon's criticism of the purist who would correct Franklin's use of the French tongue, ". . . malheur a qui voudra mettre Franklin en bon frangais, on [not eu] y echouera comme a Montague." Study of the calligraphy definitely suggests not "Montague" but "Montagne," an accepted spelling in the eighteenth century of the much-admired essayist and moralist Montaigne. Hence, the labored identification, with the aid of a colleague, of "Montague" with an obscure college in Paris, of which Rabelais wrote that "the lice there were as large and as fierce as sparrow hawks," is rather wide of the mark. More- over, in order that there be no doubt as to who or what is meant, we quote a pertinent sentence from Franklin's letter to Mme. Brillon of November 17, 1780, the day before she refers to her corrections in the margin of the dialogue: "Bien des remerciementspour les trois dernieres Tomes de Montaigne que je renvoie" By contrast, an opportunity is missed in connection with one of Franklin's most charming compliments to Mme. Brillon. The editor quotes the par- 504 BOOK REVIEWS October tially erased note in Franklin's hand in the remarkable manuscript of "The Whistle," in the library of the American Philosophical Society: "I too have lost your neighbors, and when I think of you, I sing, I have lost my Euridice" (p. 145). This recalls the famous aria of Gluck's opera, Orphee et Eurydice, which, although sponsored by Marie Antoinette, had run head on against the musical traditions of the Italian school. The furor over the revolt reached its climax in 1779, and the passage is therefore an open invi- tation for an editorial note, not only on Franklin's amazing awareness of the political and cultural movements of the time, but of Mme. Brillon's and his musical competence. These are only illustrations of the richness of the historical background, the social and cultural aspects of which will be espe- cial features of Professor Chinard's forthcoming edition of the Franklin- Brillon correspondence. The canons governing editorial notes are not too clearly established, and of course vary a good deal according to circumstances. In the case of Franklin, and particularly the Bagatelles, a wise rule is to let them speak for themselves. Because of this and the keen interest in the Passy press types, especially reflected in Livingston's Franklin and his Passy Press, facsimiles of a title page or two would be most appropriate, while photoduplicates of parts of the remarkable manuscript of "The Whistle" would be appreciated by all interested in the inception and development of these literary classics. Despite the many merits of Dr. Amacher's little volume, a definitive edition of Franklin's Bagatelles, like that of the Autobiography, remains a challenge to the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.

American Philosophical Society WILLIAM E. LINGELBACH

The Founding Fathers. By NATHAN SCHACHNER. (New York: G. P. Put- nam's Sons, 1954. x, 630 p. Bibliography, index. #6.00.) This is a useful, readable, and strangely disappointing book. Covering the period from Washington's inauguration in 1789 to Jefferson's election in 1801, it provides a relatively detailed narrative of American political history through years of fundamental importance to an understanding of our na- tional experiment. There is no other work of recent date that renders quite the same service, and many will find in it a most helpful guide. This will be especially true for laymen and for students who desire an introduction to the period. Mr. Schachner is no stranger to the subject matter of his discussion. Through earlier studies of Burr, Jefferson, and Hamilton he has become well acquainted with the raw materials from which a history of this period must be drawn, and it is upon these materials he has chiefly depended in writing this his latest study. On the whole, the text is written with the life we have come to expect from the author's pen. 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 505 Nevertheless, the book is disappointing. It gives too much of an impres- sion of having been written off the top of the authors mind. In addition to occasional suggestions of hasty composition, the interpretation lacks depth and freshness. The pattern of treatment strikes one repeatedly as more than a little hackneyed, as something serving only to freshen the recollection of previous reading. The trouble is, perhaps, that Mr. Schachner has depended too much upon his own efforts. His citations are made almost exclusively to the original sources, and the bibliography of secondary works is surpris- ingly incomplete. Had he chosen to combine with his own firsthand knowl- edge of the period the full findings of other scholars, and to give his best thought to the problem, Mr. Schachner might have written a work of major significance. But this, in the estimate of one reader at least, he has failed to do.

Princeton University WESLEY FRANK CRAVEN

George Washington's America. By JOHN TEBBEL. (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1954. 478 p. Map, index. $5.00.) What the author of this book wished to do was to tell "the story of Washington's travels over the face of America, how he looked to the nation and how the nation appeared to him." It was worth doing, and he has done it very well. The story begins in 1748 as Washington set out from Belvoir in the Appalachian spring, and ends the winter day at Mount Vernon "when the journeys were over." The story is organized in a chronological-regional sequence of admirable clarity. The style is readable, without being common, and although there is a modest disclaimer that the book is not intended "for either scholars or students," a great deal of scholarship has gone into it. Few "scholars or students" write as agreeably as Mr. Tebbel, or have made it so easy to follow the constant shifting of the headquarters of the army and the neces- sitous reasons for it. Mr. Tebbel's profession is teaching journalism, and in the best sense of the word this book is reporting. It is timely, accurate, and observant—"The Lispenard House would now be near the Canal Street approach to the Hol- land Tunnel," or, "along what would now be Broadway to the upper end of Central Park." It is a good guide or travel book and also an excellent ac- count of the Revolution and the young Republic. The very nature of it brings out one of the most fascinating paradoxes of Washington's personality: the home-keeping traveler, who eagerly rode or ranged the triangle—Marietta, Ohio—Portsmouth, New Hampshire— Savannah, Georgia. Washington's own observations on people and places, particularly on the New England and southern tours, are well selected, and Mr. Tebbel has 506 BOOK REVIEWS October summoned a cloud of witnesses, men and girls, to give evidence on how he behaved. Occasionally, what "Washington must have thought" is a little gratuitous, but it is an interpretative cliche hard to avoid. It is customary for a reviewer to close with pained reference to "errors which mar an otherwise excellent book." Frequently these appear to be the insertions of the gremlins who hover over research. We may be sure, for example, that Mr. Tebbel knows that it was not "Clinton's force" but Howe's army at the Brandywine (p. 184). And certainly Franklin did not think a "cask of porter" was "wine," unless it was a cask of port (p. 313). To refer to "the constant failure of [Washington's] intelligence to inform him accurately" (p. 199) as to where Clinton was going in the summer of 1778 is, this reviewer believes, an error of judgment and of fact. While the Continental agents in New York never got inside Clinton's mind, where Clinton himself was lost in indecision and anxiety, their reports were amaz- ingly accurate, convincing Washington that no major effort was brewing, as was the fact. The long-range Continental intelligence was mainly excel- lent. It failed worst on the battlefield, as at Long Island and the Brandy- wine. There is, however, a composite of error (p. 308) expressed at such length as to make one wonder as to its source: "Henry Laurens had been compelled in honor to resign as President of Congress after his brother John had shot General Lee in a duel." Laurens resigned on December 9, 1778, because Congress voted down a resolution of his against Silas Deane, who, on the matter of his activities in Europe, had appealed to the public over the head of Congress. John Laurens was his son, not his brother, and his challenge to and duel with Lee occurred two weeks after his father's resignation and had nothing to do with him. But I do not find that these details "mar" the book. Washington was "a man for whom the visible world existed," and here is a colorful picture of the places and people of that world.

