The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941 Page: 147
546 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
material, evidence, and assumption. The Southern earlier liberal
aristocracy, plantation life, illiteracy, the spectre of slave re-
bellion, the law and the courts, the press, colleges, academic
freedom, alien influences, independent Southern thinkers, skep-
ticism and its decline, the stifling of independent creativeness,
and Calhoun, whose real monument, quotes the author,
". . . was not the marble shaft erected to his memory in
St. Phillip's Churchyard, but the graves of young men and a
South ruined by the Civil War,"-all these factors and ideas
Eaton reviews in an attempt to justify his contentions. On the
whole, his success may be reasonably assumed. But the Nation's
characterization of the work as being "a worthy example of
recent impartial studies of by-paths in Southern history by
Southerners" is either subtle irony or a gross over-estimation
of the meaning of the adjective, "impartial."
In an effort possibly to achieve impartiality, Eaton stumbles
consistently into inconsistency. Though his major objective is
an attempt to point out that freedom of thought was not per-
mitted by the intolerant slaveocracy, page after page is filled
with examples of the existence of his alleged non-existent free-
dom of thought. Courts, newspapers, teachers, and preachers,
who were in the minority, voice their opinions and proclaim
their creeds in almost every other paragraph of the work.
Eaton's diatribe against the restrictions placed upon certain
Southern college faculty members is accompanied by his own
statement that the arch antagonist of slavery, Francis Lieber,
taught unmolested for twenty years in that slavery hotbed,
South Carolina College. Again, Eaton offers as example of
Southern intolerance the attempts to preclude Southern youths
from the invidious effects of Northern anti-slavery colleges, and
follows that example with the remark that Lee, Davis, Wise,
Toombs, Yancey and even Calhoun himself were Northern edu-
cated. Eaton says, despite his thesis, "When one surveys this
overwhelming propaganda [the propaganda of intolerance] by
the most distinguished men of the South . . . the surprise
comes not at the uniformity of opinion in the South, but at the
number of men who did think independently on the slavery
question."
The style employed is, on the whole, reasonably readable and
attractive, yet curiously reminiscent of an expanded master's
thesis. A few grammatical solecisms have escaped the atten-147
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941, periodical, 1941; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146052/m1/155/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.