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62CIVIL WAR HISTORY use of psychoanalysis for understanding Brown because it is an "imprecise discipline." Yet he portrays Brown as humorless, stubborn, rigid, and as an habitual liar with an inability to follow the advice and leadership of others. These characteristics become as important for Brown's historical role as his deep religious and ideological beliefs. Many readers will conclude that Brown's militancy was motivated less by the desperate requirements of the antislavery movement than by a personality which compelled him to wage war againstslavery. In the unravelling of Brown's complex business operations and in depicting the complicated Kansas scene, Oates' scholarship is especially impressive. It is surprising, therefore, that he accepts uncritically William Siebert's The Underground Railroad and ignores Larry Gara's The Liberty Line. And however excellent his discussion of Brown's efforts at Pottawatomie to "regulate matters"—a phrase by Brown perhaps as disingenuous as "protective reaction" or "final solution"—Oates does not discuss the incident's possible impact upon those northern financial supporters who helped launch the Harpers Ferry raid. C. Vann Woodward has suggested that it was inexcusable for Brown's allies to continue supplying funds and not to acknowledge his guilt at Pottawatomie after his culpability was established by the Howard Committee congressional report on Kansas laid before the country in July 1856. Phillip Foner, on the other hand, has cited post-Civil War evidence to conclude that Brown's supporters knew about Pottawatomie and justified the killing in the context of proslavery aggression in Kansas. My recent sampling of northeastern newspapers and the unpublished research of Anthony Cole indicate, however, that neither the minority report containing Representative Mordecai Oliver's disclosure of Brown's part in the murders nor his speech to Congress appeared in the northem press. Only the majority report, not mentioning Brown or Pottawatomie , received press coverage. It is very possible, therefore, that Brown's northern supporters were genuinely uncertain about Pottawatomie events and did not know his responsibility for the massacre. To Purge This Land with Blood presents Brown as neither a madman nor a thief but as a revolutionary zealot who was psychologically and religiously committed to militant abolitionism. It now becomes apparent that his long record of failures can be attributed to his strong propensity to gross incompetence. Today we understand that such men emerge from obscurity to make history—often as insurrectionists or assassins . Tilden G. Edelstein Rutgers University The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1S40. By Richard Hofstadter. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. Pp. xiii, 280. $6.95.) This essay, an expanded version of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures BOOK REVIEWS63 delivered by Professor Hofstadter at Berkeley in 1966, is a fascinating introduction to a rather narrow, but quite important, topic—the concept of party. It is a fast-moving survey of the gradual development of political party theory to the point where a formal opposition was recognized as legitimate and even useful. The Revolutionary generation, which dominated the nation's politics till the end of the Virginia dynasty, inherited the eighteenth-century notion that parties were formed to promote selfish ends and that partisan spirit was destructive of national unity. Thus "party" or "faction" (and most eighteenth-century writers used the words interchangeably) were pejorative terms, accusations leveled at one's enemies. The major theoretical dispute involved whether parties could be avoided or suppressed (the attitude of Bolingbroke and Hamilton) or whether they were the unavoidable by-product of free institutions whose evil tendencies could be checked and limited (the view of Hume and Madison). Not surprisingly, the establishment of national political parties in the 1790s forced a revision of this traditional yiew. Republican theory, formulated largely by Madison, naturally moved toward the conclusion that party opposition, particularly if it represented the interests of a popular majority, could be legitimate if it confined itself to constitutional methods. And the peaceful transfer of power in 1801 suggests the tacit, if somewhat begrudging, acceptance of this notion by the Federalists . Ironically, the period of Republican ascendancy represented a return to the old notion of national unity and abhorrence of faction...

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