Content area
Full Text
Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Ted Tunnell. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 326. Acknowledgments, abbreviations, introduction, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
Carpetbagger. Even to this day, the term has a negative connotation, implying someone who comes from outside to exploit a difficult local situation to his or her advantage. But Ted Tunnell believes that it should be otherwise. He is not alone. The usual stereotype-the greasy Yankee opportunist who came south during and after the Civil War, with all his worldly goods (probably a change of dirty clothes) in a carpetbag valise, "like vultures" (p. 2) to pick dry the bones of the defeated Dixie-has been under constant attack by historians, until one might believe that no such person could possibly have existed. Tunnell bemoans the fact that this false characterization is still used to justify illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral treatment of African Americans. Although he "did not conceive this book as an exercise in carpetbagger rehabilitation," he would "be pleased if that is the result." The reader might be pleasantly surprised, then, that Tunnell does not replace the word "carpetbagger" with the term "outside white," as do many other historians nowadays.
Tunnell could not have picked a better man to illustrate his point than Marshall Twitchell, a Vermonter turned Louisianan. Twitchell is not exactly unknown, as Tunnell admits, citing at least nine prior works, including his own edited edition of Twitchell's autobiography. But except for Jimmy Shoalmire's unpublished biography (a 1969 dissertation at Southern Mississippi University), Twitchell usually appears as an incidental character. With the appearance of Tunnell's well-written and...