When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Diplomacy, 1800-1860 (review)

268CIVIL WAR HISTORY crucial to the text. It is annoying to the extreme to have these notes clustered at the end of the volume. Despite the author's own warnings of the tentative nature of his study, this work does add significantly to our picture of pre-Civü War political behavior. It is the fervent hope of this reviewer that he will produce its sequel, covering the remaining antebellum years. Robert W. Johannsen University of Illinois When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Diplomacy, 1800-1860. By William H. Goetzmann. (New York: John Wüey & Sons, 1966. Pp. xvü, 138. $4.95.) In this slender addition to the series in American diplomatic history, America in Crisis (edited by Robert A. Divine), William Goetzmann has succeeded in compressing the dynamic exploits of American territorial and commercial expansion during the first half of the nineteenth century. Here is no simple narration of familiar facts but a remarkably fresh synthesis wherein governmental policy and private initiative are closely integrated. Not only did these years from Jefferson to Lincoln see the American Republic complete its continental growth, but, as Goetzmann correctly emphasizes , the United States was likewise "brought into direct and often precarious competition with the great powers of the globe" in Latin America, Africa, and the Orient. To this extent the very foundations for later great power status were laid and from which point there was to be no retreat. On the whole, Goetzmann seems to believe that government policy was the principal driving force for expansionism, at least as reflected in the nation's diplomatic policies. His story concentrates far more on the diplomats and politicians than on merchants, explorers, farmers and that amorphous quantity, public opinion. What makes the book worth reading for both interested laymen and specialists is that Goetzmann asks significant questions about the familiar facts. Even his broad perspective is fresh if not altogether novel. He does not shirk from engaging in historiographie controversies. For instance, he does not accept the view that the primary motive for President Polk's interest in California and Oregon lay in the coastal ports and harbor installations to be used for the enhancement of the Pacific trade. Goetzmann argues that the commercially minded Whigs were simply not influential enough in the decision-making process to shape Polk's policies in this manner. The difficulty with this position seems to be that, like most syntheses of American expansionism covering the 1830's, the 1840's, and the 1850's, Goetzmann treats each phase topically and separately as if they are so many successive lectures. Historians have considered the events leading to the American Treaty with Siam (1833); the First China Treaty (1843); the Mexican War (1846); the Oregon Treaty (1846); the Treaty with New Grenada (1846); the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850); the Cuban Question (1853-1854) and BOOK REVIEWS269 Perry's Mission to Japan (1853-1854) as so many individual, even isolated chapters in American diplomacy. Nowhere are these chapters fused into some overaU "large" policy. Unlike later day historians, American decisionmakers have had to deal simultaneously with a vast range of problems which could not be disconnected. Scholars might also devote additional attention to studying the forces in opposition to "manifest destiny" during the mid-nineteenth century. Professor Goetzmann clearly did not attempt these tasks, but he is not unaware of them. He has written a masterful synthesis which adds lustre to the John Wiley series and contains many useful suggestions for further scholarship. Lawrence E. Gelfand University of Iowa Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom. By Merton L. Dillon. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 285. $6.75.) To historians, Benjamin Lundy has long seemed one of the most puzzling and seemingly contradictory of the abolitionists, a pioneer reformer working in the half-light of public hostility until 1830 but thereafter, until his death in 1839, retreating into the shadows of an ill-considered colonization project while younger men like William Lloyd Garrison seized the limelight . In the first place, the record is incomplete. Most of Lundy's papers were destroyed in the burning of Pennsylvania HaU in 1838, and historians have generally had to rely...