"This sensitive and informed account of freedmen's education provides the fullest and richest portrait we have of the 'Yankee schoolmarms' who went South to teach blacks after the Civil War. . . . [A] well-written and rewarding book."
—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
"This is an altogether admirable piece of scholarly literature. It will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with the history of Georgia, Reconstruction, blacks, education, philanthropy, or the place of women in nineteenth-century America."
—Richard N. Current
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, first published in 1980, 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.
