The Black Codes of the South by Theodore Brantner WilsonReview by: Louis R. HarlanThe American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Apr., 1967), pp. 1104-1105Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1846863 .

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I I04 Reviews of Books

this diary is much more than an encyclopedic recital of events. More than in any Civil War diary I have seen he has succeeded in putting into words the feeling, the emotional reactions of the soldier to the hours before a battle, during the battle, and as a dangerously wounded and half-frozen man lying on the battlefield wondering if help would come. This ability to convey feeling in words marks young Patterson as a literate and articulate person, and it makes the diary a substantial contribution to the literature of the Civil War.

A word of commendation should be said for the editing. Enough notes have been supplied to clarify certain portions of the text but not so many, as is sometimes the case in printed diaries, that the reader is overwhelmed with foot- notes.

Tulane University JOHN P. DYER

THE BLACK CODES OF THE SOUTH. By Theodore Brantner Wilson. [Southern Historical Publications, Number 6.] (University: University of Alabama Press. I965. Pp. I77. $5.95.)

THIS useful, workmanlike review of the Black Codes enacted by the southern states in I865 and I866 is also something more ambitious and more exasperating. The introductory chapter, a search for precedents of the Black Codes, develops the principal theme of the book. The origins of the Black Codes were in the era of slavery, says the author, but not in the institution of slavery. The Negro was part of what he calls the "gray institution," a body of patterned and ritualistic race relationships existing in the shadow of but not directly within the slavery institution. This "gray institution" was compounded of both law and custom and governed race relations of free as well as slave Negroes. The full importance of these key words in the semantic game is revealed later when the author emphatically denies that the Black Codes, as the North charged, tried to reinsti- tute slavery. Instead, though neither North nor South realized it, they were an attempt to reinstitute the "gray institution." It is hard to take seriously an institution so ghostly that it was unknown to the people of the time.

The Black Codes were real enough, and they are closely examined, state by state and clause by clause. More thorough research into the conditions of the time and place and into the code-making process might have deepened our understanding. Between codes and between clauses Mr. Wilson finds wide variations. Some were aggressive and exploitative, others paternalistic or uncon- sciously discriminatory, others benign in intent and effect. That the codes of I865 were harsher than those of i866 he explains not by the policies of presi- dential Reconstruction but by the financial and psychological panic at the end of the war. The author indicates sympathy with many of the purposes of the codes; on the other hand, he asserts that northerners put the worst possible construction on the codes not because of pro-Negro sentiments but for "more self-centered considerations" of northern sectional power. While this may be a valid judgment of northern motives in Reconstruction, it would need to be proven, rather than merely asserted, against the contrary conclusion of a large volume of recent historical literature.

There are many other general assertions without adequate proof. A notable

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Americas 1105

example is the final sentence: "The Black Codes of the South did not cause Radical Reconstruction," which can hardly be proven by examining the letter of the Black Codes. Not all would agree that Negro troops "offended the sensi- bilities of the white population while encouraging the freedmen to insolence and idleness." The author regrets that "the harsh features of the South Carolina Black Code were widely publicized while the protective features went unnoticed," as though whipping and confinement to the premises of contract servants were balanced by limited due process rights in some Benthamite calculus. One might also question whether Benjamin C. Truman was "one of the least biased of northern reporters."

The author's jaundiced view of Reconstruction might have been better sustained by a direct investigation of political behavior in the period than by minimizing the Black Codes or conjuring up a "gray institution."

University of Maryland Louis R. HARLAN

THE TWEED RING. By Alexander B. Callowv, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press. i966. PP. Xi, 351. $7.oo.)

SCRIBBLED disagreements spill over almost half the pages of my copy of The Tweed Ring. Some of my scribbles exclaim at Callow's mode of discourse. He explains events without independently establishing the existence and significance of his variables and without concern for the criteria of scientific elegance. Is it necessary, for example, to posit a peculiar "moral twilight" in post-Civil War America in order to explain Tweed's success?

The most important and emphatic of my marginal notes challenge the sub- stance of Callow's argument. He contends that Tweed developed a stable and highly centralized political machine that allowed him to exercise almost absolute control over large segments of the city's life. Tweed, Callow insists, was the prototype of the modern political boss.

I do not believe this argument, at least partially because Callow's own lan- guage and choice of similes hint at unresolved contradictions in his thought. He repeatedly describes New York's political system as "feudal," comparing the ward leaders to powerful and cantankerous barons and dukes. At the same time he argues that the system was centralized, with formal and formidable hierarchi- cal lines of control. Traditional terms of medieval history, let alone modern organization theory, suggest the hedges in this comparison. You cannot have your feudal cake and centralize it too. Nor is it useful to describe Tweed's short reign as evidence of political stability. The "Boss," it seems to me, ruled by paying off the participants in a fundamentally decentralized system. His power, and that of his immediate successors, was inherently unstable.

What, moreover, is the prototypical modern political machine to which Callow alludes? Is it the machine of I966 or of I900? In either case the ideal type he employs has very little substance. Samuel Hays has laid Lincoln Steffens' "boss" in his grave; the contemporary city as described by Banfield and Wilson hardly suffers from an excess of centralized control. Callow's frame of reference seems, in my scribbles, curiously irrelevant.

University of Pennsylvania SEYMOUR J. MANDELBAUM

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