BOOK REVIEWS89 it in line with the requirements of the more sophisticated social order of the postwar era. If all this were not enough, then the repetitious organization, the diffuse argument and the leaden, graceless prose style would disqualify this book from serious consideration except as an object lesson. The blame should not fall on the hapless author alone. Some must be shared by the distinguished historians who, according to the acknowledgements , read all or part of the manuscript. The press, which bears the name of a respected university, certainly failed in its duty of providing a fledgling author with competent editorial advice. So too, Yale University must assume some responsibility for having awarded one of its students a doctorate without having taught him the tools of his trade. Allan Peskxn Cleveland State University The Promised Land: The History of the South Carolina Land Commission , 1869-1890. By Carol K. Rothrock Bleser. (Columbia: Published for the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission by the University of South Carolina Press, 1969. Pp. xviii, 189. $6.95.) It is generally agreed that one of the great failures of Reconstruction in the South lay in the fact that the freedmen failed to acquire land as an economic underpinning for their political freedom. To be sure, a few did become landowners, largely as a result of the work of the Freedmen 's Bureau, but they were merely a handful out of the four million emancipated slaves. South Carolina became the place where it appeared that the Negroes stood the best chance of securing land. There the legislature, in March, 1869, created the Land Commission under whose operation the state planned to purchase land and sell it to the former slaves on a long-term payment plan—an experiment which, in many ways, was unique. Unfortunately , in its early years the Commission was characterized by a great deal of fraud and dishonesty. It was also used by the Republican party to further its own political strength. And yet, for all of that, by 1871 something like two thousand families, representing perhaps ten thousand freedmen, had been settled on their own lands. Between 1872 and 1876, under different administration, the Commission proved more honest and effective than earlier. Then in 1877, with the overthrow of the Republican government, the experiment underwent another change as the "Redeemers" sought to use the operation of the Land Commission mainly to help retire state indebtedness. And in the years between 1877 and about 1890, when the Commission ceased to exist, many of the freedmen already settled were evicted and compelled to forfeit their lands because of a more stringent collection policy established under the Democrats. It is difficult to say precisely how many of the former slaves benefited from the program, though the au- 90CIVIL WAR HISTORY thor estimates that at one time or another, perhaps as many as 70,000 did. Some of the individuals, after all, did manage to retain their holdings, and some of the tracts secured are still held by descendants of the original owners. This is an interesting and sound study. The author has made extensive use of primary materials and has written her narrative in a very readable fashion. The work is a valuable addition to the body of Reconstruction literature. Martin Abbott Georgia College The Negro in Maryland Politics, 1870-1912. By Margaret Law Callcott. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969. Pp. xv, 199. $7.95.) Dr. Callcott has taken on the difficult job of analysing a very fine, but undramatic point, the equivalent, in the theatre, of an able character actor's accepting a "thankless role," difficult and important yet muted against the panoply of larger figures. Her task, like Dewey Grantham's in his lectures on The Democratic South ( 1965), was to show that a losing party, composed in part of a minority racial group, did not lose as badly as one would gauge from a cursory glance. In fact, she argues, the Negroes of Maryland with their persistently high numbers of voters in the Republican column demonstrated strength enough to ward off Democratic disfranchisement attempts to a degree unmatched by blacks in the lower South. Yet she must conclude "Negro Marylanders, in...