Books for the Day

With today being Martin Luther King Day, I thought that looking back to the slave period and following Civil War in the US is an appropriate way to try to learn and understand what happened then.

For the human side of slavery, the recent publication of "The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin" edited with an introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins [W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2007] provides us with a marvelous means to read that classic work by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her book of fiction about the human and emotional aspects of slavery was the most popular book - by sales - of the 19th century except for the Bible. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the W. E. B Dubois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and edited "The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Hollis Robbins is a humanities professor at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The book includes innumerable contemporary and modern illustrations of the scenes and characters of and derived from the book, including the engravings in the original printings.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" galvanized northern public opinion against slavery. The stories of ripping families asunder, cruelty and sale of one's children "down river" helped the northern white women and men come to understand its evil. The notes by Gates & Hollis help modern people living over 150 years from that evil understand how the book is depicting events that one could actually see if living then, as Harriet Beecher Stowe did see them.

For the ensuing war, I suggest the Memoirs of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. He was quite a controversial figure then and is still such now. But his descriptions of his campaigns before, during and after his famous March to the Sea are wonderfully clear and vivid. Because of its actual long sections on that March and the time his army was in the major slaveholding areas of the South, I recommend this book for this day over those fine memoirs of Gen. Grant. Sherman's Army freed scores of thousands of slaves, whose happiness and gratitude are expressed in first hand stories. The cruelty of Confederate officers and soldiers toward those people are also told.

PS: So when a major modern political figure, viz. Mike Huckabee, defends the Confederate symbol in modern times, one must wonder whether he is a fool or a knave. Is he ignorant of the evil that symbol represented over 150 years ago and that my ancestors and their brothers fought to defeat, or is he a demagogue and knave trying to curry favor with ... the rabble ? Either option leads one to conclude he is unfit to be a U. S. President.