A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (review)

Abstract

256CIVIL WAR HISTORY and speaking with them, few believed in racial equality and many were vehemently racist. George M. Turner of the 3d Rhode Island Artillery expressed a common viewpoint: "The plan of having negro soldiers is very well in some cases; but ... I am not willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with a black dirty nigger" (87). New England soldiers also commented disparagingly about white Southerners , their crude homes, drinking habits, and alleged tendency toward sloth. Chapter4, "Politics on the Home Front," contains letters on a range of topics, from Abraham Lincoln's policies to Copperhead philosophy, to the war's blurring ofgender roles. In several letters, women demonstrated their political awareness by commenting on the Emancipation Proclamation. In another, a Connecticut doctor expressed his belief that women might influence voters to reject peace candidates. In chapter 5, "The Personal Sacrifices ofWar," soldiers and their families discussed the economic benefits that the war created for some Northern businesses and the economic dislocation families endured due to uneven and inadequate military pay. The final chapter, "The Morse Family Correspondence ," includes letters ofaVermont family with two men atthe front. While it reveals the family and financial tensions caused by the war, this brief chapter is somewhat difficult to follow because of a complicated family tree. Yankee Correspondence will assist students and scholars in their continuing efforts to interpretthe war's role in shaping the lives and views ofaverageAmericans . If, as Walt Whitman believed, "the real war will never get in the books," volumes such as this one at least make it possible to bring it closer to home. Wendy Hamand Venet Georgia State University A Voice ofThunder: The Civil WarLetters ofGeorge E. Stephens. Edited by Donald Yacovone. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xxi, 351. $26.95.) The first third of this remarkable books contains Donald Yacovone's incisive biography of George E. Stephens ( 1 832-1 888), complete with twelve pages of illustrations and four of maps. Stephens's parents were free African Americans who fled to Philadelphia from Northampton County on the eastern shore of Virginia in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion and the persecutions of black Virginians that were its immediate sequel. Supporting himselfas a cabinetmaker and then as a seaman on the USS Walker (of the Coast Survey, not the Navy), George E. Stephens was first and foremost an abolitionist, a reformer, and an intellectual. All the letters reproduced in this book were written for publication in the Weekly Anglo-African, published by Thomas and Robert Hamilton in New York City. Stephens wrote his first four letters in Philadelphia between November 1859 and January 1861. He then wrote a much larger and, for the historian of the Civil War, more original group of letters from Maryland and Virginia between October 1 861 and December 1862. Attached as cook and helper to Col. Benjamin C.Tilghman of Pennsylvania's 26th Regiment, Stephens both BOOK REVIEWS257 acted in and reported on local struggles involving Unionists, Confederates, the defenders of slavery, abolitionists, slaves, and freedmen. Once the Union had finally decided to arm blacks, Stephens traveled to Massachusetts to enroll in the most visible, and certainly most discussed, black regiment in the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th. His remaining letters detail the training of the 54th and its campaigns against Charleston and in Florida. Stephens vividly testifies to the regiment's heroism in usually ill-conceived and unnecessarily dangerous battles and its political heroism in refusing to accept inferior pay for fighting the Union's war. Unfortunately the letters end after August 1864. Yacovone's biography tells of the triumphant return of the fate 54th to Massachusetts and of Stephens's initially promising career as a schoolmaster and politician in Tappahannock, Virginia. His later years were spent in Brooklyn, where he helped organize the William Lloyd Garrison Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. Briefdescriptions can scarcelydojustice to the qualities ofGeorge E. Stephens as a writer. In choosing the phrase "A voice of thunder" from an ultra-militant speech of Henry Highland Garnet, Yacovone testifies to Stephens's mastery of the prophetic style so richly developed by the abolitionists. But there is much more to Stephens...