Civil War History

BOOK REVIEWS345 parenthetical notations embedded in the text, which makes reading a chore. These caveats aside, Otto has provided a valuable addition to the historical literature. Donald L. Winters Vanderbilt University The Work ofReconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870. By Julie Saville. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 221. $49.95.) This book examines the transition from slavery to free labor in rural South Carolina during the Civil War and early years of Reconstruction. With emancipation Saville argues that freedpeople mounted a "dual struggle" rejecting their erstwhile masters' control over their persons while challenging the notion that freedom merely meant "subjection to landowners' management and to the discipline of an abstract market" (2). In the process she explains how regional differences and the structure of antebellum labor arrangements affected the postemancipation experience. Unlike the upcountry slave experience, emancipation in coastal areas around Port Royal came early and with cataclysmic suddenness. Here, although freedpeople wanted to become landowners, their aspirations were frustrated by government policy. During the war most found employment as cotton hands, under the Treasury Department's wage labor system. Saville shows that aspects of their antebellum work experience led them to reject certain restrictions imposed by free labor. For example, the antebellum task system afforded flexibility of work hours and production levels, depending on the skill and strength of the slave. By contrast, Treasury Department superintendents stressing uniformity of working hours and production transformed antebellum tasks into "wartime piecework, as wage rates made the younger workers' maximum performance (67)" the new standard. These supervisors also promoted the individual worker's accountability for specific tasks, but freedpeople preferred cooperative work arrangements, especially centered on the family. The author demonstrates how their insistence forced modification of the original labor force organization to a family-centered system, foreshadowing later tenancy arrangements. Low-Country freedmen aspired to secure lands to which there was a family or historical connection. Saville contends that the uplands slave experience dictated a different priority. Since individual slaveholdings had been smaller, family members were often dispersed. Freedpeoples' first priority there was to reconstruct kin groups in the same location as the basis for production. Universally , Saville explains, one of the greatest problems for the wage system resulted because "emancipation had transformed the antebellum relationship 346CIVIL WAR HISTORY between plantation labor and domestic production" (132). In the antebellum years slaves' domestic subsistence production was encouraged, but postwar planters severely limited domestic production as a source of competition. Saville's portrayal reveals the variety of ways resourceful freedpeople circumvented such restrictions to develop independent household economies. Systematic discussion of how the internal redistribution of the black population affected its economic prospects regionally would have added a useful dimension. The strength of this work is that Saville documents the assertive behavior of laboring freedpeople who boldly promoted their vision of freedom at the "grass-roots" level. Its focus is not narrowly economic, and, to her credit, the author relates social themes such as kinship and community institutional growth to her subjects' elemental condition as workers. The need for selfprotection spawned independent militia units on the Sea Islands and political associations, while frustrated desires for land and schools contributed to political activism. These efforts, combined with the church, gave voice to rural working-class concerns even before the black community had achieved formal political rights. Saville's work makes a significant contribution to the literature on the origins of the postwar agricultural labor system. Bernard E. Powers, Jr. College of Charleston The U.S. Army in the West, 1870-1880: Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment. By Douglas C. McChristian. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. 384. $39-95) In his memoirs of Gen. George Crook's campaign against the Sioux in 1876, correspondent John Finerty commented on the appearance ofthe soldiers in the field by writing, ". . . as for the uniform the absence thereof is a leading characteristic ofthe service. Perhaps this is all the better, for a more disfiguring costume than the fatigue dress ofthe United States Army the imagination of the most diabolically inclined of existing tailors could not conceive." Indeed, the cavalrymen and doughboys of the frontier military took to the field wearing...