Frontier Governor: Samuel J. Crawford of Kansas (review)

186CIVIL WAR HISTORY tributed its presence to European influences, and he saw no solution except all-out racial warfare or the creation of a vastly inferior black nation within the larger nation. Nevertheless Sarmiento's travel book provides a good corrective for some of those written by contemporaries whose biases were more negative . As a work written by one of the leading Latin American intellectuals and political activists, it assumes first-rate significance. Sarmiento worked diligently to make his fellow Argentinians aware of the United States, and to make Americans aware of Argentina. This new edition of his travel book should add still another dimension to his task. Larry Gara Wilmington College Frontier Governor: Samuel J. Crawford of Kansas. By Mark A. Plummer . (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1971. Pp. xiii, 210. $7.75.) Observers of the Kansas scene in the 1860's might have predicted a bright political future for Samuel Crawford because of his spectacular rise to high state office, but the young Kansas governor reached the apex of his political career very early in life. Crawford went to Kansas in 1859 and served briefly in the state legislature before joining the military upon the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1864 Colonel Crawford , commander of a Negro regiment, received the Republican nomination for governor and was elected to that office before his thirtieth birthday. Crawford served two terms during the difficult Reconstruction period. He reflected Kansas attitudes by supporting Radical Reconstruction and advanced beyond public opinion by supporting an unsuccessful effort to award the suffrage to women and blacks. After the election of a new governor in 1868 Crawford resigned to command the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry during Philip Sheridan's winter campaign against the Southern Plains tribes. Thereafter he unsuccessfully sought high political office, but he did become state claims agent, a position that made him a very wealthy man. Although Mark Plummer has mined primary and secondary materials for this biography, he has chosen a subject of minor importance. Crawford was an adequate but unspectacular soldier and an adequate governor but a poor politician. Hc never developed a political machine and was inconsistent in party affiliation, and although he became a Liberal Republican and opposed corruption, his administration was tainted with scandal. Moreover Crawford's political career docs not throw much light on the "dark ages" of Kansas history, the period between Bleeding Kansas and the Populist Era, as the author had hoped. Plummers short biography will not supersede other works on this period of Kansas history such as Albert Castcl's A History of a Frontier State at War. Paul Gates' Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kamas Land Policy, BOOK REVIEWS187 1854-1890, or standard accounts of Sheridan's winter campaign against the Indians. Richard N. Ellis University of New Mexico Race and the American Romantics. Edited by Vincent Freimarck and Bernard Rosenthal. (New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Pp. xi, 328. $12.50.) In the preface to their anthology, Messers Freimarck and Rosenthal have attempted "to define the place of slavery and race in American romantic imagination." Their thesis, enunciated in a twenty-one page introduction to the selections, is that most of the romantic writers who flourished in prc-Civil War America evinced no passionate antipathy to slavery, shared the anti-Negro prejudices of their peers, and at worst were out and out "racists." The passages from articles, essays, fiction, letters, and speeches that make up the volume have less to do with the role of the Negro in the romantic imagination than they do with the attitudes of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman , Bryant, and Lowell toward slavery and the Black race. That these writers, Whitticr excepted, shared the pervasive belief of Negro inferiority comes as no surprise to any one familiar with their writing. The most authoritative "scientific" opinion of their day sustained them. Indeed, the editors might have strengthened their case against at least two of the romantic culprits, Hawthorne and Whitman , by extracting damaging excerpts from their letters. They might have pointed out as well that devoted anti-slavery fighters like Theodore Parker displayed on occasion a distinct "colorophobia" and that even Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom they...