autobiography of rear admiral charles wilkes, u.s. navy, 1798-1877by william j. morgan
TRANSCRIPT
North Carolina Office of Archives and History
Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798-1877 by William J. MorganReview by: Max R. WilliamsThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April, 1979), pp. 253-254Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23534849 .
Accessed: 16/06/2014 14:15
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
North Carolina Office of Archives and History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The North Carolina Historical Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 195.78.108.105 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:15:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 253
plantations, mainly to northern cities where cheap European labor was no longer available for industrialists. In order to compensate for their loss of workers, plan ters mechanized their operations, which further weakened the system of coerced
labor on the plantations. Mandle's analysis would have been more persuasive if he had included the
nonplantation South in his account of black poverty. According to most
historians and contrary to Mandle's claims, the planter culture was not the
dominant force in late-nineteenth-century southern society. Merchants, yeoman whites (who constituted a substantial majority of the white population), and
townspeople competed with planters for control of southern society. Mandle
ignores the role of these elements in the region's economy. He also seems un
aware that changes in politics and government could have influenced the
economic position of blacks. Nowhere, for example, does he mention the sig nificant political changes of Reconstruction which affected planter-labor rela
tions in numerous black belt counties. A broader study, reflecting the com
plexity of southern economic problems and the nuances of black-white relations, would have been more useful.
William C. Harris
North Carolina State University
William C. Harris
Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798-1877. Edited by William J. Morgan and others. (Washington: Naval History Division, Department of
the Navy, 1978. Endpapers, frontispiece, introduction, preface, list of illustrations,
Wilkes chronology, epilogue, index. Pp. xxii, 944. $13.50.)
Charles Wilkes is best known for the early Civil War incident in which he, as
captain of the U.S.S. San Jacinto, removed Confederate agents James M.
Mason and John Slidell from the British steamer Trent, having declared them
contraband of war. When the United States returned his "contraband" in order
to placate an angry Great Britain, Wilkes castigated Abraham Lincoln, William
H. Seward, and Gideon Welles—his bête noire—for their timidity. This reaction
was typical of the controversial Wilkes, known by his contemporaries as the
"Stormy Petrel." Wilkes survived two courts-martial convictions while rising from midshipsman to rear admiral in a career which began in 1818 and ended in
the 1870s. Wilkes wrote his autobiography between 1871 and 1875 from voluminous
diaries and a self-serving memory. Although his chronological narrative ends in
1865, he left 2,800 pages of manuscript. The editors of this volume explain that
their primary tasks were to "translate" Wilkes's considerable literary legacy
while attempting to order the material by providing punctuation, sentences,
paragraphs, and chapters. Generally, they have accomplished these goals. The
text is, however, innocent of all but the barest explanatory notes; more would
have been helpful. Also, though forewarned by the editors, the reader is some
times distracted by repetitive passages, especially diatribes directed at Wilkes's
detractors. When discussing controversial issues (e.g., his command of the
VOLUME LVI, NUMBER 2. APRIL, 1979
This content downloaded from 195.78.108.105 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:15:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
254 Book Reviews
United States Naval Exploratory Expedition, 1838-1842; his role in the Trent Af
fair; and his running quarrel with Navy Secretary Gideon Welles), Wilkes en
gages in rhetorical overkill.
Noting these reservations, the readers of this volume will be rewarded by Wilkes's keen eye for geography, social institutions, and politics. Wilkes's com ments regarding France, Italy, Latin America, and North Carolina—where he visited and lived periodically—are of particular interest. On the basis of an 1848 visit to North Carolina, Wilkes, who had recently inherited property in Meck
lenburg County, reported accounts of would-be swindlers. He described Charlotte as follows: "It was a sorry place, and I may say it was destitute of any energy or enterprize. The inhabitants I saw and became acquainted with were idlers and loungers about the street corners, destitute of any employment or in terest. There were some few who attended to business, but none who made it a
constancy. . . . [Tjrade there was not, and no disposition to engage in it. . . .
Society there was none such as intercourse among the people" (p. 626). Wilkes's observations regarding his contemporaries—especially fellow officers and poli ticians—are frequently trenchant and always diverting. For example, after de
claring Navy Secretary John Branch "unfit" and "of small mind and entirely ignorant of his duties," Wilkes provides a devastating physical description that is a classic of satirical caricature (pages 234-235).
Charles Wilkes's autobiography will interest a wide range of scholars of nine
teenth-century subjects. Ironically, however, it may be a disappointment to his torians of the United States Navy, since it provides relatively little insight into naval organization, administration, or technology.
Max R. Williams Western Carolina University
Max R. Williams
New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty. By Paul E. Mertz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Preface, illustrations, bibliographical notes, index. Pp. xiii, 279. $14.95.)
For two decades a growing number of historians have been finding the key to the meaning of the New Deal—or at least one of its keys—in its treatment of the rural poor. Paul Conklin, M. S. Venkataramani, David Conrad, Sidney Bald win, Louis Cantor, and Donald Grubbs, among others, including this reviewer, developed the theme in varying ways during the early years. Then, in the 1970s, rural poverty became one of the most well-developed parts of New Deal histori ography as it responded to the continuing impact of the New Left and the rising interest in the history of blacks, Indians, and Mexican-Americans. The work of Walter Stein on the Dust Bowlers and of Donald Holley on the Lower Mississippi Valley were especially significant.
Now Paul Mertz, a former student of Gilbert Fite and John Ezell and present ly a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, deals with all of the New Deal efforts to attack the South's deeply rooted and widespread rural poverty. Based on a rich array of primary sources (many of them unavailable in
THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW
This content downloaded from 195.78.108.105 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:15:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions