Louisiana State University Press, 1996

Benjamin H. Trask has recovered a lively voice from the past, a voice heavy with the accents of time and place. Trask’s recent republication of the neglected 1863 Two Months in the Confederate States by “an English Merchant” brings to light an interesting, informative, and enjoyably readable account of a British citizen’s southern travels from October to December of 1862. The work is valuable both as a source of firsthand information about the social and economic conditions of a defining period in the South’s history and as a text that engages late-twentieth-century readers in the retrospective exercise of measuring the narrator’s impressions and predictions against the evolution of historical events.