Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/131

Rh average knowledge of American history and from such topical discussions of the Negro history as may be found in E. A. Johnson's History of the Negro Race or in John W. Cromwell's The Negro in American History. In his discussion of the Indian and the Negro there is an effort which serves to direct attention to a neglected aspect of our history, that is, to figure out the extent to which the races were associated and the race admixture which resulted from such contact.

Coming nearer to our day to take up the discussion of the Missouri Compromise, the abolition agitation, and the constitutional debate on slavery, Mr. Brawley shows his inability to develop his subject for he merely draws a few facts first from one field and then from another to fill out certain topics in the book without correlating them in such a way that the reader may be able to interpret their meaning. He has endeavored not to write a history but to summarize what other persons are now publishing as selected topics in this field. In other words, he has added to the unscientific history of the Negro, which has hitherto appeared in the so-called text books on Negro history, facts culled from various sources but so improperly used as not to develop the subject.

The chapter on Liberia should have been incorporated into the treatment of colonization or made a supplementary chapter in the appendix of the book. Placed in the middle of the work, it has been necessary to repeat certain facts which could have been stated elsewhere once for all. The same is true of his treatment of the Negro as a national issue, and of social progress, which he takes up the second time as topics inadequately developed in the earlier stages of the treatise. In his discussion of the Civil War, the Emancipation, the Reconstruction, and the Negro in the new South, he says very little which is new. Under the caption The Vale of Tears, he drifts almost altogether into opinion as he does also in the case of the Negro in the New Age and the Negro Problem. Judging, then, from the point of view of an historian, one must conclude that this work does not meet any particular want and that so far as the history of the Negro is concerned the publication of it will hardly result in any definite good. Mr. Brawley does not know history.

 

This is a revised edition of a work of a similar name by this author, published in 1913 by Moffat, Yard and Company, New 