Word: forested
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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John William De Forest was so much better than so many writers who are famous that readers may reasonably wonder why they never heard of him before. De Forest was a Connecticut Yankee who married a Charleston girl and raised and captained a Connecticut company throughout the Civil War. His war novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion (TIME, Aug. 21, 1939)> a failure when first published, went unread for nearly 72 years. His personal story of the Civil War, A Volunteer's Adventures (TIME, July 22, 1946), was published for the first time two years ago. Now it appears...
...South. De Forest had a faculty for revealing put-up jobs, or detecting phony sentiments, simply by writing down what people said. His recital of his postwar experiences in the Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, S.C. is compounded of vivid scenes and well-remembered dialogue. Yet, say his editors, his book has not been used in any of the standard histories of the Reconstruction. One reason: historians have considered the Reconstruction as "a series of political transactions, rather than as the story of a people defeated, a race enfranchised, and a society overturned...
...Forest knew the South before the war-the courtesy, generosity and courage of the Southerners; the pompous, polite windbags who believed that their flowery compliments were unequaled for elegance in any other society that had ever existed; the intellectuals who confused bookishness with learning; the Southern lady who personally whipped her slaves...
...Forest also knew the Southern admiration for virility: "If you will fight, if you are strong and skillful enough to kill your antagonist, if you can govern or influence the common herd ... if you stand by your opinions unflinchingly, if you do your level best on whiskey, if you are a devil of a fellow with women, if, in short, you show vigorous masculine attributes, he will grant you his respect...
Reconstruction. But the South had "had its fill of arms and glory." There were 400 soldiers' widows in one county of De Forest's military district; 600 in another. The planters were almost destitute. There were heiresses doing menial labor, great ladies without stockings. The planters wondered how they could keep the Negroes in the fields if they were not slaves. So they drew up elaborate contracts, forbidding them to leave the plantations without permission, setting fines for rudeness...