Hewlett, Long Island, N. Y. HOWARD SWIGGETT

Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book. With Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings. Edited by EDWIN MORRIS BETTS. (Princeton, N. J.: Published for the American Philosophical Society by Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1953. xxiv, 552 p. Illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. $15.00.) When Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book was published several years ago, it furnished a very welcome addition to the literature of eighteenth-century horticulture. To it has now been added the Farm Book which Jefferson kept for more than fifty years. The two volumes, carefully edited by Edwin Morris Betts, supplement each other and give a wealth of information, not 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 507 only about Jefferson and flowers and agriculture, but about the general life and economy of Piedmont Virginia plantations during the birth and early years of the Republic. The original manuscript of the Farm Book is in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, presented by Jefferson's descendants, who inherited it. In preparing it for publication, the editor has traced as many as possible of the missing pages dispersed into other libraries and collections, and the 178-page facsimile which forms the first portion of the work shows them inserted in the proper places. A few margins have become worn and mutilated by time and use; where possible, the missing data is supplied on the sheet so that the reader can see, at firsthand, the entries exactly as Jefferson made them. Not only Monticello, but Shadwell, Poplar Forest, and several other places are covered by the record. Jefferson owned much acreage, too much, he often felt. And each plantation had to be fully equipped and made as self-supporting as possible, for each was located at some distance from the others, and from markets for its produce and for buying. It was necessary to keep a full general account of essential operations, of the manpower, the yields, the losses and gains involved, quite apart from the records made on the individual properties. Not only the food for the multitude of persons employed, but their clothing, the nails and ironwork needed for building, were, in Jefferson's estimation, proper projects to undertake. In his enormous interest and determination to make them successful, as well as to make American agri- culture wholly independent of foreign goods and competition, he spent a great deal of effort and time. The capabilities of the Negroes were carefully assessed so that each might have a proper place in production, an expensive, and usually fruitless, search was made for new mechanical devices which would be not only laborsaving, but financially profitable. Sometimes this was carried to extremes, as in the insistence that fine cloth for the family wardrobe be locally produced; since the weaving was beyond his mechanic's ability, Jefferson persisted in finding weavers in Virginia who might be acceptable. Discreet hints from these finishers that better and cheaper material could be bought was the only reason for the final abandonment of such attempts. Ordinary, expected occurrences, such as inclement weather and freaks of nature, did not discourage Thomas Jefferson. After an unusually wet season he could write, "Nothing like it has ever been seen within the memory of man," ignoring the fact that this is the commonest plaint of all agricul- turists, and then go on to plans for the betterment of the next year's crop, with careful notes as to the disposition of the workmen among the various plantations, the gear for the problematical harvest, and the expected profit from the surplus. The continual losses experienced were, he realized, partly due to his own active participation in government, with too much time spent away from home and the care of everything necessarily left to others, yet 508 BOOK REVIEWS October he found a moment here and there for fresh, magnificent schemes, for a variety of notions This manuscript is supplemented by five hundred pages of notes. The editor has divided the subject matter into headings, such as "Slaves," "Gun- powder," "The Nailery," and so forth, made a short summary of the topic as a heading, and added pertinent extracts from letters and other writings by Jefferson or to him. The result is a series of dissertations on the varied aspects of a Virginia plantation, together with the unconscious revelation of character which follows the assembling of such letters and records. An introduction by Francis L. Berkeley, Jr., short biographies of persons men- tioned, excellent illustrations, some of them reproductions of Jefferson's own drawings, and an appendix and index complete the book. Mr. Betts has done a worth-while and valuable work in presenting, in such form, another source book to the public.

Williamsburg, Va. SARAH P. STETSON

The New York of Hocquet Caritat and His Associates, 1797-1817. By GEORGE GATES RADDIN, JR. (Dover, N. J.: Printed for the author by the Dover Advance Press, 1953. 172 p.) Not the least fascinating, or important, studies are what have often been called "the end-products of scholarship"—material turned up in the pursuit of a scholar's main concern. It seems inevitable that George Gates Raddin, Jr., following the career of Hocquet Caritat, that intrepid New York book- seller, Francophile, and champion of the democratic process, through early periodicals, diaries, proceedings and letter books, should offer us now a volume of peripheral material, the sum of which is a particularly rewarding and thoroughly documented picture of the growing pains of an early New York in fierce pursuit of cultural as well as commercial eminence—with not a few reflections of the Philadelphia scene. Mr. Raddin carries the city through the dreadful yellow fever epidemic of 1798 which provided Brockden Brown, then living there, with Gothic paraphernalia for two of his novels. Raddin makes striking use of con- temporary testimony, including that of Brown and of young Dr. Alexander Anderson, who suffered the appalling loss of brother, father, wife, mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law in the midst of his generally futile minis- trations. Little wonder that Anderson gave up medicine to become New York's foremost wood engraver. Exhaustive consideration is given the graphic arts, 1797-1804, and the attempts of Washington Irving's brother Peter and others to lead the citizenry from an interest in waxworks titivated by the display of such phenomena as "a nine-foot catamount in excellent preservation," rattlesnakes, and "a lamb with eight legs" to an intelligent understanding of the best in painting and sculpture. The activity of the Peales, father and son, inspired Edward Savage's Columbian Gallery which 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 509 included the work of Van Dyck, Reynolds, Rubens, Rembrandt, Michel- angelo and others. Remarked the columns of Irving's Morning Chronicle: "Philadelphia boasts a good museum; so, I trust, will New York under the fostering hands of its citizens. . . ." The culmination was the (ultimately American) Academy of Arts, which originated in a series of plaster casts of famous statuary procured at considerable expense. Its opening was delayed by a certain lack of anatomical catholicity in Gotham, as attested by the minutes of February 1, 1804, authorizing payment to "Mr. Edw. McComb for affixing fig leaves—twelve Dollars fifty Cents." Its fortunes are followed to the great exhibit of 1816, for which Mrs. Robert Fulton "very liberally expressed her consent" to the removal of Benjamin West's Lear and Ophelia's Madness from the Academy of Fine Arts of Philadelphia. Never far in the background is Caritat, his own contribution to the cul- tural upsurge, and his acute observation of the American character. Chapter IV deals with much more than Franco-American trade. Caritat notes astutely as early as 1797: "The United States, though averse to everything that looks like a standing military establishment, on account of those genuine republican principles which ought to animate every American, are nevertheless, by the prevailing politics of Europe, in a manner forced to deviate from principle." And later: "The stationary and printing business is, perhaps more encouraged in America than in any other country of the world—such are the blessings of liberty—they undoubtedly consume a vast deal more of paper, considering the population than we do in France." "The bulk of the people," he says, "are far better informed than in any other part of the world." The devious financial shifts of Caritat's onetime partner, the "notorious Isaac Riley ... a shrewd trader, an indefatigable worker whose flexible mind and active imagination permitted him to find business opportunities in every direction," are followed in a chapter which (accompanied by a valuable check list of Riley imprints) is most informative concerning the vicissitudes of publishing, bookselling, and literary taste in our young coun- try. Mr. Raddin here makes much use of the Lea & Febiger letter books in The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Incidentally, Riley's ambitious career came to a tame conclusion in Philadelphia, where he had a bookshop, first on Prune Street, then at 8 Decatur Street, and a home at the south- west corner of Eleventh and Chestnut streets. It is interesting, as a matter of modern psychological jargon, that he should write Henry Carey in 1817, at the breaking off of business relations: "... I have always & hope to in future conduct myself correctly respecting you & your Family—& I am sorry to find the Boilers of your Brain should have been washed on so high a steam." Mr. Raddin's book is scholarly, informative, well organized and well written.

University of Pennsylvania THOMAS P. HAVILAND 5IO BOOK REVIEWS October

The New Green World. John Bartram and the Early Naturalists. By JOSE- PHINE HERBST. [American Procession Series.] (New York: Hastings House, 1954. [xii], 272 p. Illustrations, bibliography. $4.00.) There is much to praise in The New Green World. It is an exceptionally well-written, easily read book, and holds one's interest throughout. It is an excellent start for the American Procession Series, and we Bartrams are pleased to note that John Bartram and his son were chosen for the first book. The author writes: "History has made heroes of the reckless, the acquisi- tive and the worldly powerful. The Bartrams have slipped down some crevasse among the mosses to be found only through search and patient listening." It is all too true that the name Bartramia in botany today can only be found in the family of mosses. Miss Herbst has succeeded well in digging Bartramia out of the crevasses in the rocks and exposing it to the view of the reading public. Her book is sure to be read by many to whom John and William Bartram meant absolutely nothing. For this she is en- titled to the appreciative thanks of those of us greatly interested in having these important men given their just due. They here receive more credit than has been accorded them since their deaths. The New Green World represents a considerable amount of careful study of available material pertaining to the lives and works of John and William Bartram, as well as to the times in which they lived. The author has painted a vivid portrait of the life and character of John, the only kind of portrait he can have since no likeness of him has ever existed. The illustration used with a question mark very definitely is not that of Bartram, nor was the original painted by Charles Willson Peale. It is greatly to be regretted that the facts are not always properly handled. Apparently this is due in some cases to the lack of sufficient research and in others to deliberate distortion. As a result, the book, which could have become an authentic reference, loses value as scientific literature. One can readily forgive the statement that John's uncle, Isaac Bartram—who died in 1707, four years before the botanist's father William—assisted his sister- in-law in raising the two boys, John and James, following the death of their father. The author states that John Bartram, the settler, had three sons and but one daughter. She does not seem to know of a second daughter, Eliza- beth, the only child born in America, who married John Cartledge, a fur trader. Much excitement followed Cartledge's killing of a drunken Indian who had attacked him. That incident must have had its effect on John Bartram's attitude toward the Indians, since he was about twenty-two years of age at the time. Miss Herbst copied the printer's error of identifying Lewis Evans as a surgeon; the word intended was surveyor. Perhaps it was carelessness in reading proof, but John Bartram was interested in "Physick and Surgery," not in "Physics and Surgery." These and similar slips are not very serious, but they do detract from the book as a reference work. 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 511

The journal of the trip to Onondaga is discussed quite fully. Why, know- ing better, did the author state that John Bartram was sent by the King of England to negotiate peace between the Five Nations and the Delawares, and to collect plants and other material for him? Bartram in his journal writes that it was Conrad Weiser who was going as an envoy of peace, sent by the governor of Pennsylvania at the request of the governor of Virginia. The King is mentioned in the book several times, but it is doubtful that he had any knowledge of the trip; certainly, he did not instruct John Bartram to make it as his envoy. It is interesting that after more than two hundred years the author has found the answer to the whereabouts of the journal of the Onondaga trip between the time Bartram sent it by Captain Reeves to Collinson in the spring of 1744 and its arrival in England in June, 1751. Captain Reeves and his ship were captured by the French in 1744, but he "Finally showed up in London with the sheets of Bartram's Journal safe on his person all the time." (And still in condition to be read and printed!) An attempt at dramatics, perhaps, results in part of a letter written to Peter Collinson, December 3, 1762, being tied to one which Bartram had written to Dr. Alexander Garden on March 14, 1756, by far the best letter he ever wrote. The book has it: "My head runs all upon the works of God in Nature; it is through the telescope I see God in his Glory." Then follows part of the Garden letter placed after a description of a midnight scene of Bartram (who never owned a telescope), with his eye to the telescope, being carried away by what he saw. Just substitute what John Bartram did write to Collinson, using the word "that" instead of "the" before the word "tele- scope," and note the difference! Had the author heeded the paragraph in the Garden letter just preceding the one she used, she would have read one on the floral kingdom in beautiful poetic prose, unsurpassed by anything his much-better-educated son William ever wrote. She could have shown that William so well inherited his ability to write that he influenced many poets, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Why did not the author stay closer to fact ? The book could have been an excellent reference work, and naturalists like Harper, Wildman, and others, who have loved and studied the Bartrams and written very accurate works on them, would have commended it, as would also the John Bartram Association.

Philadelphia FRANCIS D. WEST

Florida Fiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border, 1810-1815. By REMBERT W. PATRICK. (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1954. x, 359 p. Bibliography, index. $5.00.) For much better reasons than alliteration, Florida Fiasco is an appro- priate title for this book. The dictionary says that the meaning of fiasco is 512 BOOK REVIEWS October "a complete or humiliating failure," and Mr. Patrick's three hundred pages of text fully justify the word. Between 1811 and 1814 President Madison and Secretary of State Monroe were interested, or appeared to be, in various schemes which had as their purpose American possession of Spanish East Florida. In succession George Mathews, David Mitchell, and Thomas A. Smith were unable to fulfill what they believed their mission to be—the acquisition of East Florida. The circumstances and reasons for their failure are well shown in this extensively documented and, at times, unduly, detailed account. President Madison was well aware of the popular clamor that the United States should occupy the Floridas. Spain was involved in the Napoleonic Wars; England, for some years a violator of American "rights," was trying desperately to sustain her Continental allies. Was not the time opportune, nationalists asked, for American seizure of both Florida and Canada? Madison and Monroe do not show to advantage as the directors of Amer- ican policy in the Florida question. Patrick appears to be in agreement with the view expressed in 1827 by Joseph M. White, territorial delegate from Florida, in a letter to P. P. Barbour. White saw in the instructions given to Mathews "the commencement of all American aggressions against the prov- inces of the Floridas: to see the Secretary of State dictating to his agent the quibbles to which he should have recourse, and recommending the first of those baseless promises so to be worded as to deceive . . . without being binding upon him who made them." No study in which scholarship, ac- curacy, and honesty necessitate the recording of so much deception and aggression can be altogether pleasant, and this one, therefore, has much that is not sugar-coated. The author does not hesitate to express judgments which plainly show his attitude toward what is under discussion. His candor is one of the better features of his treatment of men and events, particularly since his position is well supported by the evidence he adduces. For Florida to be included in American territorial expansion is not surprising and presently it was ac- quired through negotiation. It is both ironical and paradoxical, however, that Madison and Monroe in their Florida policy did not scruple to use methods of the same type which they were denouncing as England and France applied them against the United States. Twice, in July, 1812, and February, 1813, the Senate refused to approve the proposed occupation of Florida. Senators who were more interested in defeating whatever Madison requested than in any other consideration were joined by those who on principle opposed what Senator William Hunter said was a war, "offen- sive," "unjust," and "wicked." From varied motives a democratic body came to the right conclusion and prevented Madison from an injustice against Spain. The careful research and generally good writing are marred by some re- grettable efforts to achieve liveliness. These seem all the more unfortunate because the author has shown that he need not resort to them in order to 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 513 present his case effectively. Surely, interest can be sustained and style be felicitous without these terms (quotation marks omitted): fledgling vulture, resilient brain, [prostitutes who] serviced the seamen, stricken eagle, scalp- less wonder, hatched the egg, Jackson vegetated. More careful proofreading would have eliminated the errors of referring to the early 1800's as in the eighteenth century, an occasional slip of grammar, and the misstatement of General Thomas Pinckney's age. More serious is the omission of maps. Per- haps there are too many lengthy conversations, though they are based on documents, and their use may be defended as a legitimate exercise of historical imagination. In a poor book these matters would not be as conspicuous as they are in Florida Fiasco.

University of Kentucky WILL D. GILLIAM, JR.

A History of Ohio. By EUGENE H. ROSEBOOM and FRANCIS P. WEISEN- BURGER. Edited and illustrated by JAMES H. RODABAUGH. (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society, 1953. xiv, 412 p. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. $6.50.) This book will long remain one of the worth-while results of Ohio's sesqui- centennial celebration of its statehood. It sets a high standard for state histories and of modern bookmaking. No expense has been spared. Any reader who picks it up only casually will be impressed by the more than three hundred illustrations and maps, all excellently chosen. Their presenta- tion was greatly facilitated by the two-column, 8^ x 11, enamel-paper page used. Their excellence is a tribute to Dr. James H. Rodabaugh, a former student of the authors, who was responsible for their selection, and under whose expert guidance the scholarly publications of the Ohio Historical Society have received national prize awards. The two authors have for more than a quarter of a century taught courses in Ohio history at the Ohio State University, have guided many theses of their graduate students in this field, and themselves have written widely in this field. The text of this volume is basically that of their earlier one, published in 1934 and long used as a college text. All chapters have been brought abreast of the latest work of scholars. One new chapter, "From the Great Depression to the State Sesquicentennial," has been added. Chapters on social and cultural history have been expanded, espe- cially the sections dealing with art, education, and recreation. It is an excel- lent book for the general reader and will serve as a point of departure for research students. They will welcome the full, up-to-date bibliography at the end of the volume.

Ohio University A. T. VOLWILER 514 BOOK REVIEWS October The World's Rim: Great Mysteries of the North American Indians. By HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER. With a Foreword by CLYDE KLUCKHOHN. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1953. xx, 259 p. Index. $475-) This is a rich and stimulating work, written and posthumously published by an American philosopher who was also a specialist in American Indian art and mythology. It is an exciting book which provides an acute and sympathetic insight into the life and mind of the North American Indians as expressed through the symbolism of their art and ritual. It is through his sympathetic understanding of the common humanity of the Indians as manifested through their dramatic symbolism that the author makes his most significant contribution. In brief, this is essentially a work of philo- sophical interpretation of ethnological material rather than a restatement and description of Indian ritual concepts and customs. Alexander endeav- ored to demonstrate the mystical idealism implicit in Indian symbolism and he chose, therefore, "the white pages" of Indian thought with the intention of showing it at its best. What I find most significant in the author's approach is his thesis of the essentially universal, symbolic significance of Indian art and ritual. The North American Indian emerges not only as a "primitive philosopher" as he was for Tylor, but also as capable of a degree of intuitive, philosophical, and poetic insight which reveals his common humanity and compares favor- ably with the heritage of the classic cultures of the Old World. According to Alexander, "there is something that is universal in men's modes of thinking, such that, as they move onward in their courses, they repeat in kind if not in instance an identical experience—which, if it be of the mind, can be understood only as the instruction which a creative nature must every- where give to a human endowment" (p. xvi). It is this emphasis upon "the human truth" expressed in identical ritual patterns regardless of the diver- sity of ethnic origins and cultural settings which characterizes the work as a whole. In other words, Alexander proclaims anew the doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind, but in a form different from that of Bastian and Tylor. He neither postulates a folk soul and "elementary ideas" as does Bastian, nor stages of mental evolution corresponding to cultural stages as does Tylor. Alexander's approach is, however, closer to Bastian's insofar as it is nonevolutionary. As against the prejudice of the Tylorian view, which tends to discredit "complex" and "advanced" ideas when reported of the Indians, and contrary to the approach of the extreme diffusionists, which presupposes historical diffusion from a common source, Alexander maintains that "noth- ing essential to the Indian cultures can be traced to other than native sources. . . . without the assumption of a long-seated and distinctive native development of American cultural ideas, we possess no intelligible picture of man in the Western Hemisphere" (p. xvii). 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 515

In order to demonstrate his metaphysical thesis of a common human nature and of the necessary forms of thought which emerge from the experi- ence of living to shape a philosophy of life, Alexander undertook a series of studies of typical rituals and ceremonies developed by the North American Indians. The rituals selected are the Pipe or Calumet rite, the tree and pillar cult, the rite of purifications, the rites connected with sacred stones, the Corn Dance, the rites of passage, the Sun Dance, the Sacred Infant, and the Algonquian Mystery of the Way (The Last Trail). These rituals afford a vision of the world as it appears to the Indian and symbolic interpretations of the meaning of human life. Throughout, the author finds striking parallels in the mysteries of the Old World rituals, such as the Eleusinian, Orphic, and Mithraic. Thus, the myths of the Indians are not thought to be merely rationalizations and validations of ethnocentric rituals peculiar to the In- dians as modern functionalistic ethnologists tend to think. According to Alexander, "human thinking is a truth-giving window into the world's reality" (p. 228). Human intuition as well as reason provides genuine insight into the relation of man and nature. The ritualistic symbolism of the Indian together with his so-called myths involve the principles of a realistic phi- losophy of life and conform, notwithstanding their "clouded shapes," to the essential reality of nature and of life. The "elemental agreements" are said to be far more basic than the "differences in the costume of thought" (p. 229). For Alexander, "the wheel of man's horizon and the wheel of man's time circumscribe his universe, and form the World's Rim, and this is the same for red man and white" (p. 230).

