A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina

The Civil War journals of a Northern abolitionist engaged in the Port Royal Experiment

New Englander William Francis Allen (1830–1889) is mostly known today as the lead editor of the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United States, the earliest published collection of African American spirituals, and as a distinguished history professor at the University of Wisconsin. During the Civil War, he served from late 1863 through mid-1864 as a member of the "Gideonite band" of businessmen, missionaries, and teachers who migrated to the South Carolina Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment. After the war he served as assistant superintendent of schools in Charleston from April through July 1865. Allen kept journals during his assignments in South Carolina in which he recorded events and impressions of about several hundred people, especially ex-slaves, along with fellow Gideonites, Union soldiers and officials, and ex-Confederates.

In A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina, editor James Robert Hester has transcribed Allen's journals and fully annotated them to create a significant documentary source of information on Civil War South Carolina. Hester notes that Allen's journals are more than travelogues, as he often analyzed the people, events, and ideas he encountered. In addition to being a competent amateur musician, Allen was a Harvard-trained historian and philologist and brought his impressive skills to his writing. Later in his life he became an eminent professor of history at the University of Wisconsin.

The work is generously annotated, containing almost six hundred endnotes, which amplify Allen's narrative and complement Allen's vivid glimpses of coastal South Carolina during the Civil War.