Reviews for Magistrates' Manual ; Or, Handy Book Compiled from the Revised Criminal Law, Revised Statute...

The average rating for Magistrates' Manual ; Or, Handy Book Compiled from the Revised Criminal Law, Revised Statute... based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-11-17 00:00:00 Alan Sigwardt Even if I had accompanied Olmsted on his journey through the antebellum South, I would have missed the majority of his observations. He has an excellent eye for many factors I would be blind to, from the wasteful management of natural resources, to what institutions ought to be present in a community of a given size (but are not). While authors such as Frederick Douglass amply document the horrors visited on the slaves themselves, Olmsted's experiences reveal the deleterious effect that slavery has on white Southerners, both morally and economically. He faithfully records how the violence meted out to slaves seeps into the relationships among whites, citing a duel where the victor took pleasure in hacking his downed opponent. The sons of a plantation owner he stays with, including boys as young as fourteen, spend all night in the cabins of female slaves. The shabby plantations described resemble those in "Huckleberry Finn" much more than the grand mansions in "Gone with the Wind" (with the possible exception of Virginia). The South is depicted here free of the glamor it would be painted with in later works. Rather than a dreamy Arcadia of older, aristocratic ways, it is a vast rural backwater far behind the North in its development. Every other household still uses a spinning wheel and handloom, technology obsolete in the North, and a plow with a moldboard is regarded as a recent innovation. Many grown men have never seen a dollar, but barter for all their needs. The vast majority of white Southerners are poorer than Northerners, both in material wealth and in intellectual capital. Rarely does Olmsted see a piano, a painting, or a book of Shakespeare in even the homes of the well-to-do. He compares the South to a permanent frontier environment. Schools, churches, printing presses and the like are few and far between, as they are on the western frontier, but this is only a temporary condition on the frontier. As the population presses westward, all these advantages are eventually brought to what was once a frontier town, which is thus civilized within a decade or so. Olmsted finds such progress much more glacial in the South. Even the vaunted "Southern hospitality" turns out to be largely a myth. Innkeepers, coach drivers, and even the railroad routinely take advantage of Olmsted, and when he begs for a night's accommodation in a prosperous home, he is charged for the privilege. Some of this underdevelopment stems from an attitude toward work that is almost medieval. Even poor whites consider work to be degrading, engaged in only by necessity. Physical jobs that require independent judgment are entrusted to laborers from the North, and to specially picked slaves who are motivated not by whippings but by cash payments for exceeding quotas. Some might think his narratives overlong, relating every turn and fork of a ride through the woods, or every time someone walks in and out of a room while recounting an evening spent in a slave owner's home. Not me, as I'm fascinated by the routine incidents of lives so remote in both time and attitude. I did, however, wonder whether Olmsted had a photographic memory, was taking surreptitious notes, or was just inventing details. While today we have no need of arguments against slavery, it's still interesting to read the approaches Olmsted takes. In one chapter he asks if Southern blacks are inferior to whites, as claimed, why are there no attempts to rehabilitate and educate them, as is done with white criminals, or with the inmates of insane asylums?

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-23 00:00:00 Blala Dada ************************ *Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin 5 stars Books by Olmsted: *The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861 TBR *A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier TBR