![]() Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo, although the president pushed his pet project in part to offer Southern freedmen a place of refuge from violence and oppression. Having made clear Douglass's opposition to prewar and wartime schemes for black emigration, Blight is at a loss to account for the black leader's enthusiasm for Ulysses S. One also yearns for more discussion of Douglass's postwar activities, when he was far more of a symbol than a leader, losing whatever ability he possessed to shape events (a matter of debate throughout the book). While he recognizes the dilemma faced by black leaders in retaining credibility and influence with both white leaders and black followers, we never quite find out how much influence Douglass exercised over blacks. Some of Blight's arguments encourage further inquiry. The black future always seemed a hostage to the white present. And, just as a war between whites opened the door for the abolition of slavery, the quest for reconciliation between whites closed the door to post-emancipation hopes for equality. ![]() Yet Douglass could never escape the fact that whatever the personal predilections of white politicians, notably Abraham Lincoln, black advancement was rarely their foremost policy priority, but rather one among many considerations. As he had hoped, the conflict ignited a revolutionary transformation of book reviews359 the status of blacks in American society, and, while he cheered on advances, he kept pushing for more, making it clear that he was not yet satisfied. He welcomed the intensification of sectional confrontation, for the resulting turmoil represented a wedge of opportunity for blacks to take advantage of circumstance and the necessities of war. Hope and despair cohabited in his mind as he contemplated the future of blacks. In the 1850s, Douglass suffered from a crisis of faith in the promise of America. The result is a rich, subtle, and thoughtful portrait, merging soul and mind, making the complex understandable without resorting to simplification or reductionism. It is a study in tensions and ambivalence, of weighing pragmatism against principle. Now David W Blight offers a penetrating discussion of Douglass and the causes, conduct, and consequences of the American Civil War. DuBois characterized as the "double self" of black identity. His public and private self, being black and being American, leading blacks while dealing with whites-in these and many other ways Douglass exemplified what W E. ![]() Recurring throughout these studies is the theme of Douglass's struggle to reconcile the dualities within his life. $27.00.) Frederick Douglass continues to fascinate American historians, as recent studies by Waldo Martin, Allison Davis, Peter Walker, Nathan Huggins, and Dickson Preston demonstrate. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Richardson The University of Akron Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. One's final judgment of the book will depend upon whether one agrees that class analysis explains as much as Bernstein, Wilentz, and Montgomery think it does. In a sense, what he has set out to do is bridge the gap between Wilentz's treatment of the period before 1850 with Montgomery's account of the late 1860s and early 1870s. His most obvious, and readily acknowledged, intellectual debts areto Sean Wilentz and David Montgomery. Bernstein has thoroughly explored the relevant primary sources and made imaginative use of the existing scholarly literature. ![]() Too often he does just that, in part to justify the original conceptual framework. ![]() What is troubling is that he does not heed his own admonition: "One should here be careful not to place too much weight on the draft riots as a means of explaining post-war phenomena" (243). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ģ58civil war history useful comments about how Tammany benefited from the riot's negative impact upon the Peace Democrats, the subsequent rise and fall of William Tweed, postwar trade union developments, the wave of strikes in 1872 for an eight hour day, and their defeat through a combination of employer intransigence and police pressure. ![]()
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