Caroline E. Janney

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis (review)

Douglass and Smith advocated the necessity of training men and women in the trades—a debate that would be famously revived fi fty years later by, among others, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. With America’s First Black Socialist, Taylor makes several important contributions to African American history, not least of which is the recovery of Peter H. Clark’s life for a new generation of scholars. Through Clark she also reveals the vibrancy and complexity of African American social and political thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With clarity she demonstrates how Clark’s intellectual thought was infl uenced by a vast variety of traditions, from both within and outside the black community. These included the strong German workingmen tradition, which would introduce him to socialism and labor activism. A freethinking tradition, through the ideas of Thomas Paine and others, infl uenced his ideas of social equality and universal manhood and ultimately led him to Unitarianism. Two other infl uences were the African American church tradition and the abolitionist tradition, both of which educated his thinking on protest. In addition, Taylor sheds light on Clark’s numerous contributions to African American life and history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clark was indeed “America’s fi rst black socialist,” but he was also a Republican, a Democrat, and an educator. Like so many of his contemporaries, Clark used whatever means he could to defi ne a life for himself and the African American race in the changing social and political landscape of abolition, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. Shawn Leigh Alexander

Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (review)

Despite Gannon’s exhaustive research, most of her evidence is anecdotal. Gannon has identifi ed over 450 integrated posts, but because of the GAR’s offi cial color-blindness, she is usually unable to determine if a post had three black members or thirty. In addition, although Gannon devotes a few pages to the pension issue, she could have linked that issue more closely to the political priorities and choices of white veterans. Rather than spending their substantial political capital on issues important to their black colleagues but less clearly supported by their white comrades, white veterans chose to focus on the less controversial (at least to them) movement to expand the pension system rather than on civil rights and antilynching legislation. Finally, it would also have been useful to have some idea if any of the myriad other veterans’ organizations—the Union Veterans Union, for instance, or the societies formed by individual units or by special groups (military telegraphers and prisoners of war, to name just two)—dealt with race in any way. Despite these small concerns, The Won Cause is a unique and important contribution to the slowly growing literature on Civil War veterans and will help inspire historians to take closer looks at the ways that veterans and their communities responded to the decades following the war. James Marten