Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.

Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr., Kyle S. Sinisi, and David H. White Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xiv, 413. $49.95, ISBN 1-57003-510-5.)

Too often essay collections are slapped together to gratify conference organizers and participants from whose speeches the articles are derived. Happily such is not the case with Warm Ashes, an outgrowth of the 2000 Citadel Conference on the South in Charleston, South Carolina. Winfred B. Moore Jr. and colleagues enlisted scholars of the first rank. Far from sifting through dying embers, we find lively interpretations throughout this collection. The well-edited subjects discussed here might induce teachers of southern history to use the book in upper-level undergraduate classes.

Civil War historian Emory M. Thomas leads off with delightful strikes at the unoriginal recapitulations of battles and military biographies that earn an undeserved niche in today's marketplace. More to the academic point, he sketches the persistent gaps in our grasp of the blood-drenched four years of war, subjects that long-dead historians hoped would be treated by now. Thomas reminds us that Douglas Southall Freeman, Robert E. Lee's biographer, was scarcely a Rebel flag-waver, for all his admiration of Virginia's sainted hero. Freeman wondered why rational calculation of risks received so little notice in the underpopulated, industrially ill-equipped South as war clouds gathered. The secessionists' saber-rattling of 1859-1861 might "disclose," Freeman is quoted to exclaim, "a clinically perfect case in the psychosis of war" (p. 11). Thomas misses a chance to elaborate. William A. Link, William W. Freehling, Charles B. Dew, and others have wisely explored this issue. Southern moral identity and slavery's security were both thought in immediate peril.

In the second part, "Enslaved," James McMillin provides an eye-opening account of the post-Revolutionary War influx of African slaves. By meticulous research, he challenges Philip Curtin's underestimation of 70,000 African newcomers between 1783 and 1810 and also Stanley Engerman's and Robert Fogel's overestimation of nearly 300,000. McMillin splits the difference. Seizing a gendered perspective, Kirsten E. Wood refreshes interest in Eugene D. Genovese's classic interpretation of slaveholding paternalism. The lives of slave-owning widows, she persuasively argues, reveal that their plantation management differed little in terms of either kindness or cruelty from that of their late husbands. Following Wood on the distaff side, Patrick H. Breen explores white female reactions to insurrectionary threats and scares. He finds that, though panic-stricken, women could be as handy with gun and defiance as any male protector. In both essays, we find further substantiation of Catherine Clinton's view of hard-minded, hard-handed plantation mistresses and women of lesser standing.

Part 3, "War and Southern Identity," offers some fascinating clues about regional identity. Christopher Phillips demonstrates that Missourians turned pro-southern when the nearby Kansas conflict heated up and war approached. Comparing the rhetorical styles of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Brian R. Dirck shows that the Union president faced the more difficult public task. Leader of a diverse constituency, Lincoln expressed how a drastic wrenching of old ways might ensue. Davis had only to cheerlead. This provocative study is neatly matched by Christopher Waldrep's review of Ku Klux Klan language. He argues that, while racial violence changed little over time, it was seldom called "lynching" in the Reconstruction period. Once the Republicans had been overthrown, however, bloody-minded Redeemers lustily paraded lynching as another word for community solidarity.

Part 4 is devoted to religious developments. Paul Harvey's trenchant study of biracial Pentecostal and Holiness worshipping in the era of growing Jim Crowism reminds the reader of Charles W. Joyner's explication of white and black musicians" collaboration in Shared Traditions (Urbana, Ill., 1999). James O. Farmer Jr. recounts the unexpected relationship of religious faith and liberal reform in the women's suffrage activities of socially prominent Emma Anderson Dunovant. Equally innovative is Joan Marie Johnson's discovery of South Carolina Episcopal women spearheading greater white-black understanding in the 1920s Commission on Interracial Cooperation. In contrast, William R. Glass considers how fears of social gospel liberalism, as opposed to traditional evangelism, prevented cooperation and reunification between Methodists (1938) and Presbyterians (1955), North and South.

The fifth section dwells on racial questions. Michael Daly and John Wertheimer. along with Peter Wallenstein, deal with issues of housing and higher education. Daly and Wertheimer unravel the story of a 1912 North Carolina housing controversy with complicated legal issues about individual property rights, local zoning, and state power. Wallenstein astutely sees black students as the leading force for change in the desegregation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--as they would be in the Greensboro sit-ins. A darker historical situation emerges in Rod Andrew Jr.'s recovery of black military education during Jim Crow. Students could march but not carry guns, learn to salute but not study battle tactics. The Citadel admitted its first black student, Alexander S. Macaulay Jr. tells us, in 1966. Along with a small number of successors, Charles Foster endured all the cadet abuse one might sadly anticipate. Yet the mingling of races did eventually break barriers, Macaulay concludes.

The final section includes W. Fitzhugh Brundage's ongoing investigation of black memory, of which most of us regrettably have little appreciation. Massive black commemorative celebrations of freedom provided participants with a wholly different interpretation of racial history than the one whites absorbed. Glenn T. Eskew's essay complements its predecessor by discussing the rise of southern civil rights museums, struggles lot financing and political space notwithstanding.

Finally, Sheldon Hackney rounds off the collection with thoughtful reflections on southern identity and its odd paradoxes of militarism and libertarianism, populism and social hierarchies, not to mention the racial interchanges and divisions. All in all, this is an anthology that avid readers of southern history will have to ponder.

Baltimore, Maryland

BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN