| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. By Lonnie A. Burnett. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. viii, 239 pp. $37.50, ISBN 978-0-8173-1524-5.)

Fans of political history will savor this model biography. Well written, balanced, succinct yet comprehensive, it rescues from obscurity the son of a more famous father. John Forsyth Jr. (1812–1877) graduated Princeton in 1832 as class valedictorian, practicing law briefly in Georgia before moving to Mobile in 1835. Giving up law for journalism, he made his mark as the staunch Democratic editor of the Mobile Register over a forty-year span and was a politician of national reputation. Forsyth took firm positions on a variety of local, state, and national issues in his newspaper though he somehow avoided duels. A man of affairs, he served in the state legislature before and after the Civil War, as Mobile's mayor and an alderman during Reconstruction, and as an urban promoter who, amusingly, saw his city's interests as synonymous with his own. Forsyth traveled throughout the United States and made a postwar European trip.

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