Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[352] But so personal in tone as to make them almost autobiographical are Fielder's Life and times of Joseph E. Brown and Dowd's Life of Zeb Vance, and the writings of E. A. Pollard, a Richmond editor during war time.¹ Humorous, but accurately portraying certain types of Southern character, is Charles H. Smith's Bill Arp so called, a book which in a period of economic depression and political disappointment had the power to make Southerners laugh. Among the Southern malcontents who had no sympathy for secession, two left accounts of their opinions and experiences. ‘Parson’ Brownlow, who was expelled from Tennessee early in the war, published in 1862 his Sketches of the rise and progress of secession, replete with quotations from the contemporary Southern press. A few years later a Virginian, John M. Botts, made Southern policies the subject of denunciation in his Great rebellion (1866) and started a memorable historical controversy by declaring that Lincoln had offered to surrender Fort Sumter provided that the Virginia convention of 1861 would adjourn without taking action on secession.

Closely related to the autobiography were the reports of newspaper correspondents and tourists. These were especially noticeable between 1865 and 1876 when the economic and social upheaval in the South was a subject of general interest. Of this literature, some was ‘inspired,’ notably the reports made to President Johnson in 1866 by B. C. Truman, Carl Schurz, and General Grant. Other contributions to this class of writing were Whitelaw Reid's After the War, Sidney Andrew's The South since the War, and J. T. Trowbridge's The South, all published in 1866. More notable were the books of two former abolitionists, J. S. Pike and Charles Nordhoff; the former left a memorable description of the barbarism of negro rule in South Carolina in his Prostrate State (1874), and the latter gave a valuable account of Southern conditions in his Cotton States in 1875. The personal experiences of a Northerner during his residence in the South were the basis for the novels of A. W. Tourgee,² and of similar character is A. T. Morgan's Yazoo, or on the Picket line of freedom in the South.

Hardly had the Civil War ended when other questions, in