Soldiers of Light and Love; Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873

Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xiii, [1], 273, [1] pages. DJ has wear, frayed edges and some soiling. Minor endpaper soiling. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Signed by the author on the free end paper. This is one of the Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. The American Missionary Association sponsored a large majority of the teachers, and its rich archives vividly illuminate the expectations, joys, and disappointments of these middle-class reformers. The story of these courageous yet short-sighted missionaries reveals the tensions of a war-torn society and the possibilities and limits of the reform impulse in America. Jones discusses the teachers' reasons for going south, their work in the classroom, their personal relations with administrative superiors, students, and one another, and she relates these to recent studies on early Victorian womanhood. The result is a collective portrait of a fascinating group of women who cannot be classified as feminists or as genteel "ladies." Jacqueline Jones is the author of several books, including, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America. That book and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize for 1986. Other works include Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, 1854-1872; American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor; and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873. She has won a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004). Soldiers of Light and Love is an acclaimed study of the reform-minded northerners who taught freed slaves in the war-torn Reconstruction South. Jacqueline Jones's book focuses on the nearly three hundred women who served in Georgia in the chaotic decade following the Civil War. Commissioned by the American Missionary Association and other freedmen's aid societies, these middle-class New Englanders saw themselves as the postbellum, evangelical heirs of the abolitionist cause. Specific in compass, but wide-ranging in significance, Soldiers of Light and Love illuminates the complexity of class, race, and gender issues in early Victorian America.