North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns, 1864-1865 by William A. FrassanitoReview by: Herman HattawayThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January 1984), pp. 117-118Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23518441 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 00:58

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 support@jstor.org.

.

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 188.72.127.150 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:58:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 117

This two-part work actually makes up the seventh and last in a series of volumes on the Revolution in Virginia published for the Virginia Inde

pendence Bicentennial Commission. The series is of inestimable value to

anyone interested in the development of the Revolution in the colony. This volume covers the journal and papers of the Fifth Virginia Con

vention, which met from May 6 to July 5,1776, and the proceedings of the

Virginia Committee of Safety. As events moved rapidly toward inde

pendence, the members of the convention were concerned with providing protection for frontier citizens from Indians and loyalists as well as with whether to evacuate the population of Norfolk away from Lord Dun more's foraging parties. Additional troops and supplies were constant

problems. Of utmost importance, however, was the decision of the convention on

May 15, 1776, to instruct the delegates of the Philadelphia Congress to

support independence—a decision that set the stage for the famous motion of Richard Henry Lee. A committee swiftly proposed a Declara tion of Rights (mainly the work of George Mason), which prepared the

way for the adoption of a "Plan of Government." With this constitution for the new state, the Revolution was complete except for the military aspects.

Among the people who were prominent in this convention were Ed mund Pendleton, president of the convention; Edmund Randolph, attor

ney general; George Mason; Robert Carter Nicholas, treasurer; and Patrick Henry, who was elected governor of the new state.

The editors did a skillful job in placing events in context and adding biographical data through footnotes and editorial notes. Brent Tarter, employed by the Virginia State Library, completed the editing after the death of his collaborator Robert L. Scribner, who had been involved in most of the project. Volume VII contains 298 documentary entries with 6 editorial notes and an appendix consisting of 38 supporting documents to the convention. These are drawn from 57 manuscript sources in 21 differ ent repositories. A valuable index is included, and its usefulness is enhanced by reference to previous volumes.

This whole series will be of great use to every serious student of the

period and it should be in every reference library.

Liberty Baptist College

Cline E. Hall

Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns, 1864-1865. By William A. Frassanito. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983. Lists of maps, acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, index. Pp. 442. $24.95.)

"It just doesn't get any better than this," a popular beer commercial

proclaims. One justly can say the same about this book, as long as one is

aware of just what "it" refers to. William A. Frassanito is a respectably able Civil War historian who also happens to be an expert in photo

graphic analysis. He earlier did similar work on Antietam and Gettys

burg and now offers an unsurpassable package dealing with the end

VOLUME LXI. NUMBER 1, JANUARY, 1984

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:58:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

118 Book Reviews

game in Virginia. It is, as he says, "not a photographic history of Grant's

Virginia campaigns, but rather a history of the photographic coverage of those campaigns."

Although, tragically, untold numbers of Civil War photographs have been lost forever, many thousands of them are available. Aside from

photographic histories per se, such as the wondrous Image of War series—on which Frassanito worked as a technical adviser—all Civil War authors quite typically use a portfolio of them to decorate, enhance, and illustrate their books and articles. Many of the images have become clas sics. But, too, they have become more and more the objects of increasing error and misconception. Many persons think, wrongly, that the war's

only photographer was Matthew Brady. Locations, dates, and even the

identity of a photograph's subject itself often are misstated. Even valuable historical data, which sometimes can be deducted from

the photographs, usually have been ignored. For example, Frassanito

points out that, although the Wilderness was indeed "an entangled area of dense woodland, the foliage [on May 5 and 6, 1864, when the battle was fought] was by no means in full bloom, and hence visibility was

probably greater than has been assumed in the past." For the person who likes this sort of thing—it is very well conceived

and well written, but one can easily imagine many readers finding it tedious—or for the historian who needs the strictures and instruction, this quite simply is a wonderful book.

University of Missouri-Kansas City

Herman Hattaway

Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture. Edited by Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1983. Acknowledgments, introduction, contributors, index. Pp. x, 260. $15.95.)

Recent studies of religion in the Old South have dealt almost exclu sively with the evangelic Protestant groups that comprised the antebel lum mainstream. Non-Protestants have remained as isolated in these works as they were in the theological milieu of their own day. The essays collected by Randall Miller and Jon Wakelyn take an important first step toward integrating Catholics into an understanding of antebellum south ern culture.

The collection opens with an insightful essay by Miller in which he

speculates on Catholic identities in the Old South. His engaging narra tive moves quickly through the region, describing briefly the Catholics of each state, pausing for a somewhat longer visit amongst the Creoles, Irish, and Germans of Louisiana. Miller's second essay considers the Catholic church's failed mission to antebellum blacks, while one by Gary B. Mills examines in depth an unusual black Creole parish. Other essays consider Catholic elites, Maryland Catholics, Irish Catholics in the South, and slaveholding by Jesuits. There is an overview of the institutional church in the antebellum South for readers who are unfamiliar with its

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.150 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:58:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions