Scholar in America

THE COLONIAL AGENTS--Dr. Ellla Lonn--University of North Carolina Press ($5).

Twenty years ago, when Ella Lonn's career as a scholar had barely begun, she lived in a boardinghouse in Bloomsbury, lunched on is. 6d. a day, spent most of her waking hours in the vast files of the Public Records Office in London. As in most of her work since then, she was traveling paths of history no one had traversed before.

Before the American Revolution, the colonies sent agents to England. Benjamin Franklin was one, but the rest are largely forgotten. What Dr. Lonn wanted to know was who they were, how they lived, what they did, how much they earned. These and other facts she had set herself to discover from almost undecipherable letters, records and minutes of the British Board of Trade 300 years before.

After eight months of research she carried thousands of notes home to La Porte, Ind., and went back to her job as professor of history at Baltimore's Goucher College. Soon came a letter from home: the house had caught fire and all her notes were burned.

Bloodhound and Ant. An ordinary woman--or man--might have abandoned this recondite search in despair. But the genuine scholar is indefatigable--a combination of bloodhound and ant. Ella Lonn did not forget the problem of the colonial agent. But before returning to it she produced four other books--all scholarly tomes of the kind which are published obscurely but become indispensable source books for other scholars and for popular writers.

Now in her middle 60s, unmarried, friendly, animated, Dr. Lonn still lives in Baltimore, is working on a book about foreigners in the Union Army. She gives some 25 lectures a year, is one of the editors of the Journal of Southern History, serves many a worthy committee and cause. The quality of her writing and the originality of her subjects have kept her books well above the level of run-of-the-mill Ph.D. dissertations.

Postwar Guide. Her first book was Reconstruction in Louisiana. To students now concerned with the postwar world, this detailed account of what happened in defeated Louisiana--where Federal troops (and bullet-headed General Phil Sheridan) remained in occupation until 1877--is invaluable. To plain readers it is a collection of facts which their histories have neglected to give them--including a brilliant sketch of the Negro Governor Warmoth, who was only 26 when he took office. Like Dr. Lonn's next painful subject--Desertion During the Civil War--the book is gall & wormwood to romanticists of the Old South.

While Dr. Lonn was digging up the facts for Desertion During the Civil War, she discovered her closest approach to a popular subject. This was salt. Something strange and terrible happened to the people in the Southern states when the northern blockade deprived them of salt. The 9,000,000 Confederates had used 300,000,000 Ibs. of salt a year, most of it in curing bacon. Humans were weakened through lack of salt in their diet, and Lee's horses suffered hoof and tongue diseases. Determinedly after the subject, Dr. Lonn spent five years studying the archives at Raleigh, Montgomery, Jackson, New Orleans, Atlanta.

Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy has the effect of making the Southern struggle more poignant and painful than many a book that tries to make it so. Foreigners in the Confederacy, Dr. Lonn's fourth book, reveals the Civil War as more international than Southerners or Northerners have remembered. It lists the English officers on the generals' staffs, the thousands of Germans, the soldiers of fortune, the freebooters who fought on both sides. Pursuing this trail, Dr. Lonn searched the Union and Confederate muster rolls.

Fixers In London. The Colonial Agents is a 444-page record of the 200 agents who represented Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia in London. (Because other scholars had "nibbled at the subject" she restricted herself to the South.)

The colonial agents were fixers. The grievances they tried to redress were usually minor. Sometimes the King, in honoring a subject, would give him a land grant in Virginia of thousands of acres, not knowing that the tract contained many a large and flourishing plantation. Or the Board of Trade would quiz a Virginia agent about conditions in the West Indies, thinking it a neighboring province. Or the English Government would appropriate -L-7,000 or -L-8,000 a year for presents to friendly Indian tribes, and the money would be spent for presents so inappropriate that the colonists would not bother to distribute them.

The book gives a close picture of the weakness and isolation of the colonists when they declared their independence. The ceaseless attempts to see the authorities, to collect expense accounts, to get reimbursements for money spent in war, to explain things to monarchs, to answer misrepresentations--all this gives the impression that exasperation alone was enough to bring on the American Revolution.

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