The Death of Slavery: The United States, 1837-1865 (review)

Abstract

352CIVIL WAR HISTORY for Negroes are at present major problems in the United States but are not so in Cuba. Robert McColley University of Illinois The Death of SUvery: The United States, 1837-1865. By Elbert B. Smith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Pp. viii, 225. $5.00.) This book forms a part of the Chicago History of American Civilization series. It takes its place chronologically between Marcus Cunliffe's volume on the period 1789-1837, and John Hope Franklin's on reconstruction ; it overlaps Charles P. Roland's The Confederacy. One may say at once that the author is less perspicuous than Cunliffe, less successful as a synthesizer of recent scholarship than Franklin, and more superficial than Roland. Surely, if the futile Confederacy deserves a whole book for its brief hour, the preponderant Union deserves as much for its enduring contribution to American civilization. It is perhaps pretentious to describe this work as a volume in a history of civilization. In actuality Smith has written fairly straightforward political history, stressing parties, campaigns, and men, making scant effort to fit his narrative into the context of American civilization. Daniel Boorstin, the editor, asserts that his series "aims to bring to the general reader, in compact and readable form, the insights of scholars who write from different points of view." Whatever this may signify, Smith has written a highly readable narrative, which is probably too compact to encompass his grand theme. His insight is distinguished bv balanced judgment; but his approach is conventional, if not old-fashioned, and his recital, as I must amplify, is gravely marred by factual errors. To tell the history of the United States from 1837 to 1865 in two hundred pages is no mean feat. Mr. Smith offers a smoodi account, enlivened by anecdotes and biographical sketches. He is familiar with recent literature; and he emphasizes racism as a fundamental cause of the Civil War. Slavery, in dying, he observes in a contemporary note, did not take with it the disease of racial prejudice. I believe him quite right in stressing race, but I think he has not sufficiently buttressed his argument . Smith commences with a sparse survey of historians' interpretations of the causes of the Civil War, and of sections, the abolitionists, and Jacksonian democracy. His treatment of the last theme is largely biographical, inadequate on the Democrats and misjudging of the Whigs. He excels himself in explaining the origins of the Mexican War, and censures the United States for starting it; and he underscores the one war as a cause of a second. He underplays the explanation of the partition of Oregon. Consistent widi his biographical method but not with the realities of history, he focuses upon the great Senate debate in presenting the Com- BOOK REVTEWS353 promise of 1850. Rather surprisingly he follows this with an entire, if short, chapter on fugitive slaves, and tiiis witii a chapter on Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Sumner. So significant a matter as the origins of the Republican party is managed cursorily, leading up to an extended narrative of the Fremont campaign. Throughout tiiis part of the book Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose biography Smidi has written, looms almost larger than life. From here on the book moves at a hurrying pace. Smith holds compromise to have been impossible in 1861, frees Lincoln from fault in opposing the Crittenden proposal and from starting the Civil War. He disposes of the military history of die Civil War in nine pages. The teacher who might consider putting diis book into the hands of students should be alerted to the questionable assertions and downright errors that a knowledgeable press reader would have eradicated from the text. It is misleading to say diat Seward and Weed adopted "the twin spirits of abolitionism and Free-Soilism" to defeat Van Buren's Albany Regency (p. 17), and to continue to identify Seward as an abolitionist (pp. 97, 164); or to call John Quincy Adams an abolitionist (p. 55). Smith is sadly in error in stating diat "in die election of 1832 Calhoun and his friends gave tiieir unqualified support to Clay" (p. 48); and in having Calhoun resign from die Vice-Presidency...