Indiana University DAVID BIDNEY

The Old Country Store. By GERALD CARSON. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. xvi, 330 p. Illustrations, appendix, index. $5.00.) In this book Mr. Carson gives an account of retailing in rural American areas which is encyclopedic in scope; let it not be assumed, however, that here is tedious reading. The style is gripping throughout, and there is choice humor on almost every page. In point of time the author begins with the year 1791, when the economic situation of the new nation had so steadied that a man inclined to trade had a fair chance to succeed. He concludes in 1921, when the automobile, good roads, chain stores, supermarkets and "cash and carry" had destroyed the atmosphere which made the old country store distinctive. In locale the book is largely confined to the northeastern quarter of the United States. Mr. Carson is alert to economic conditions in every period, and at the year 1861 places a division between the two parts of his work. By that time railroad building had been largely extended; the commercial traveler—the salesman for the suppliers—came into promi- nence; no longer was the country store proprietor obliged to make periodic 5l6 BOOK REVIEWS October buying trips to the nearest wholesale metropolis. The author conceives this to be a significant milestone in the history of the institution he presents. Mr. Carson was previously a successful executive in the advertising field. Among items he popularized for sale were breakfast foods and other pack- aged goods. Thereby he gained not only background but interest in the history of retailing. His research along this line has been really impressive. He knows the vocabulary of the stock in trade and the modes of business he considers. He also handles easily terms common long ago, but now nearly obsolete. How many readers today will recall the "pung," that heavy single sleigh which in winters a century since handled the burdens now taken over by the modern truck? Readers are carried through the age of barter, when hard money was scarce and the value of currency uncertain, when the storekeeper took in ashes, tanbark, barrel staves, goose feathers, flaxseed, maple sugar or home- woven fabrics in exchange for tea, spices, buttons, hardware and the like, which the farm did not produce. The whole story is told—long-term credits, battles of wits, secret price-marking codes, patent medicines, the loungers and their tall tales. At first nearly all commodities were handled in bulk, with the customer bringing his own molasses jug or sugar pail, and tea and rice were wrapped in brown paper; then came the invention of the paper bag, and the introduction of packaged and trade-marked goods. With the latter came a shift in advertising from the retailer to the manufacturer. Ingeniously, many topics, seemingly irrelevant, are discussed and some- how fitted in — the stage, the post office, the militia muster, the circus, the pack peddler, the book agent, the rivalry with mail-order houses. The posi- tion of the storekeeper as a man of consequence in the community is given a chapter. There is an interesting section on the keeping of accounts. One proprietor withheld from sale his last bunch of shingles because his customers' debits were on them. Another hung a boot on either side of the fireplace. In one he deposited cash received, in the other memoranda of payments. He could dump the boots and strike a balance. The advent of the high-pressure cash register salesman changed all that. The quality of the wealth of anecdotes can best be shown by quotation. When an early morning customer found the proprietor doing his own sweep- ing, the following conversation ensued: "Where's Eddie." "He's through." "Got anybody in mind for the vacancy?" "Eddie didn't leave no vacancy." When screening was not yet, the fly was ubiquitous. Said the storekeeper: "Ten flies come to one fly's funeral." Much later a representative of the Department of Agriculture visiting a farm remarked: "I see you have an auto but no bath tub." The farmer's wife replied: "You can't go to town in a bath tub." 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 517

The frontispiece, in color, is most artistic and is reproduced on the jacket. It portrays an old country store interior. The many old woodcuts and line drawings tell well their part of the story. In the appendix are listed most of the country store museums which preserve to view an almost extinct insti- tution. Here, also, Mr. Carson places his "notes on sources and authorities," in fact, a bibliography. The author has contributed a valuable and rather unique chapter to our economic history and has done this in a fascinating manner.

Hartwick, N. Y. ROY L. BUTTERFIELD

Highlights in the History of the American Press. A Book of Readings edited by EDWIN H. FORD and EDWIN EMERY. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1953. xii, 398 p. Index. $6.50.) This is an uneven collection of twenty-seven articles from seventeen magazines dealing with the presentation of news from pre-colonial times to the reign of Colonel McCormick, publisher of the self-confessed World's Greatest Newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. Readers may be momentarily dismayed, on opening the book, to find the first fifty pages devoted to such highlights in American press history as a description of sixteenth-century ballad journalism in England, or the way the English papers reported the Great Rebellion. The dismay, however, should be short-lived because there is reading here for many tastes. The style ranges from the Lucite prose of Time magazine to the more turgid handiwork of professors of journalism. In fact, its catholicity is the book's attraction and weakness. Every reader will find something to interest him. Few readers will be entertained by every piece in the collection. Perhaps the title might have been less misleading if it had been side lights or even spotlights in American press history. For example, there is a fine piece from the Pennsylvania Magazine about William Cobbett's sojourn in Philadelphia, but none about Charles A. Dana. This is not intended to be a criticism of the selection, but of the title. The book is designed to supplement, rather than replace, the standard histories of journalism. This it does remarkably well. The editors declare in the foreword: "Whenever limitations of space have forced a choice between excellent articles, we have sought to include those which best help to tell the story of the American newspaper in the most significant periods of its de- velopment, keeping also in mind the aim of preserving in book form the most rewarding of relatively inaccessible periodical articles about news- papers and newspapermen." The articles chosen come from a wide range of magazines: the Atlantic Monthly', Collier's, the New Republic, the American Mercury, Editor and Publisher and the Nieman Reports. Ten were culled from scholarly journals. 518 BOOK REVIEWS October William T. Laprade, in an illuminating piece on "The Power of the English Press in the Eighteenth Century/' comments: "Newspapers are more in the nature of relics than chronicles of their times. They have not served identical functions at all stages in their history." He points out that many of the leading statesmen of eighteenth-century England were inti- mately associated with newspapers and often wrote for them. Almost every writer of note contributed to them. The list includes Swift, Addison, Steele, Burke, Defoe and Johnson. Even though writing for the press, Johnson could not refrain from repeating the quip that while an ambassador is a man of virtue sent abroad to tell lies for the advantage of his country, a news- writer is a man without virtue who writes lies at home for his own profit. In another article, Gamaliel Bradford attributes this classical defense of newspaper impetuosity to Samuel Bowles, the great editor of the Springfield Republican: "It is no trouble at all to me that the paper contradicts itself. My business is to tell what seems to me the truth and the news today. It is a daily journal. I am not to live to be as old as Methuselah and brood in silence over a thing till, just before I die, I think I have it right." Joseph Pulitzer was one of the greatest publishers this country has pro- duced, as well as a vivid personality. Don C. Seitz, one of his lieutenants, recounts this story in a profile on his boss: "One day at the lunch table at Bar Harbor in October, 1899, the company was discussing the achievements of an able reporter, Charles W. Tyler, who had just done a very good piece of work. Mr. Pulitzer was complimenting Tyler highly. Professor Thomas Davidson spoke up: 'I cannot understand why it is, Mr. Pulitzer, that you always speak so kindly of reporters and so severely of editors/ 'Well/ he replied, 'I suppose it is because every reporter is a hope and every editor is a disappointment!' " Philadelphia PIERRE C. FRALEY

