The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990 Page: 406

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

John C. Calhoun, Jr., "out Yankeed the Yankees" and made a fortune,
but more shared the fate of poet Sidney Lanier who spent most of his
time "not dying" in the inhospitable North.
Loyalty to the southern past did not silence criticism of the New South.
Lonely and isolated in northern cities, numerous ex-Confederates, such
as Chicago journalist Theophilus Noel, a former scout with Sibley's
Texas Brigade, blamed Jefferson Davis's inadequate support of the
army for the bitter Southern defeat and feared that the Democratic
Bourbon Redeemers, having learned nothing from the ordeal, had
doomed the region to poverty and racial disharmony. Noel's depiction
of southern women (loyal and honorable in war and defeat) as the true
believers is supported in Sutherland's discourse, which emphasizes the
contributions of Sarah Pryor, Constance Cary Harrison, and Varina
Davis to national reconciliation as well as to the literary Lost Cause.
Belief in the righteousness of their cause sustained the first genera-
tion of Confederate Carpetbaggers, but to the second-children dur-
ing the war growing to adulthood in the North-fell the real "burden
of southern history." Wanting to acknowledge the flaws of the South
without repudiating their parents and its past, they faced the enduring
dilemma of being both southern and American.
Sutherland draws from such extensive research that it appears he
traveled even more than his subjects-from San Marino to Baton
Rouge to New Haven, and every major archive in between. This per-
ceptive and readable work avoids stereotypes and is recommended for
all southerners, scholars and general public, who want to better under-
stand their past, as well as anyone interested in the Civil War and its
effects on American life and thought.
Middlebury College BARBARA L. BELLOWS
Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867-I912. By
Donald R. Walker. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
1988. Pp. xiii+ 2 i6. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations,
tables, notes, afterword, selected bibliography, index. $24.50.)
For those afflicted with the notion that the prison bugaboo is unique
to the 198os, Donald R. Walker's study of the foundation era of Texas
penal history could prove antidotal. Post-Civil War conditions, like
those following the oil boom, were bleak: prisoners were too many,
revenue too little, public pro-punishment and anti-tax sentiment too
strong. Legislators sought a solution in the lease system, intended to
render the two prisons at Huntsville (1849) and Rusk (1875) sources of
profit. As first implemented, from 1871 to 1883, leasing involved state

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