Soldiers of Light and Love

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.

* 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.

Soldiers of Light and Love is a splendid study. . . . The book is a model of careful scholarship.

Jones takes the reader along with northern schoolteachers in a manner reminiscent of Willie Lee Rose's masterful Rehearsal for Reconstruction.

In Soldiers of Light and Love, Professor Jones demonstrates a thorough mastery of several complex subjects including antebellum education, the experiences of mid-nineteenth-century northern women, the evangelical missionary impulse, the political history of Reconstruction, and the transition from slavery to freedom as viewed by southern blacks. The resulting narrative depicts the postwar decades with holistic integrity. I wish there were more books like it.

* Tulane Universi