Neglected Giant

A UNION OFFICER IN THE RECONSTRUCTION (211pp.)--John William De Forest; edited by James H. Croushore and David M. Potter -- Yale University ($3.75).

John William De Forest was so much better than so many writers who are famous that readers may reasonably wonder why they never heard of him before. De Forest was a Connecticut Yankee who married a Charleston girl and raised and captained a Connecticut company throughout the Civil War. His war novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion (TIME, Aug. 21, 1939)> a failure when first published, went unread for nearly 72 years. His personal story of the Civil War, A Volunteer's Adventures (TIME, July 22, 1946), was published for the first time two years ago. Now it appears that there are still more first-rate De Forest works to be read.

Old South. De Forest had a faculty for revealing put-up jobs, or detecting phony sentiments, simply by writing down what people said. His recital of his postwar experiences in the Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, S.C. is compounded of vivid scenes and well-remembered dialogue. Yet, say his editors, his book has not been used in any of the standard histories of the Reconstruction. One reason: historians have considered the Reconstruction as "a series of political transactions, rather than as the story of a people defeated, a race enfranchised, and a society overturned."

De Forest knew the South before the war--the courtesy, generosity and courage of the Southerners; the pompous, polite windbags who believed that their flowery compliments were unequaled for elegance in any other society that had ever existed; the intellectuals who confused bookishness with learning; the Southern lady who personally whipped her slaves.

De Forest also knew the Southern admiration for virility: "If you will fight, if you are strong and skillful enough to kill your antagonist, if you can govern or influence the common herd ... if you stand by your opinions unflinchingly, if you do your level best on whiskey, if you are a devil of a fellow with women, if, in short, you show vigorous masculine attributes, he will grant you his respect."

Reconstruction. But the South had "had its fill of arms and glory." There were 400 soldiers' widows in one county of De Forest's military district; 600 in another. The planters were almost destitute. There were heiresses doing menial labor, great ladies without stockings. The planters wondered how they could keep the Negroes in the fields if they were not slaves. So they drew up elaborate contracts, forbidding them to leave the plantations without permission, setting fines for rudeness.

Around them was a great, illiterate, hot-tempered, lazy group of poor whites--in De Forest's district they were called "the low-down people"--the descendants of farmers whose farms had been bought by the planters. In this class, two-thirds of the men had been killed or crippled in the war. They were wretched beyond description, living in cabins with hencoop sides and porous roofs. Wrinkled, filthy, with desperate eyes and unkempt hair, they chewed tobacco, drank, fought, lived a life "of rare day's works, some begging, some stealing, much small, illicit bargaining, and frequent migrations."

Around them were the Negroes, "trapping rabbits by day and treeing possums by night, [with] dances which lasted till morning and prayer-meetings which were little better than frolics," traveling wherever they could go and then begging the Bureau to bring them home again. "Oh! but that slavery was costly, with its breed of parasite poor-whites and its remaining dross of decrepit old Negroes!"

The Vandal. Most Bureau officers distributed their supplies from their offices. "They fed the strong and impudent vagrants who could march 20 miles, and I fed the old, weakly and infantile . . . Theirs was the official method, and mine was not ... I wonder that I was not fined or reprimanded or court-martialed . . ."

De Forest appears to have believed that the Negro, like the Indian, might gradually disappear. "There will be no amalgamation, no merging and disappearance of the black in the white, except at a period so distant it is not worth while now to speculate upon it . . ." He was convinced that the slaves' abrupt emancipation was of benefit to the white man only: the white man was freed of responsibility for the Negro, who was not yet ready & able to fend for himself.

After a year and a half De Forest had had enough. There came a moment when he met a six-or seven-year-old girl on the street and was surprised to find that she smiled at him. He knew that he was regarded as a Vandal, that the women were bitter and taught bitterness to their children. "When will this sectional repulsion end? . . . Let us remember in our legislation . . . that no section of a community can be injured without injuring the other sections . . ." These were words of wisdom which the victorious North was not then willing to heed--which may be one reason why De Forest's works lay forgotten for so many years.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.