Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron.

Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron. Edited by W. Todd Groce and Stephen V. Ash. With an afterword by Paul H. Bergeron. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Pp. x, 188. $40.00, ISBN 1-57233-441-X.)

Paul H. Bergeron taught at the University of Tennessee beginning in 1972 and over a career spanning three decades played a leading role as a distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century political history. In addition to his own books, Bergeron served as an editor of two massive scholarly projects, the Correspondence of James K. Polk and the Papers of Andrew Johnson. He also served as an adviser to numerous graduate students over the years. This Festschrift serves as a tribute to Bergeron's career, as it is composed of seven essays by scholars who completed dissertations under Bergeron's direction.

Given their mentor's interests, it is perhaps unsurprising that the authors focus on politics and public life in the nineteenth-century South. These are for the most part traditional political histories, thoroughly grounded in archival research. This work has more thematic unity than some volumes that are written in tribute to a distinguished adviser, but like most such works the quality of the essays is uneven.

The best essays in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron are superb. Stephen V. Ash contributes a fine piece on Confederate attempts to control runaway slaves and to thwart their attempts to reach Union lines. He convincingly makes the case that Confederate attempts to create a "wall around slavery" were partially successful in slowing the hemorrhaging of the peculiar institution (p. 55).

Several of the articles make use of the papers of James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson, which Bergeron made widely available for researchers. Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius effectively complicates the historical understanding of Johnson's pardon policy during Reconstruction by emphasizing the role that governors such as William G. "Parson" Brownlow and William Woods Holden played in the process. Holden, for example, fast-tracked pardon applications of potential political allies and slowed pardons for his potential rivals. Liulevicius's work suggests that Johnson was necessarily dependent on the advice of others given the enormous volume of pardon applications received. L. Thomas Smith Jr. uses Johnson's papers to ably study the relatively neglected topic of that president's relation to white southern churches.

W. Todd Groce revises his 1988 master's thesis on Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney while failing to adequately integrate new scholarship on his subject by scholars such as Eugene Genovese, David Blight, and Sean Lucas. Like many long-dormant theses, this one probably should have been left in the stacks.

This reviewer's favorite essay is by Charles F. Bryan Jr., the president of the Virginia Historical Society. Bryan tells a remarkably engaging story about how he and his colleagues acquired original art, diary, and memoir material belonging to Robert Knox Sneden, a private in the Union army. The papers were an extraordinary find, and Bryan's account of finding, purchasing, and then publishing the material reads like an academic dream come true. It is not just about luck, however: Generous donations and hard detective work made this achievement possible.

In an afterword, Bergeron offers a few insights gleaned during his long career. He recognizes that, unfortunately, few institutions today would make the long-term commitments required to publish the papers of Johnson and Polk. Further, Bergeron worries that many scholars today view political history as hopelessly "old-fashioned" (p. 183). Yet Bergeron also optimistically sees signs of revival in the field: the so-called "New New Political History" has come to the fore in the work of scholars such as Joanne Freeman (p. 184). In all, this book of essays offers testimony to the continuing vitality of political history and to Bergeron's fine career.

WALLACE HETTLE

University of Northern Iowa