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78CIVIL WAR HISTORY qualification in the light of the changes brought about by the Negro Revolt and symbolized in the enthusiastic support of a Civil Rights Act by the first southern president in over a century. Carl N. Decler Vassar College The Mind of the Old South. By Clement Eaton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Pp. xiv, 271. $6.00.) Clement Eaton is not to be blamed for a certain paradoxicality in the title and subject of his latest study of the antebellum South. As his Growth of Southern Civilization has already shown, he has a finely balanced understanding of the southern economy and society. But after searching out more than a dozen thinkers representative of the southern mind, he has to conclude that they were all so "bent and warped by powerful economic and social forces"—the mandatory defense of slavery in particular—as to have been as trivial in thought as they were ineffectual in action. "The Southern brand of individualism," he observes, "was of manners and character rather than of the mind." Only in the sense that all history has sprung from human consciousness can the pervasive southern "folkways and attitudes" which so hemmed in Eaton's would-be intellectuals be called mind. As a southern version of the liberal, John Hartwell Cocke appears neither particularly liberal nor at all effective in reform. The radicalism (on slavery) of Cassius Marcellus Clay and Hinton Rowan Helper was rejected out of hand; it was all they could do to keep one foot in the South. A conservative such as James H. Hammond was just as ineffective and notably vacillating in ideas as well. Indeed, Eaton is hard put to apply such terms as "liberal" and "conservative" with any consistency, apart from attitudes toward slavery. On the other hand, Henry A. Wise, accounted a progressive as an exponent of white democracy and economic development, was not wholly inconsistent in ardently defending the Negro slave labor system. The southern scientific mind, apart from a handful of part-time southerners struggling against "ignorant and outlandish" opposition, Eaton finds to have been "essentially unscientific"; only the applied science of the improving planter was honored. The religious mind, retreating into a defensive orthodoxy, produced no theologians, only pulpit orators and dogmatic professors. The romantic mind, exemplified by William Gilmore Simms, was undisciplined, devoted to the gentlemanly self-delusions of self-made cotton snobs, and not even much interested in literature. Even Greek architecture and the fashionable classical curriculum were "viewed in a romantic and unhistorical light." Although Eaton takes his intellectuals as seriously as they deserve, he has to concur with Frederick Law Olmsted that the mind of the Old South was "disinclined to exact and careful reasoning." BOOK reviews79 One is left wondering whether so mindless and self-deluded a society, whose defense of its economic and social values vitiated those among its intellectuals whom it did not in fact expel, could by any means have avoided the irrational plunge into hopeless civil war. At the fateful hour the southern mind was represented by William L. Yancey, "the voice of emotion"—or of neurosis, as Eaton's sketch of his fitful career suggests. That is not to say that the northern mind of the time was of a much higher grade of excellence, except in not being doggedly committed to one peculiar economic and social institution. But that is not Professor Eaton's subject, and his sympathetic study of the mind of the Old South presents a truer indictment than any abolitionist of the time could have contrived. ixr U- _·. TT-·*_ROWLANn BERTHOFF Washington University Shvery in America: Its Legal History. By Bamett Hollander. (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1963. Pp. xx, 212. $7.00.) The author, who is identified on the dust jacket as an English attorney and the author of several legal works, opens his book with the question : "I have asked myself, is there possible justification for another book related to 'Slavery'?" This reviewer wishes that the question had been answered with an emphatic negative, for there is little reason for the existence of this book. Its title belies its contents—a hodge-podge of random...

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