BOOK REVIEWS281 arrangements that each produced. While he focuses on the larger regional patterns, the author carefully considers individual places within the region, particularly St. Louis, which dominated the steamboat trade of the Upper Mississippi and thereby took on entrepôt functions, and Davenport and Galena, two towns that assumed very different roles in their interactions with the region. There are two aspects of River Towns in the Great West that deserve special comment. First, Mahoney provides an excellent analysis of the creation and functioning of this particular urban system in the 183Os and 1840s. He does far less in analyzing its evolution after the 185Os, however, even though he selected 1870 as the closing date for the book's subtitle. Mahoney does show that the panic of 1857 played a critical part in hardening and centralizing the regional system and thereby making for less diversity among the dozens of small towns, all of which became increasingly dependent on large metropolitan centers. He pays scant attention, however, to the coming of the railroads and to the advent of a vastly reoriented urban system, one that in this particular region began to focus increasingly on Chicago rather than St. Louis. A second aspect of Mahoney's incomplete achievement has to do with the social, political, and cultural history of the region. He suggests intriguing lines of inquiry in these areas, particularly in an epilogue he titles "Toward a Regional Social History," but his own research and analysis settle largely on economic questions. These comments are not meant as criticism but rather to suggest how Mahoney's work shows the way for significant additional research. His own research is impressively thorough, and his writing is clear and interesting (though Cambridge University Press should be embarrassed at the many print shop errors that remain). This is an outstanding book, one that will have relevance for scholars of widely different interests, and one that will make it considerably more important for all of us to think in regional as well as local and national contexts. James H. Madison Indiana University-Bloomington Civil Rights, the Constitution and Congress, 1863-1869. By Earl M. Maltz. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. Pp. 198. $25.00.) Earl Maltz's Civil Rights, the Constitution and Congress is a clever addition to the literature that asks whether the framers of the Civil War Constitution intended to house the genie of civil rights in a bottle or to set him free. It will be welcomed by those who seek a modestly sized bottle and a cork. The contents of the bottle are, he concedes, uncertain at the margins, but amount to a "limited absolute equality" of core rights "based on a relatively narrow, fixed conception of both natural rights and the privileges and immunities of citizenship." The stopper 282CIVIL WAR HISTORY was federalism, the Republicans' "widely shared belief that . . . the role of federal government in the protection of individual rights would be minimal at best." Maltz believes that the Supreme Court should be guided by the original understandings of the framers, and he brings considerable skills of advocacy as well as careful scholarship to the task of discovering what they were. The book's strength lies in the presentation of argument rather than in the exploration of new sources. Maltz tests the credibility of the case for a broad construction of civil rights laws and finds it wanting, but only after appearing to give it full due process. His intelligent concessions to alternative interpretations, and his disarming admissions when he finds that the evidence could be construed in more than one way, have the effect of making his own skilfully defended inferences the more seductive. To mix more metaphors from the nursery, this is a Pied Piper of a book, very attractive, very reasonable. The reader should keep her wits about her. The declared purpose of the book is to discover what changes in the law congressmen believed they were making. Its sources are congressional debates, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment and ending with the Fifteenth. Maltz finds little to sustain some of the modern—and now threatened?—constitutional doctrines that sustain federal interventions into state and private decision making...
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Apr 25, 2024
Chen Xuan 
Open Access