Negro Slave Songs in the United States. By MILES MARK FISHER. With a Foreword by RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Published for the American Historical Association by Cornell University Press, 1953. xvi, 223 p. Bibliography, index. $4.00.) Scholars and laymen alike generally agree that slave songs and spirituals occupy an important place as American folk music. Not so uniform, how- ever, are the explanations of the origins and meanings of these songs. A common lay view is that the songs are simply musical expressions of a variety of moods, experiences, and beliefs of an unsophisticated people. "Experts,"however, have taken a further range:"pure music"; "carriers of burdens" (both physical and spiritual); proof of "this and that about Negro people"; vehicles of Christianity; "the only American folk music"; the "sifting of centuries"; the compositions of anonymous "Unknown Bards"; copies of white revival songs; sources of racial history—these are but a few 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 519 of the terms which students have used to describe the origins and meanings of the slave song. To this company is now added Dr. Fisher's present history and interpretation. It is the author's thesis that slave songs are "historical documents" which are "best understood when they are considered as expressions of individual Negroes which can be dated and assigned." The songs "were products of a particular time and place and were meaningless outside of that frame of reference." They "were actually history," giving impressions of real occurrences. In extension of this hypothesis, Dr. Fisher has separated the period between 1740 and 1867 into subperiods, each characterized, according to the author, by distinctive developments in the history of the Negro in America and by correspondingly distinctive patterns and moods in slave songs. The period 1740-1815, for example, was marked by Negro camp meet- ings, by colonial revivals, by religious instruction of Negroes by whites, and by the gradual development of separate Negro denominations—all parts of the Christianization process which had begun in earlier colonial times. Twelve slave songs illustrative of these developments are discussed by the author. In these various religious activities there was a continuous counter- point engendered by the African cult—protest against the injustices of slavery. This protest, the author holds, is accordingly reflected in some twelve slave songs in which "hell" is equated with the South and slavery, in which "heaven" is freedom, and in which Bishop Francis Asbury is averred to be the "Moses" who should "tell ole Pharoh [to] let my people However, in Dr. Fisher's next period, 1816-1831, Moses has ceased to be Bishop Asbury and becomes a Negro who had sailed to Liberia under the aegis of the American Colonization Society and who, by 1824, was being implored to "stretch out your rod and come across" to lead slaves back across the "Jordan" (Atlantic) to "that bright glory" (Africa). Historically, this time segment coincides neatly with a period of great activity by colonizationists; and in extension of his thesis, the author finds colonization meaning in some thirty slave songs which, he holds, were sung at that time. Some twenty other songs of similar mood and intent were to come forth between 1832 and the Civil War. In these songs Liberia becomes "Zion" or "Jerusalem" to which "the old ship of Zion" would carry true believers, who, now "done wid massa's hollerin," would "meet at Zion's gateway" where Jesus "will bring you milk and honey." Or, failing the water passage, transfer to Africa might be accomplished by a "climb up Jacob's ladder." Still other songs rejected colonization and embraced instead the insurrec- tionary spirit of Nat Turner: Jerusalem, the actual tactical objective of Turner's Virginia band, easily fitted into slave songs. When all else failed —manumission, insurrection, colonization, freedom "up North"—the slave would sing an other-wordly song of "bright mansions above." With the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, his songs would 52O BOOK REVIEWS October include the more joyous "Look What a Wonder Jesus Done" and "No Man Can Hinder Me." Dr. Fisher has accomplished a remarkable task. Not a collector, he has nevertheless pored over the great body of extant slave songs and has related them to religious practices, to social and economic aspects of slavery, and to the hopes of the bondsmen. He has examined the symbols, images, and concepts which appear in these songs. Most creditable is his first chapter, "History in the Music of Negroes," an essay which telescopes into a few pages much of the African background and which summarizes the scholar- ship on the slave song. Equally outstanding is the bibliography which will be attractive to both laymen and students. Unfortunately, the volume is marred by what may be called a "Pro- crustesian tendency": One recalls the legendary Greek character who would shorten (by cutting off the extremities) or stretch the bodies of his victims, the better to make them fit a certain bed. All too frequently—especially in the chapters which are concerned mainly with songs with colonization con- notations—Dr. Fisher seems to be at great pains to force his materials to fit a pattern. Indeed, the author uses specific language evincing that a colonization meaning is surmised rather than demonstrated: "A song which suits the 1824 period . . ."; or, "Colonization interpretation is also possible for a song about poor Rebecca Lawton, who knew in advance that she would never enjoy the benefits of African colonization." (Italics added.) How Rebecca obtained such advance information is not explained by Dr. Fisher; neither is it clear from the source indicated by him in his footnote. The interpretive note contained in the author's indicated source states that "none could say" concerning the meaning of the song; of a certain explana- tion given by a collector the editors of the source hold that "... even this was vague, and all else vaguer." Similarly, in many of the alleged coloniza- tion-theme songs the only evidence of such meaning is Dr. Fisher's state- ment, his constant source (Allen, Ware and Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, one of the earliest compilations) doing little more than giving the words and music of the songs. Other interpretations which the author has given to other songs are similarly without demonstrated foundations. These faults are perhaps inevitable in an interpretive work of this kind. Although Dr. Fisher has attempted to put the songs into their historical period and setting, it is nevertheless true that that environment was so com- plex—and perhaps so remote, in terms of recapturing unequivocal details— as to make it a very uncertain historical technique to assign precise author- ship and dates and to suggest inferences as to origins and meanings from so great a distance. Thus, the reviewer cannot share with the author of the foreword the enthusiasm for "startling" or "revolutionary" findings. Rather, one congratulates the author for a stimulating and provocative, but not definitive, examination and interpretation of slave songs.

Morgan State College WALTER FISHER 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 521

The Nebraska Question, 1852-1854. By JAMES C. MALIN. (Lawrence, Kansas: Published by the author, 1954. x, 455 p. Appendix. $4.00.) Professor James C. Malin, an independent and original thinker who scorns conventional interpretations and works out every problem afresh on the basis of the sources, has now applied these talents to an extremely detailed study of The Nebraska Question, 1852-1854. Despite the amount of historical energy which has already been expended on the decade of the 1850's, he emerges with a fresh treatment, just in time for the centennial of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which suggests that that law has been much maligned and is really worth celebrating after all. While Mr. Malin is a conscientious scholar of minutiae in the most orthodox Teutonic tradition, he is also as much, or more, interested in historiographical problems of causation and interpretation. What he is try- ing to do here is to refute what he considers the stereotyped abolitionist approach to pre-Civil War history which made slavery the central issue in the Kansas-Nebraska furor. He begins with the new technological develop- ments, which, by replacing human power with mechanized power, were revolutionizing western civilization in the mid-nineteenth century. Steam power, especially, in the form of the railroad, was altering societies formerly dependent on water transportation by making possible the invasion of large interior land masses. In the United States the fact that it was now feasible to settle the Great Plains explained Stephen A. Douglas* sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Neither he nor the people of northwestern Missouri had any interest in extending slavery; Mr. Malin goes to great lengths to show how the dictates of geography naturally caused them to think of Nebraska's becoming a small farm and even manufacturing area like the North. But the same mechanical revolution that inevitably led to the organiza- tion of the Nebraska also promoted everywhere a tendency toward centrali- zation and uniformity, of which the prohibition and nativist movements of the 1850^ were two examples. Thus for Mr. Malin one should not view the Nebraska question in traditional terms of slavery versus abolitionism; rather, Douglas' principle of popular sovereignty, far from hurting the cause of freedom by increasing the possible area of slavery (for realistically this was almost impossible to do), instead represented the moral principle of freedom in the conflict between the forces of nationalism, centralization, and uniformity and those of self-determination and localism. Therefore, Mr. Malin views the Kansas-Nebraska Act sympathetically not only as an admirable effort to cope with the very real problem of how to protect individuals, localities, and minority groups from the national government, but also as an application of the Jeffersonian doctrine of the right of each generation not to be bound by the dead hand of the past, but instead to solve current problems as it sees fit. 522 BOOK REVIEWS October Yet this combination of abstract historical theory and specific factual data, which can be a very effective technique, does not quite result in the self-evident geometrical demonstration that one feels Mr. Malin intended. Certainly, it is a refreshing reappraisal, possibly, as Mr. Malin himself says, "The most important contribution to the subject since the works of Allen Johnson and Frank Hey wood Hodder," but there are also a number of difficulties that make the volume far less simple reading than the above summary might suggest. To be sure, Mr. Malin announces that "no field requires greater toughness of intellectual fiber than history" and that his analyses demand "sustained effort and precision of thought," but he makes it needlessly hard for the reader to perform his appointed role. Not only does the book examine in detail a number of superficially unrelated subjects, but it leaps back and forth from one to the other in the most disconcerting fashion without the aid of any explanatory transitions. Furthermore, the style itself is curiously harsh and abrupt, even dogmatic, though lightened by an occasional sardonic thrust. (And is there any good reason these days for perversely refusing to capitalize "Negro"?) Moreover, Mr. Malin's own efforts for "precision of thought" involve such lavish use of abstractions, like "closed time and space unit constructs," "conceptual and semantic forms," "original propositions" and "multidimensional space," that they come close to a private jargon which confuses the issues more than it illumines them. More serious, the methodology is not as entirely convincing in its scien- tific rigor as this impressive terminology would imply. Mr. Malin bases his conclusions almost entirely on a minute examination of scattered files of obscure newspapers with little attention to manuscript material. But is the newspaper as trustworthy a guide as he appears to think, especially when he concedes that his elaborate analysis of the meaning of these articles is based not "on mere literal readings of the documents"? At times his overly subtle worrying over the nuances of language suggests that Mr. Malin is applying the literary techniques of the "New Criticism" too readily to historical material in assuming that the local Missouri editorial writer of the 1850's is susceptible of as elaborate an explication de texte as his eastern contemporary, Herman Melville. These various obstacles by no means undermine the book's tremendous value, but they do make it almost impossible for the reader with only a slight background to unearth it and probably explain why Mr. Malin pub- lished his work himself instead of through a commercial firm. We may be thankful, however, that he had not only the industry to do the research and thoughtfulness to evolve the interpretations, but also the determination and ingenuity to make the results available to us.

