NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Opinions and Reviews Atkins, Jonathan M. Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee , 1832-1861. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1997. 371 pages. Cloth. $38.00. This monograph is an expanded version of the author's 1991 University of Michigan dissertation. It has all of the strengths of that particular genre of historical literature and a few of its limitations as well. It is generally clearly organized and well researched in primary sources. In addition, Atkins has read most ofthe secondary literature on Tennessee, Southern, and American politics that deals with that subject between 1832 and 1861. He has combined all of these elements into a straightforward narrative that provides considerable detail about the several phases of state politics in Tennessee in this time period. Atkins starts with a chapter on politics and Republicanism in Tennessee . Republicanism serves as his interpretive theme and is described as follows: "Government was to be based on the consent of the governed; a written constitution represented the people's grant of power to their leaders and provided the framework for government and law; and all citizens were to be regarded as equal before the law..." This rather general sentiment had become embodied in the political image of Andrew Jackson, who was the unchallenged political leader in the state in the early 1830s. The Jackson coalition split during the presidential election of 1836 when Hugh Lawson White, a United States senator from East Tennessee, challenged Jackson's hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren, for the electoral vote in Tennessee and won. White's supporters, who represented the more commercial interests in the state, on organized themselves into the Whig party. For the next two and one-half decades, Jackson's allies—calling themselves Democrats—and the Whigs and their successors contested statewide elections in close races that encouraged a remarkably high level of voter participation. Atkins traces the impact of bank and tariff policies , depression, slavery, the Union, and secession on the political leaders and voters of Tennessee. Most of this has been ably covered by Paul H. Bergeron in his Antebellum Politics in Tennessee (1982). Atkins does, however, greatly expand coverage of the period after the decline of the Whig party and shows the continuities that survived through the election of 1860. In addition, Atkins also provides a new focus on the ideas presented in these campaigns. He points out that many ofthe issues and 64 ideological assumptions in Tennessee politics were framed in a national perspective. The result was that specific state or local issues rarely intruded into the formal campaign speeches or partisan newspaper columns . Both parties emphasized the importance of maintaining a republican government and accused the other ofviolating major tenets of this point of view. When one compares this work with Marc W. Kruman's Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865 (1983), the limitations ofAtkins's approach are apparent. Kruman spends several chapters setting the scene and describing the structure of the political system and its place in the broader context of North Carolina society. In addition, Kruman refuses to be bound by strict chronology and instead follows a series of developments in chapters that overlap time periods. Atkins, on the other hand, follows a strict chronological format that limits the amount of analysis that he can bring to the text. The result is that Atkins presents a series of election case studies that are very detailed and that provide clear explanation ofwhy one party or the other prevailed in that contest. The reader comes away, however, from this monograph not fully convinced about the analyses that the author presents. There are a number ofspecific instances that should be noted. First, Atkins does not really provide a convincing explanation for the profound differences in political behavior to be found in the three divisions of Tennessee. The readers of this journal will note that the insights provided by recent works by Tracy McKenzie, David Hsiung, and Ken Noe are not used to explain the distinctiveness—or lack thereof—of East Tennessee. Instead, Atkins relies on patterns of partisan loyalty, levels of commercial activity, and percentage of slaves in the population to explain voting patterns—which are...