Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/690

 68o Reviews of Books Fort Warren in August, 1865, to accept the results of the war without resistance and meet conservative opinion in the North half-way on the subject of negro enfranchisement. To do this he ran the risk of being declared " reconstructed " and of losing his wide popularity. He took the stand, however, in what was known as his Fort Warren letter, that the better class of negroes should be permitted to vote, that ignorant and propertyless whites and blacks should alike be disfranchised, and that the Southern states should co-operate cordially with President Johnson in re-establishing federal relations. This letter brought to its author unlimited abuse, and for a time every politician considered it his especial duty to malign and ridicule the former Samson whose locks had been shorn by the modern Delilah. Ere ten years elapsed the Fort Warren prisoner was seen to have been the best counsellor of his time. The last hundred pages of the Memoirs consist of appendixes giv- ing reprints of Reagan's more important speeches in Congress and his invaluable public letters of 1865 and 1866. The editing of the work has been very well done. While this book tells us a great deal that deserved to be recorded and confirms much that was not quite certain without this evidence, it does not give all or even most of the real experience of its author. The most difficult thing in the world for a writer of memoirs is to forget himself and tell truths in the interest of history that might pain people whom he loves. For the noble reticence of great men on subjects of this kind the world may be thankful and historians possibly not unthankful. In this respect Reagan is like most of his predecessors ; and some very interesting things which he alone knew are buried with him. William E. Dodd. History of the United States from the Compromise of i8f,o to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 18/ /. By James Ford Rhodes, LL.D., Litt.D. Volume VI., 1866-1872; Volume VII., 1872-1877. (New York: The IMacmillan Com- pany; London: ]facmillan and Company. igo6. Pp. xx, 440; xiii, 431.) To the ten years following 1866 Mr. Rhodes has given two volumes. Neither of these, however, is much more than two-thirds the length of their immediate predecessor, the bulky volume V. One cannot help wondering, therefore, why chapter 30, introducing Reconstruction, was put in that volume, which was already quite long enough, and which would so much more naturally have ended with the end of the Civil War. In the recasting which the entire work will doubtless have some day, one of the changes should be the transfer of that chapter to volume VI. Volume VI. could then spare some of its matter to volume VII., which, even with the long general index, is shorter than the average.