176CIVIL WAR HISTORY tury, when a different set of reformers, armed with a different metaphysics , became advocates, not judges, of the demoralized poor. The idea that cultural and political values determined the nature and impact of philanthropic endeavors figures in other parts of Bremner's analysis as well. One reason that Confederate war relief was relatively ineffective was that "states' rights philosophy justified particularistic tendencies in charities as in nearly everything else" (p. 47). This factor, together with transportation and other difficulties, precluded intelligent coordination of aid to Southern soldiers. Bremner also argues that Southern resentment and deep-seated racial attitudes undermined efforts to educate the freedmen. Volunteer teachers who made their way south found themselves socially ostracized or, at worst, threatened by organized resistance activities such as the Ku Klux Klan. On one level, then, The Public Good advances a plausible, not overly detailed, and probably noncontroversial thesis about the impact of the war on the organization of philanthropic enterprise. On another and deeper level, The Public Good explores the cultural configurations of that enterprise, showing—at times brilliantly—how basic beliefs and attitudes shaped our dichotomous and troubling approach to the poor. David T. Courtwright University of Hartford The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America. By Lewis O. Saum. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Pp. xxiv, 336. $29.95.) Historians have long pursued that phantom, popular thought, but their quarry always seems to elude their grasp. While the importance of delving "into the shadowy recesses of the popular mind," as the author of this bold and ambitious book points out, has never been in doubt, the appropriate method for accomplishing this task has never been certain. In the currently popular effort to package the past in neat, manageable categories there is even disagreement on where to place the study of popular thought. Intellectual historians are loathe to claim it (although there are exceptions); social historians seem uncomfortable with it. Moreover, there are nagging problems of definition that will not go away, not the least of which is—who are the people? Perhaps the best one can do is simply to recognize that there are several possible routes toward this elusive goal and to abandon the fruitless task of trying to label them. Lewis Saum expresses the hope that his study "deserves to be called history" and leaves it to the reader to supply "whatever qualifiers might seem appropriate." Although there are some in our time who feel that it has just been discovered, the attempt to study the past "from the bottom up" springs from a long and interesting tradition. Much of what passes for social history today, acknowledged or not, is a variant on the "cult of the common man" that has attracted historians, in one form or another, for a long BOOK REVIEWS177 time. Saum recognizes this tradition and draws instruction from it. He rejects the pathway suggested by the new interest in popular culture, that of inferring popular thought from the artifacts (literary, artistic, physical, etc.) of popular culture; such an approach, he feels, involves too many risks, is too fraught with uncertainties. Instead he hasadopted what he regards as a more direct approach—the "reconstruction of common attitudes" from the letters and diaries which the common people themselves left behind, or as he puts it, "the written remains of a couple thousand unelevated, mainstream Americans—Americans whose views might be supposed to have been conventional, characteristic and concentric rather than dissident, exotic or eccentric." W7ho were these "unelevated, mainstream Americans"? Saum finds it easier to say who they were not. They were not, for example, the "intellectual formulators " and the "evidently wealthy," nor were they journalists, ministers and educators. His subjects were ordinary people, unrefined and unsophisticated , the "everyday Americans," the "mute, inglorious Mutons" (one of Saum's favorite characterizations derived from the popular "Elegy" of Thomas Gray). While he hints that this approach too may have shortcomings, he proceeds in the confidence that he has found the way to the popular mood of pre-Civil W7ar America. Many of our assumptions about early nineteenth-century America, he argues, must be altered in the light of his findings. Previous historians of the period...