University of Pennsylvania WALLACE EVAN DA VIES 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 523

Americans Interpret Their Civil War. By THOMAS J. PRESSLY. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1954. xvi, 347 p. Appendices, index.

From the spring of 1861 to the present day, books, pamphlets, and articles have poured from American presses in unbelievable abundance on the subject of our Civil War. Tracts, documentary collections, pictorial records of great emotional impact, diaries and memoirs of participants, histories and biographies of all levels of competence now await the reader or searcher. Selecting from this abundance the major histories of the war, in particular those written by trained historians, and analyzing these with the writers' backgrounds, times, and assumptions always in mind, Mr. Pressly has made an important contribution to the history of ideas in America and to our historiography. In addition, and incidentally, he has provided us with what amounts to a critical vade mecum to Civil War literature: read Pressly, and you can be forewarned of your author's angle. During the conflict Unionist writers fixed the war guilt on the South for its rebellion, begun by the South at Sumter, and led by a conspiracy of slaveholders who had sought long and unsuccessfully to impose their pecul- iar institution on this free country. The assassination of Lincoln reaffirmed the conviction of Southern wickedness and the military victory over the Confederacy reassured the North of the righteousness of its cause: the forces of evil had been overcome. The Republican policy of waving the bloody shirt, and the first history by a trained historian, Von Hoist, continued these attitudes well into the 1880's. Southern writers during and after the fighting placed the war guilt directly on the Lincoln administration, wrote of the long tyranny and coercion by the North, and asserted that secession was a legal right of sovereign states. Even in the humiliation of their defeat they looked forward to justification and vindication in the future. As the years passed and a new generation emerged, great economic changes were taking place throughout the country, and the new spirit of nationalism helped to foster sectional reconciliation. North and South began to admit that perhaps there were two sides to the questions involved in the war. Symposia, such as Battles and Leaders of the Civil War> written by participants on both sides, were published. The printing of the Official Records, which was to run to 128 volumes, was begun. James Schouler and John W. Burgess, writing at this time, dropped the "conspiracy" theory and presented a mixture of old and new attitudes, e.g., the North was right in the war, while the South was right in Reconstruction. James Ford Rhodes's history, though it reached conclusions similar to Burgess', was something new, in that the author undertook to be scrupulously impartial; his books became milestones of fairness and balanced judgment and were commended in North and South. Rhodes was the last of the great self-trained amateurs, and was followed by younger men trained for history as a profession in the recently estab- 524 BOOK REVIEWS October

lished graduate schools in eastern universities. From these men came new interpretations of the war cutting across sectional lines: the frontier, evolu- tionary, and nationalistic views of F. J. Turner and Woodrow Wilson, the social history of J. B. McMaster, and the evolutionary and economic emphases of Edward Channing. At the turn of the century the "nationalist" historians were predominant. The era of progressivism and social reform was reflected in the breezy and readable account of the Civil War as the Second American Revolution in The Rise of American Civilization by Charles A. Beard and his wife (1927). They gave economic forces a crucial role, and the "triumph of business enterprise" was deplored. The book had immense popularity and influence in the universities and with thoughtful general readers. Purely Marxian interpretations of the war written at this time appear to have caused little stir except among Socialists. From their beginnings in the seminars of William A. Dunning (a Northern man) at Columbia early in the century, Southern historical scholarship and historiography made great strides. Dunning's students were pioneers in the collection of source materials, the establishment of archives, the teaching of courses in Southern history, and the training of graduate students in universities in the South. Certain economic, cultural, and sociological ten- sions of the ic^o's and 1930's nevertheless shattered the irenic situation in Southern historiography, and books began to appear from Southern pens which read like the speeches of the fire-eaters of the sixties. Subsequent to World War I the disillusionment and revulsion against war led to a re-examination of the efforts for compromise made in 1860-1861 and a reappraisal of the figures involved. In the "revisionist" works that fol- lowed, psychological factors were investigated and the abolitionists and other extremists lost some of their luster. Mr. Pressly calls his last chapter "The Confusion of Voices." Rhodes had become the whipping boy of the younger scholars. Morison felt that "war does accomplish something, that war is better than servitude, that war has been an inescapable aspect of the human story." Reinhold Niebuhr empha- sized the "reality of evil in the universe, the complexity of the problems faced by human beings, and the tragedy inherent in existence." The "new nationalist tradition" appeared, and the time seemed ripe for a synthesis. Allan Nevins attempted this in his Ordeal of the Union, the largest-scale history of the war ever undertaken, and the reviews "revealed not only a sharp disagreement in interpretations of the causes of the Civil War but also that some historians of the 1940^ and 1950^ wrote of the Civil War with a greater emotional intensity than had their predecessors a half- century earlier." Pressly concludes on this note: "Thus, by the 1950's an anomalous situation prevailed: the further the Civil War receded into the past, the greater the disagreement among twentieth century historians over its causes, and the greater the strength of the emotions with which these divergent viewpoints were upheld. One could almost fancy himself back in 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 525 the i86o's once again." The author has succeeded brilliantly in relating the war writings to their times in this ninety-year cycle; future readers will be grateful for his achievement in what they probably will be calling the Era of Confusion.

Columbia University MILTON HALSEY THOMAS

A History of the Southern Confederacy. By CLEMENT EATON. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954. xiv, 351 p. Index. $5.50.) This is not merely a military history of the people of the Southern states during four years of civil strife. Professor Eaton says in the preface of his book that he has "sought to achieve a balance between the social, political, and military history of the Southern Confederacy. Instead of giving a de- tailed, technical account of battles, I have sought to portray the human drama and the significance of the military campaigns." He has achieved his purpose and in a brief treatment has succeeded in portraying the life of a people at war. Professor Eaton recognizes the divided mind of the South with regard to secession and makes the point, a perfectly valid one, that John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, and Northern support of it, more than any other incident solidified the people of the lower South in the view that they could no longer hope for protection of their institutions under the Federal Government. Then, it was Lincoln's call for troops to coerce the seceded states that forced the upper South to secede. A new government established and the Civil War having begun, the author takes his readers behind the scenes into the inner councils of President Davis, his Cabinet, and Congress; shows the discord between the state and the general governments, the weakness of Confederate diplomacy, and the lack of a central command in military strategy; then he lets them see the common soldier in the field, the economic disintegration of the home front, the tragic effect of war on the social and cultural life of a people, and, finally, the decline in morale and the loss of will to continue the fight by the war-weary Southerners. Strong points in the author's presentation are such neglected phases of the military side of the Confederacy as logistics, strategy, and the western campaigns. He sees the wide dispersal of troops by the Confederacy as a fatal weakness. And he plays up the effectiveness of the Grant-Sherman plan of divide and conquer. Another strong point in Eaton's approach is his effort to show the devastating effects of war on the human spirit. The Civil War not only left a spirit of defeatism, but also the corrosive memory of the lost cause. Anyone knowing Professor Eaton's keen interest in, and broad knowledge of, intellectual and cultural history will not be surprised to find considerable discussion of this phase of life in his History of the Confederacy. His frame 5^6 BOOK REVIEWS October

of reference is that the Southern people were extremely conservative. This attitude and the fact that his data are drawn from a wide variety of indi- vidual personal sources lead Professor Eaton into contradictory statements that mar the general excellence of the book. One or two examples will have to suffice. He reports that a Richmond publisher reprinted a Northern translation of Les Miserablesy "but carefully omitted the passages reflecting Hugo's abolitionism." He then says that a reviewer in the Southern Literary Messenger "regarded it as a sublime work, marred only by 'the blotch* of Hugo's antislavery views." Again the extreme, conservative Southerners wrote a constitution that contained such progressive features as the item veto and cabinet participation in congressional discussion. And, while not a seafaring people, Southerners were the first to develop the torpedo into use as a formidable and practical weapon of war and to develop the submarine and ironclad in naval warfare. In spite of its full coverage, one notes the failure to mention Jedidiah Hotchkiss's work as a cartographer and the Jonesboro (Tennessee) Confederate Iron Works in their respective places. One serious error is noted: namely, John A. Gilmer not John A. Gunther was the North Carolinian to whom President Lincoln offered a Cabinet post. Professor Eaton's interpretations are generally sound and ably supported. However, he overlooks a major factor in why the Southern states seceded. Was it not because the people felt that the United States no longer gave them the sort of government they wanted and because of their implicit belief in the right of any people to a government of their own choice? Again, in weighing the strength and weakness of the two governments at war, Professor Eaton overlooks the fact that the United States was a well- established and going concern, whereas the Confederacy was organized in haste during the crisis of secession and was forced to fight for its existence at the very time it needed order and freedom if it were to succeed as a system of government. These are matters of opinion, however, and do not offset the fact that this is an intensely interesting and admirably balanced study and, for a brief treatment, an exceptionally thorough one.

