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book reviews171 scious," in a bizarre book about racism, fundamental differences between Negroes and whites, and our society's search for racial harmony. Convinced that a "psychoanalytically oriented history should be much more therapeutic," he charts a course in a Table of Contents that conveys reliably the flavor and sweep of his interests: History, Sigmund Freud and the Old South; Cannibalism, George Fitzhugh and the Mechanism of Introjection; George Fitzhugh and the Mechanism of Repression; The Slaveholder and the Six Faces of the Slave; The Master and Slave; Castration Anxiety in the North and South; Three is a Crowd: the White North Adopts the Black Slave Child; and, in an Epilogue—Psychohistory, the Black Power Movement and Woman's Liberation; Psychohistory in the Wide and Narrow Perspectives of Afro-American History. The pace continues inside, where an exasperating array of opinions, insights and messages tumble together in statements which indicate why this kind of psycho-history is often criticized as trying to have it all ways: "In the present book, the slave is refered to as representing in the unconscious mind of whites many things, such as penis, mother, father, god, feces, devil, death, evil, joy and child" (p. 19). "To the mind of the slave the white man was feces. Feces is many things as money, death, toy, weapon, child and gift. The slave thought of his owner as all of these things, and also as father, mother, devil, god and penis" (p. 113). Some of these statements are useful: a major facet of the slave personality was playing the system for all it was worth while maintaining a shuffling facade (p. 152). Some are careless: Denmark Vesey's conspiracy (1822) is put into "the 1831 to 1860 period" (p. 214). And others boggle the mind: "Genovese did not see that at least an equal tragedy for Fitzhugh [a tragedy equal to not having read Marx] is that he had no familiarity with Sigmund Freud who was only one year old when CANNIBALS ALL appeared" (p. 62). Norman Q. Brown, Fritz Perls and Joel Kovel, some antebellum writers , and a few others are the major sources for The Old South: A Psycho -history. But historical documents such as the "Management of Negroes" articles in antebellum agricultural journals, planters' diaries, and the insurrectionists' "Confessions," were not used. The value of this evidence is that it lays bare the planters' sexual anxieties, compulsion for order, and ambivalent feelings about blacks, as well as the slave rebels' conceptions of resistance and freedom, in contemporary expressions and symbols, which are sufficiently rich, and need not be teased out and distorted by cumbersome twentieth-century language. Gerald W. Mullin California State University, Sacramento The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861. By Robert E. May. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Pp. 285. $10.00.) 172CIVIL war history In its many forms, the question of the expansion of slavery into present and future territories of the United States must be one of the most thoroughly studied issues in antebellum historiography. Taking the shape of the asserted constitutional right of slaveholders to carry their human property westward, it provided the basis for the great sectional compromises and conflicts dating from the various ordinances of the 1780's down to the abortive Crittenden plan of the secession winter. In its economic and demographic guise, it has embroiled historians in a rich and confusing debate over the "natural limits" of slavery expansion, and the alleged imperatives within the southern political economy which demanded the acquisition of new lands. The expansion theme has also presented an intriguing chapter in the diplomatic history of the 1840's and 1850's, as southern politicians and eager filibusterers parried with their adversaries and with public opinion over the pursuit of Caribbean territory. Although it deals mainly with the latter problem, Robert E. May's The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire is the most ambitious effort yet to relate the Caribbean question to the larger picture of southern economic and political anxieties, and to secession. He describes with real skill the way in which the notion of manifest destiny was transformed by the political controversies of the last decades...

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