The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS365 figure for whom the historical record is largely incomplete. Schweninger has done an impressive amount of research in federal and county records, newspapers, and manuscript sources, and he has presented his findings in a clear and pleasing style. The result is a welcome contribution to reconstruction historiography. Lawrence N. Powell Tulane University The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War. By Gerald W. Wolff. (New York, Revisionist Press, 1977. Pp. viii, 378. $49.95.) Historians have conventionally regarded the controversy over the passage of the Kansas-NebraskaBill in 1854 as signifying thebreakdown of the second American party system. North-South polarity, die conventional wisdom goes, replaced political party division. Gerald Wolff's thesis is that these hostilities between the North and the South encompassed less than the above explanation leads oneto expect. He bases his conclusion on an intensive study of voting behavior in the Thirty-third Congress, the Congress that passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Wolff's roll-call analyses reveal that on Homestead legislation and also on tariff questions party affiliations of individual Congressmen proved more determining than section of residence. Since Congress turned to Homestead and tariff bills after the passage of KansasNebraska , the author feels justified in concluding that party spirit survived the seeming debacle. Further, Wolff considers fully all the roll-calls on amendments and procedural questions associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Although he acknowledges that the final vote revealed a strongly sectional split, especially among Congressmen elected as Whigs, the examination of the related roll calls shows that even on the KansasNebraska issue party identity persisted. Most Whigs, Northern and Southern, Wolff finds, took a "moderate" position. Wolff's work prompts two criticisms. First, his findings lack the novelty he claims for them. Historians have, it is true, seen the KansasNebraska Act as marking the collapse of the Whig party, but they have hardly denied that on matters unrelated to slavery expansion internal differences within the South persisted. Second, revealing as the intensive study of one Congress may be, the period covered is too short for meaningful generalization. On attitudes toward Homestead legislation, for instance, all Wolff establishes is that immediately following KansasNebraska 's passage, many Southerners still favored a homestead bill. His study offers no insight into later Southern solidarity and leaves open the possibility that 1854 may have heralded the beginning of the sense 366 CIVIL war history that Homestead and slavery expansion were closely related. In short, the subtitle "Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War" claims too much for this study of one Congress. These reservations should not obscure the book's merits. Not the least of these is a lucid explanation of the techniques of roll-call analysis, provided in the text as well as in the endnotes. Wolff s research results in splendid tables giving voting information for each member of the Thirty-third Congress. Fortunate indeed are future biographers whose subjects happen to have served in that body. Most important, the narrow chronological scope that prevents the study from sustaining generalizations about the causes of the Civil War makes possible what may well be the most detailedstudy in existence of a single Congress. Certainly, Wolff establishes that despite the party chaos associated with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, old loyalties and old predilections persisted among congressmen. Kansas-Nebraska may have killed the second party system, but The Kansas-Nebraska Bill makes it impossible to believe that death was instantaneous. John V. Mering University of Arizona Custer in the Civil War: His Unfinished Memoirs. Compiled and Edited by John M. Carroll. (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1977. Pp. 233. $27.50.) The modern reputation of George Armstrong Custer is fraught with irony. A successful "fighting general" during the Civil War, he is principally remembered for his disastrous defeat on the Little Big Horn in 1876. Because his grand finale was so memorable, Custer, the most celebrated army loser of the Indian wars, now commonly serves as the symbolic villain of white conquest. "Custer died for your sins," a red power slogan admonishes us. TheCuster publishing industry, which has flourished ever since the Generalfell, reflects the popularpreoccupation with Custer's...