University of North Carolina FLETCHER M. GREEN

The Fremantle Diary. Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel James Arthur Lyon Fremantle > Coldstream Guards', on His Three Months in the Southern States. Editing and Commentary by WALTER LORD. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954. xvi, 304 p. $4.00.) On April 2, 1863, one month after he had left England, Lieutenant Colonel James A. L. Fremantle of Her Majesty's Coldstream Guards came ashore at the village of Bagdad on the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande. He went on to Brownsville, Texas, and from there proceeded northward and eastward through the Southern Confederacy, with a side trip to visit Bragg's army at Shelbyville in middle Tennessee. Continuing eastward from 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 527

Atlanta to Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, he went north to Richmond, Virginia. He then went on to join Lee's army, at that time en route into Maryland and Pennsylvania. "Armed with let- ters of introduction from the Secretary of War (James A. Seddon) for Generals Lee and Longstreet," Fremantle was assured of a suitable intro- duction. On June 22 he arrived at Lee's headquarters, on June 27 he caught up with General Longstreet, and on June 30 he first met General Lee. He was present with Lee's troops throughout the Battle of Gettysburg and witnessed much of the fighting from various points of vantage, including a seat in a tree. He accompanied the Confederate army on its retreat as far as Hagerstown, Maryland, from which point he went to Cumberland, Mary- land, to Johnston, Pennsylvania, and eastward to Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York. He sailed for England from New York on July 15, 1863, three months and fourteen days after landing at Bagdad. Fremantle kept a diary "as well as I could (from) day to day during my travels throughout the Confederate States." He was a sympathetic and accurate observer who recorded his observations of the "wonderful strug- gle." With a strong sympathy for the Southern cause, he was a good mixer, equally at home with the wild and reckless Texans, the elite of Charleston and Richmond, the country people and the Negroes, the rough and friendly Confederate soldiers, or the statesmen and generals. He met most of the important leaders of the Southern Confederacy and wrote of them with sophistication, humor, simplicity and understanding. Fremantle arrived in the Confederacy at a time when the South still hoped for active aid from Great Britain; he left for England witft the feeling that the South would eventually win the war. Except for his conclusions, no diarist of this period is more dispassionate or objective in his observations. The diary will always remain an authoritative and valuable record of this critical period in American history. In September, 1863, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published "The Battle of Gettysburg and the Campaign in Pennsylvania" as an "Extract from the Diary of an English Officer present with the Confederate Army." This account covers the period from June 20 to July 15, 1863, and makes up chapters X to XIV inclusive in the present reprint. Fremantle's complete account was published in book form in London late in 1863. The following year it was reprinted in New York by John Bradbury. Several months later the complete diary was again reprinted, apparently from the New York reprint, by S. H. Goetzel of Mobile, Alabama, in the so-called wallpaper edition. Until now it has not been reprinted, although it has been frequently cited and quoted from. The reprinting of out-of-print publications that have historical value and interest is usually worth while because such narratives are thus made avail- able to a wide public interested in the period and subject. Too often, how- ever, the editing of such reprints leaves much to be desired. This reprint of The Fremantle Diary is no exception. 5^8 BOOK REVIEWS October The editing is carelessly done, there is no indication as to what edition of the diary is reprinted, and there is no biographical sketch of Fremantle. Chapter headings in the present reprint did not appear in previous print- ings. Likewise, the editor has made changes in paragraphing, spelling, and punctuation without comment or explanation. No attempt has been made to identify unnamed persons mentioned in the diary. The author's notes are interesting, but frequently superfluous. In addition, they contain numerous errors of statement, and some words in the text are misspelled. For example, General John Pope becomes "James" Pope (p. 272); General W. N. Pendle- ton, Lee's chief of artillery, becomes "young" Pendleton, although he was at the time nearly fifty-four years of age (p. 277); Bermuda Hundred be- comes "Bermuda One Hundred" (p. 288); it is implied that Mrs. Peters was present "in a private room" when General Earl Van Dorn was shot and killed by the enraged Dr. Peters (p. 278). General J. E. Johnston did not retreat "all through late '63 and early '64"—Johnston did not assume command of the Confederate Army of Tennessee until December 27, 1863, and remained encamped about Dalton, Georgia, until Sherman began to move on May 5, 1864 (p. 270). Furthermore, the editor's characterization of General J. B. Magruder is exaggerated. Magruder did not have a career of "wonderful European junkets"; he went to Europe, on leave, in the mid- 1850's to visit his wife and children, who were living in France and in Italy; he went again late in December, i860, on an official tour of observation. Although eccentric and an advocate and user of good cheer, Magruder was a good soldier and a leader with ideas (p. 257). Slang phrases that seem out of place are frequently used in the editor's notes, and there is no index. The end-paper maps, showing the route fol- lowed by Fremantle, are a useful addition.

Locust Valley•, N. Y. THOMAS ROBSON HAY

U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition. By BRUCE CATTON. [The Library of American Biography.] (Boston: Little, Brown and Com- pany, 1954. x, 201 p. Index. $3.00.) This is not "just another Grant book," nor, on the other hand, a military treatise of Grant's campaigns, but a well-written, brief life history of Grant the Man, Grant the Soldier, and Grant the President. There has always been a need for a book of this type on Grant, and Bruce Catton, fresh from his literary laurels won for A Stillness At Appomattox and its predecessor histories Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road—a narration of the career of the Army of the Potomac—now turns to the man who brought that army to its triumphal climax and with the same sure brush strokes paints his portrait for all to see. This volume is the first in the series of The Library of American Biog- raphy, edited by Professor Oscar Handlin of Harvard and intended to I954 BOOK REVIEWS 529 analyze the relationship of the individual to American history, of the man to the events in which he is involved, and to demonstrate how each force reacted on the other. Like many efforts of this nature where a series on historical characters or episodes is written by different authors, it is difficult to maintain the high standard usually found in the initial volume, and this reviewer feels that whoever follows Bruce Catton and his Grant will have a formidable task. In his preface Dr. Handlin says, "Grant moved unsteadily into the nation's highest office. ... as a civilian the very qualities that made him a great soldier proved a liability." The point is then made that Grant's failure as President rested on his military training of complete obedience to his superior officers: Grant considered Congressmen his "supe- rior officers" and made no effort to check their ill-advised acts with regard to the South and other matters, or to drive them to do his will rather than he theirs. Then Dr. Handlin takes a position that many will question when he says, "It may also, by analogy, illuminate some of the problems of a later post-war era, which in 1953 again saw a general enter the White House." When Mr. Catton is writing of Grant the Soldier, his intimate under- standing of the man, and his ability to select the right anecdote or charac- teristic to demonstrate his character is notable, but when he turns to Grant the President and the political snares which confronted him on every side the picture is not so vivid. In one paragraph in this very interesting book, Catton sums up his reasons for Grant's failure as President when he says: "He was before long to become President of the United States and his last two years as general gave him the worst possible training for the place. He had a defective con- ception of the Presidency to begin with. When Congress replaced President Johnson's reconstruction plan with one of its own and reduced Johnson to sheer impotence, it confirmed Grant in that defective conception and made it even more defective. In the end, it became humanly impossible for Grant to be a strong President." Grant saw himself as the servant of Congress, Catton thinks, and as a purely administrative officer instead of as the Chief Executive. This book will be very useful to the reader who wants to learn about Grant in a short volume, and a "must" to the student of the Civil War, who will find familiar material presented with a fresh and entertaining viewpoint.

