In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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 an exclusive monolithic structure has imposed a purposeful pattern on otherwise unpredictable events." (P- 72). By the use of insights drawn from social psychology and his own studies of counter subversion, Davis advances an hypothesis about conspiratorial thought that adds significantly to the work of Richard Hofstadter and others. This mode of thought served to relieve the tensions which were generated in a mobile and inner-directed society, he believes , by the need on the one hand to "conspire," to sell oneself by role playing, and by the romantic imperative on the other hand to realize an honest sense of self. "The counter subversive could achieve at least temporary escape from the necessity of role playing by joining an ostensibly authentic crusade against a symbol of duplicity." (p. 29). The Slave Power thus constituted, for many in the North, "a powerful symbol that could stand for all the contradictions between appearance and reality in American society." (p. 30). In this respect Davis lends support to the "revisionist" interpretation of the coming of the Civil War. But he also deals with the paranoid style in a more sympathetic way than others have done. The rational assumption that men and groups, 74CIVIL WAR HISTORY evil no less than good, can direct the course of events is obviously a basic tenet of American liberalism. The disposition to find conflict in society may also give a reading to reality at least as valid as that of the consensus view. Paradoxically, as well, conspiratorial thought has had a constructive side, for the political process of isolating a presumed enemy has been an important means of reaffirming communal values. Nor was this mode of thought peculiar to the generation before the Civil War: the Revolutionary fathers, the Jeffersonian Republicans, and the Jacksonian Democrats similarly perceived and acted upon the realities of their day. The most important contribution of the present work is the stimulus it gives to further inquiry. More explicit analysis is needed of the relationship between the paranoid style and the Edenic myth. If Americans have believed that the nation began its existence in essential perfection, then they would naturally be strongly inclined to regard political evil as a "snake in Paradise." There is also the need to explain why the paranoid style conduced to "liberal" results in the nineteenth century, whereas the right wing seems more closely identified with it at the present day. A mode of thought shared by Lincoln, Jackson, the Revolutionary fathers, and the John Birch Society clearly presents a challenge to historians not associated with theright wing. Major L. Wilson Memphis State University The South: Old and New Frontiers, Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley. Edited by Harriet Chappell Owsley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. Pp. xix, 284. $8.00. ) This volume presents a broad spectrum of...

pdf

Share