Soldiers of Light and Love

Book excerpt: "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.