Paoli KENT PACKARD

Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. As Recorded by LUCIEN PRICE. (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown and Company, 1954. x, 396 p. Frontis- piece, index. $5.00.) Alfred North Whitehead was one of the seminal minds of his times. His background was that of a middle-class Victorian English intellectual. The 53O BOOK REVIEWS October son of a parson, his schooling followed the old classical tradition. At Sher- borne, one of the oldest of English schools, he was soaked in the literature of Greece and Rome. He said himself that he could read Greek as easily as he read English. From Sherborne he went to Cambridge and until he was fifty or thereabouts he remained at Cambridge and made a scholarly reputa- tion for himself as a mathematician. Then, suddenly, in 1910, he pulled up stakes and took "a bottle washing job" at London University. He was a brilliant success at London. Yet, fourteen years later, when he was sixty- three, he pulled up stakes again and accepted a call to Harvard. "Don't cling to the old," he remarked on one occasion, "because it made you glad once: go on to the next, the next region, the next experience." He was, in short, an adventurer all his days. He was intolerant of inertia, of thought without action, of security as opposed to enterprise. He would have agreed with our own Professor Cheyney that nothing is more dangerous than security. Beginning his academic career as a mathematician, he ended it as a philosopher. Above all he was a humanist, that rare blend of the scientist and the humanist. He loved people and regarded himself primarily as a teacher of people. When he arrived at Harvard his colleagues told him that he was expected to write and not waste time with undergraduates. His retort was to the effect that you could not teach an old dog new tricks. And for years he had open house one evening a week for students. They came in increasing numbers—more than ninety on one occasion. My younger son at the end of his freshman year at Harvard told me that Whitehead, then in his seventy-sixth year, was easily the most stimulating and inspiring of all his teachers. His written works are numerous. For the lay reader I think the best of them are Science and the Modern Worlds The Aims of Education, and Adventures of Ideas. All of them were written at Harvard in his sixties and seventies. Life indeed became richer for him as he got on with it. One thinks instinctively of Rabbi Ben Ezra: Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made.

Even in his eighties there was not the slightest evidence that his intellectual powers were waning. Lucien Price has undertaken to give us a picture of this man as he re- vealed himself in forty-three conversations. The book flavors a little of Plato's Dialogues, a little of BoswelPs Johnson, even a little of Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. On the whole it is very skillfully done. Although Whitehead dominated the dialogues, he did not monopolize them. It would have been quite contrary to his whole concept of education if he had. The dialogues deal with every conceivable subject, secular and religious. I cannot begin to discuss them all. Perhaps, in a magazine devoted to 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 531

American history it will not be inappropriate to confine myself to White- head's observations about America. He believed in America. He reckoned as one of the major achievements in human history our diffusion of literacy and average comfort among the masses. On one occasion he observed: "With all its limitations, life in America is better and kinder than anywhere else on earth that I have ever heard of in history." He complained about our uniformity in dress, in housefurnishings, even in the conventionality of our womenfolk. America, he insisted, sprang from dissent. Her essential spirit is looking forward, not backward. He thought she should not ape the European, but strike out for herself. He compared us with the ancient Greeks whom he idolized. The ancient Greeks, he pointed out, were not studying the best models to be had abroad. They were making their own. He complained that American universities are too aloof from practical life. One of their great functions, as he saw it, is to civilize business, or rather to civilize the businessman, so that he would come to regard himself not as a mere money-maker, but rather as an important contributor to the welfare of a good society. Whitehead looked to America as the hope of the future. "The only place I see," he said, "where another great flowering of European culture might come is in the American Middle West." And in the midst of World War II he remarked: "My hope is that out of this war America will take the leadership of humanity. America, as I see it, is the only hope." I commend this book to those who are growing old, fearful and uncertain, to those who have abandoned adventure for security, and to every good American, in these troubled times, who has lost sight of the vision splendid of our forefathers. The words of Alfred North Whitehead, who, even in his eighties, found life to be one long exciting Odyssey, will stir them like a trumpet.

Villanova CONYERS READ

American Scholarship in the Twentieth Century. MERLE CURTI, Editor. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. xii, 252 p. Index. $4.50.) The Writing of American History. By MICHAEL KRAUS. (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. xii, 387 p. Index. $5.50.) The Library of Congress is sponsoring a series of volumes on various aspects of American civilization as viewed in mid-twentieth century, with each aspect presented as an integral part of the total culture of the United States. Professor R. H. Gabriel of the Yale history department is general editor of the series and it is professedly "directed to the general public." The multiple aspects of American scholarship are extremely complex and difficult to summarize; and the brilliant Professor Curti of the University of Wisconsin history department has wisely called on five other specialists to 53^ BOOK REVIEWS October help in the specific task of this book—coverage of scholarly developments in the social sciences and humanities. In his opening chapter on "The Set- ting and the Problems," Mr. Curti has developed the growth in the emi- nence of American scholarship, its turn to functional organization, criticisms of scholarship, its secularization, and the problems of academic freedom and of social responsibility. The late Louis Wirth of the University of Chicago sociology department, treating the social sciences, in turn analyzes their precarious position, their status in 1900, their proliferation into economics, sociology, political sci- ence, social psychology, cultural anthropology, human geography and juris- prudence, and their impact upon American civilization. Historical scholar- ship, as succinctly analyzed by W. Stull Holt of the University of Washing- ton history department, is first placed in its economic and ideological nexus with American society of 1900-1950. Then follows discussion of the influ- ence of such basic historical concepts as scientific history, relativism, the idea of progress, nationalism, liberalism, democracy and irrational man. Expansion in the fields of historical scholarship closes this treatment. Literary scholarship is vigorously analyzed by a naturalized citizen, Rene Wellek of the Yale faculty in literature. After presenting the faults of philological scholarship and the revolt against it, he critically evaluates the literary contributions of 1900-1950. Classical scholarship, treated by Walter R. Agard of the University of Wisconsin classical department, is introduced via its nineteenth-century training in the humanistic tradition and the German scientific method; its American practice is found to have been lack- ing in broad social interpretation and in criticism. Confronted by a con- tinuing decline in classical interest, this field of scholarship, says Agard, must find its revival through injection of a broadly humanistic approach into the training of our teachers. Philosophical scholarship is pictured by Arthur E. Murphy of the Uni- versity of Washington philosophy department as currently confronted by the problems of advancing knowledge, the community, the individual and the universe. Speculative idealism has been followed by pragmatism, James, Dewey, Mead and Peirce. Between-wars disintegration of progressive ideals leads into discussion of Santayana. Next we read of the realists, Whitehead, Russell, irrationalism and Marxism, Gilson, Maritain and Niebuhr. Murphy soberly concludes that the future of American philosophy and, perhaps, her civilization, hangs upon finding answers to the basic questions which civili- zation puts to philosophy. To serious scholars this volume is likely to prove stimulating; among other things they will appreciate the efforts of the index-maker to include subject material, in addition to the usual personal names and book titles. But perusal by the general reader, hoped for by the sponsors of the series, is quite unlikely. Only the rarest of scholars can write for that group in America; this fact is revealed implicitly, even if unconsciously, in these analyses of the current status of scholarship in this country. 1954 BOOK REVIEWS 533 The Writing of American History is a rewrite of A History of American History (Farrar and Rinehart, 1937) by Professor Kraus of the history de- partment of the College of the City of New York. The material has been rearranged, more smoothly written, and somewhat shortened despite addi- tion of recent books; space formerly given such writers as the Mathers, Bancroft, Osgood, Prescott, Prince, Sparks, Turner, Tyler and Winsor has been variously reduced to make room. As in the earlier volume, Mr. Kraus begins with the Norse voyages, moves across the colonial period, through the scientific, nationalist, imperial, frontier and sectional schools of writing, and comes down to the present. This is a painstaking compendium, with some description of the product and the producers. Two writers, Par km an and Henry Adams, each get a chapter of a dozen pages. Eighty-seven writers receive from two to four pages each, and ap- proximately seven hundred others are included in running commentary. To find space for the more comprehensive writings, highly specialized volumes are shunted aside. Such a kaleidoscopic survey takes much industry to compile carefully and is useful to anyone wishing a general idea of the kind of books specific per- sons have written in the field of American history. The index—of approxi- mately eight hundred items—lists names of authors and periodicals, but only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Perhaps this volume might better have been titled "writings in" Amer- ican history instead of "the writing of" American history, because the latter wording suggests to professionals more emphasis on the problems of finding proper canons in writing history than is here accorded. To these problems, during the past two decades especially, much vigorous thinking has been directed, with effects on output. An illustration is a book mentioned by Professor Kraus only by title in a note—Bulletin 54 sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and devoted to "Theory and Practice in His- torical Study." In this general field, the most important contribution of Mr. Kraus is his repeated and earnest objurgation that historians must always remember to measure people by their own periods.

Philadelphia JEANNETTE P. NICHOLS

QUERY Dr. Dieter Cunz, Foreign Language Department, University of Mary- and, College Park, Maryland, is preparing an article on the history of the German influence in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey. He would be most grateful to anyone of our readers who could call his attention to historical material pertaining to the subject. Dr. Cunz is particularly anxious to locate old German newspapers of the town.