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72CIVIL WAR HISTORY in that grand nineteenth century campaign to "sell" the American West to its potential users. Karnes compares Gilpin to Walt Whitman and this is a favorable view; some Coloradans may have paired him with the eccentric and erratic George Francis Train, who stepped back and forth across the borderline dividing genius from insanity during these years. In fact, Gilpin's wife alleged, during a divorce proceeding, that indeed he had gone 'round the bend.' William Gilpin, then, was a visionary and a publicist. As with many of his kind he made predictions that proved to be shrewd and farsighted ; others were entirely chimerical. Karnes "discovered" him through Bernard DeVoto; Henry Nash Smith (author of Virgin Land) may or may not have found his man in this manner. Hubert Howe Bancroft was Gilpin's biographer as early as 1889. Coloradans knew Gilpin as their controversial governor during Civil War days and as a man who stayed on in the role of land speculator, politician and local "character" until death claimed him in 1894. The latest biographer of this fascinating, yet puzzling personality on the western scene has performed his scholarly duties with care and skill. The book is thoroughly documented, the sources are of widely scattered and often obscure origin indicating a long and diligent search, and the writing is good. As it often happens, the author immersed himself so much in his subject that some of the central figure's characteristics rubbed off on him. Speaking of Gilpin, and others, as residents of what he called the subnation (the West), Karnes suggested that "these men went to Washington for transportation, for water, for land charters, for grazing and mineral rights." So far, so good. Then he made the remarkable statement: "Thus Independence, Denver, Santa Fe, Cheyenne, and the others could never be great cities because they made great decisions ." The generalization is so large, and shot through with so many implications—many of them subject to sharp dissent—that in a single and somewhat isolated statement, the author has furnished the basis for a whole new book. Perhaps he will write it. Robert G. Athearn University of Colorado Industrial Skvery in the Old South. By Robert S. Starobin. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Pp. xiii, 320. $7.95.) This volume is a fascinating and absorbing close-up of the brawn and skill of a large segment of the South's servile population; an invaluable assessment of the involvement of blacks, free and slave, in the industrial life of the antebellum South. Both the slave and free black population were meaningfully employed in southern industries—cotton textile manufacturing , coal mines, iron works, canal works, turnpikes, railroads, tobacco factories, and so forth. This carefully researched volume can be widely used as collateral reading in American history courses. BOOK reviews73 It is particularly valuable in showing a side of American history covered little, if at all, in regular textbooks—for example, the economics and politics of industrial slavery. This well-balanced, sane, dispassionate presentation of the dexterity of the South's black population, offers sound documentary evidence that slavery and industry in the antebellum South were intertwined. Careful selections of primary sources from widely scattered collections in state archives, university libraries, and newspapers, as well as the Library of Congress and National Archives provide the information needed to understand the scope and nature ofskilledblack labor. Although somewhat brief in spots, it is a splendid work of scholarship . Starobin's book splendidly performs the task a historical work should perform. It is objective in method, inescapable in its conclusions, andreflects reasonable, soundjudgment James H. Brewer North Carolina Central University The Skve Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. By David Brion Davis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Pp. ix, 97. $4.00.) This small volume contains the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University for 1969. No bibliography or index is included , and the brief notes for the three chapters appear at the back. The contribution of the work lies less in the use of new materials than in new ways of viewing the paranoid style, the essential feature of which Davis takes to be "the conviction that...

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