Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut (review)

BOOK REVIEWS365 Prudence Cranda.il: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut . By Edmund Fuller. (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Pp. 110. $5.95.) Edmund Fuller's account of the Prudence Crandall incident, which involved the closing of a school for girls in Connecticut in 1834 because it accepted black students, is written for "general readers" who know little about abolitionism. It is a narrative account of the incident, drawn from contemporary sources, that is supposed to be "relevant" to the understanding of racial problems today. Although the book is filled with extensive quotations, it has no footnotes or index. Nor does Fuller seem to have read any of the recent scholarship on the abolitionists. His comment on William Lloyd Garrison's famous manifesto is that "they are the words of a fanatic; and fanatics, even in just causes, are dangerous men." Fuller's book is all the more disappointing because his subject has a real potential. The events surrounding the affair provide an insight not only into the early tactics of the abolitionist movement, but also into the attitudes of the abolitionists toward the education of the free Negro . Fuller's account of the Prudence Crandall affair, in short, is poor history. It will be of little interest either to historians or to students of abolitionism. Clifford E. Clark, Jr. Carleton College The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influence of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861-1865. By Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972. Pp. xi, 435. $10.00.) For more than a decade Wilfred B. Yearns' The Confederate Congress has been the sole comprehensive study of the Congress of the Confederate States. It now has a companion, but one radically different in form. Professors Alexander and Beringer have produced a wholly quantified analysis of the relationships between legislative voting and certain personal and constituency characteristics of the members of the Confederate Congress. The book opens with a brief introductory essay describing the research design employed. The first three substantive chapters deal with member attributes, including a number that are merely descriptive, but concentrating on such potentially influential considerations as former party allegiance, stand on secession, absolute and relative (in the member 's home county) wealth, absolute and relative slaveholding, constituency wealth and slaveholding, and exterior-interior status (that is, whether the district represented by the congressman was or was not occupied or immediately threatened by Federal troops). In the next six chapters the authors attempt to assess the influence of ...