I am, Yours,
Of The African Race

—­“The Extraordinary Conversion and Religious Experience of Dorothy Ripley with her First Voyage in America,” 132-144.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] From England.

[2] He expected I was a member of that society, which I never yet have been.

[3] The cross here mentioned has an allusion to an attempt made by an intoxicated soldier, to disturb our peace, who caused great confusion for a few moments; but kneeling in the midst of this tempestuous storm, God instantly caused a calm, so that no one received harm.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Aftermath of the Civil War, in Arkansas.  By Powell Clayton, Governor of Arkansas, 1868 to 1871.  Neale Publishing Company, New York, 1915.  Pp. 378.

Looking at the title of this work the student of history would expect that same scientific treatment which is observed in so many of the Reconstruction studies.  On the contrary, he finds in this a mere volume of memoirs of a political leader completed in his eighty-second year.  The work gives an account of the author’s own administration as governor of Arkansas “also of those events that commenced before and extended into it, and those that occurred during that period and continued beyond it.”

In view of the fact that he, a man of well-known partisan proclivities, may be charged with criticising his defenceless and dead contemporaries the author says that he endeavored to substantiate “every controvertible and important conclusion.”  To do this he collected “an immense amount of documentary evidence” from which he selected the most appropriate for that purpose.  The writer made use of certain documents in the Library of Congress and had frequent recourse to the Arkansas Gazette.

The book as a whole is essentially political history.  It is chiefly concerned with “the Murphy Government,” the “Organization and Operations of the Klu Klux Klan,” “Martial Law,” and the peculiar situation in the counties of Crittenden and Conway.  The subjects of immigration, education, state aid to railroads, and the funding of the state debt are all mentioned but they suffer because of the preference given to the discussion of political questions.  When one has read the book he is still uninformed as to what was the actual working of the economic and social forces in Arkansas during this period.

This work, however, is valuable for several reasons.  In the first place, whether the reader agrees with the author or not he gathers from page to page facts which throw light on other conditions.  Moreover, consisting mainly of a discussion of extracts from various records it is a good source book for students who have not access to the documents the author has used.  Further it is important to get the viewpoint of the distinguished author who lived through what he writes of and is now sufficiently far removed from the struggle to study it somewhat sympathetically.