Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic. By James Simeone. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 289. $38.00.) In the years following their state's admission into the Union in 1818, the citizens of Illinois debated revising their constitution to permit a limited system of slavery with provisions for gradual abolition. Supporters of a convention argued that a new constitution was necessary both as a boon to the state's economy and as a symbol of majority rule in Illinois. Opponents, content with the voluntary indentures that kept most of the state's African Americans in quasi-bondage, rejected a constitutional convention as unnecessary tampering that would open Illinois to a stigmatized institution. The conventionists lost by fewer than 2,000 votes in 1824, but their struggle helped transform Illinois politics forever. The convention battle is a thread that runs through this book, but James Simeone's primary interest is the rise of majoritarian democracy and identity politics in Illinois. That leads him to the broader context of a shifting and economic landscape in the late 1810s. The deferential culture of the territorial period benefited elite statesmen such as Ninian Edwards, who used the power generated through federal connections to build a patronage network. Edwards floundered, however, in the increasingly democratic and contentious arena after statehood, while other politicians, like Edward Coles and Jesse B. Thomas, had better success at building coalitions and mobilizing voters. The convention was one issue used by politicians to generate popular support. Conventionists played the majoritarian card, arguing that the 1818 constitution was a vestige of the territorial period and congressional power and needed to be replaced by a constitution that reflected the values of the majority of the people. While politicians were struggling over the implications of statehood, the Panic of 1819 and the subsequent depression halted the state's drive toward market agriculture and influenced the convention debate. Advocates of a new constitution argued that opening Illinois to slaveholders would attract a wave of new settlers and an infusion of capital, while their slaves would labor to clear the fertile, but often disease-ridden, bottomlands for cultivation of cash crops. As the title of his book suggests, Simeone argues that there was a close relationship between the limited slavery expected in a new constitution and promises of and economic democracy. He goes further to argue that the convention struggle transformed the very identity of Illinois citizens, allowing ordinary to define themselves in opposition to both the African Americans beneath them and the elitist who opposed democratization and the new constitution. But the unity of class and racial interests could not be sustained. Once the people became the white and political equality and formal social equality with the big folks was attained, there was no longer a tangible class image against which champions of democracy could register the social striving of their followers (168-69). The ordinary people of Illinois fractured along cultural lines that reflected larger divisions within American society. Southern settlers remained suspicious of those from the North, especially in regards to the issue of slavery, while whole-hog Calvinists, primarily anti-mission Baptists, challenged the culture and theology of milk-and-- cider Arminians (chap. …