Cobbler in Congress: The Life of Henry Wilson, 1812-1875 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS165 Southern History given in 1968 at Louisiana State University by the late Professor Potter of Stanford. Those acquainted with his work will recognize the carefully-turned phrase and closely-reasoned logic that have characterized his previous scholarly efforts. However, as these essays were initially presented to a popular audience, there is an absence of professional jargon and scholarly paraphernalia. His theme is the manner in which the South, although a minority, was able to maintain a position of power in the national government for nearly a century. While the techniques he describes are well known, Potter's provocative addition is the thesis that the South accepted John C. Calhoun 's theory set forth in his Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution while rejecting his methods of achieving a concurrent majority. Instead, the South has been able, historically, to gain and hold a point at which negative power could be exercised by such tactics as control of committee chairmanships through seniority, use of the twothirds rule prior to 1936 to dominate the Democratic party, and exercise of the Senate right to filibuster. Although that region's power to obstruct has been greatly reduced, Potter concludes that "one important way of understanding the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, is to recognize that, in one of its aspects, it was the Century of the Concurrent Majority." This small volume is strongly recommended for a pleasant evening of reading for everyone interested in southern history or the inner workings of the Congressional system. It is a familiar story, with a new frame of reference, related with grace and charm. John S. Ezell University of Oklahoma Cobbler in Congress: The Life of Henry Wilson, 1812-1875. By Richard H. Abbott. (The University Press of Kentucky, 1972. Pp. 289. $13.50.) The political career of Henry Wilson, culminating in the Vice Presidency in 1873, clearly suggests that the man is entitled to a modern biography. Yet, as one pursues this book some good reasons emerge as to why this is the first twentieth-century biography of Wilson. Richard H. Abbott has done more than an adequate job of tracing Wilson's political career from his early activities in the Whig and Free Soil parties of Massachusetts through his senatorial years to the Vice Presidency. The research is thorough and the footnotes are in good order . Yet despite these efforts the man never quite comes alive and the book remains throughout rather dull. Certainly one of the problems confronting the author is that his subject was an incredibly dull man. Henry Wilson was one of a host of men of humble origin in the nineteenth century who sought to realize large ambitions through political careers. Undoubtedly he did have some concern for and affinity with the poor and the otherwise underprivileged, owing to his own early deprivations, but essentially the directions of his career, and the deci- 166CIVIL WAR HISTORY sions that determined them, were matters of political expediency. We find him wandering through the maelstrom of parties of his era, from Whig to Free Soiler to Know Nothing to Republican, always keeping his fines of communication open and always sensitive to the main chance. Even his well known work on the coming of the Civil War, the History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, was written, at least in part, to assure Wilson of his proper place in the annals of the antislavery movement. Certainly he cannot be taken seriously as a leader of the political antislavery movement or as a Radical Republican. Rather, his career is a distressing example of the effect of the success credo in its nineteenth century milieu. If one of the problems with this biography has to do with the limitations imposed by the subject, Henry Wilson might have emerged as more of a human being had the author been freer in his interpretations, had he been somewhat less scrupulous in presenting a balanced study. After the introductory paragraphs we are told almost nothing about Wilson's personal life until the concluding pages of the book, when we are informed of the death...