Race, Reform, and Rebellion

Library Journal

Captain Franklin Smith was a quartermaster in Jefferson Davis's regiment, the First Mississippi, on the Rio Grande. His seven-month tour was spent in supply duties far from the battlefield. This daily journal provides an earnest and fairly typical account of daily work, camp gossip, and anecdotes about civilian and ethnic culture. Historically useful, it also makes interesting reading for the layperson, although The Mexican War Journals and Letters of Ralph W. Kirkham , edited by Robert Miller ( LJ 2/15/91), offers a livelier account of a more important theater of the war. Public libraries will still want John S.D. Eisenhower's superb account So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848 (LJ 4/15/90). This title is for specialized and larger public collections.-- Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog . , Los Angeles