The Disruption of the Pennsylvania Democracy, 1848-1860 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS177 enslaving them. Those historians with Neo-Marxist inclinations, contrary to earlier reports, will find fuel for their fires in these pages. Sharon Hartman Strom University of Rhode Island The Disruption of the Pennsylvania Democracy, 1848-1860. By John F. Coleman. (Harrisburg: The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1975. Pp. v, 184. $5.50.) The description of antebellum politics offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson , that the Jacksonians had the best principles but the Whigs had the best men, was the antithesis of the Pennsylvania situation. In the Keystone state at the outset of the antebellum period national Whig principles, particularly on economic issues, better fit the needs of a culturally homogeneous but geographically and economically heterogeneous state than did the national policies of the Southernoriented Democracy. Whig leaders were divided and inept, while state Democratic leaders cleverly offset the disadvantages of their national policies and their own internal divisions by a strident evocation of Jacksonian images of "common man" politics. But having stood Emerson's principle on its head, the author then presents a familiar story varied by the less-generally-familiar incidents of Pennsylvania history. It was the slavery issue that destroyed the Whig party, in Pennsylvania as elsewhere. But in Pennsylvania it was the conjunction of anti-slavery Whig Governor William F. Johnston's stand on the repeal of the state "personal liberty" law with the 1851 Christiana riot that enabled the Democrats to brand their opponents as abolitionist extremists and administer the electoral defeat from which the Whigs never recovered. The Whigs' successors, the Native Americans, were a "flash in the pan" because they proved totally unable to govern. But in Pennsylvania it was the "Jug Law," rather than convent investigations as in Massachusetts, which illustrated Know Nothing ineptitude. The Republicans learned the lesson of a too-narrow focus on the slavery issue; but in Pennsylvania not until after the disastrous defeat of David Wilmot in the gubernatorial race of 1857. Then the Republicans adopted a broader, conservative platform that emphasized economic issues, incorporated nativism, and transformed hostility to slavery expansion into an assertion of the superiority of the rights of northern white men to those of southern white men. With this success formula, the Republicans converted Democratic triumph into Democratic disaster in just two short years. Disruption was, however, partly self-inflicted; the Pennsylvania Democracy was wracked by bitter internecine warfare as the Presidency converted James Buchanan, the party's leading figure since 1848, from an "Old" to an "ex-Public Functionary." 178CIVIL WAR HISTORY With the Democracy suffering from a leadership vacuum, the Republicans , led by former Democrat Simon Cameron, could combine leadership and popular principles into the best of Emerson's worlds. The author's most significant contribution, in the opinion of this reviewer, is his analysis of the 1856 presidential election. While too readily accepting the legality of all the votes cast, and therefore their validity as indicating public sentiment, he does show that Buchanan ran significantly ahead of the party's 1852 vote and, contrary to traditional explanations, decisively defeated Fremont and Fillmore, individually and collectively. Eschewing both the theories and methodologies of the "new" history, the author has contributed a traditional treatment of the antebellum era to a series, begun in the 1950's and containing volumes by S. W. Higginbotham, P. S. Klein, and E. S. Bradley, which traces the political events in the Keystone state since pre-Revolutionary times. David E. Meerse State University College, Fredonia, New York The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861-1865. By D. P. Crook. (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1974, Pp. x, 405.) The concepts of a balance of power between competing empires on both sides of the Atlantic, and the interdependency of the Atlantic world surviving both the Civil War and Napoleon's Mexican diplomacy , are major themes in this work. In addition to justifiably placing the United States within these contexts, the author, an Australian historian at Queensland University, has also taken issue with the "rhetoric of historians" such as E. D. Adams, who wrote during the developing rapprochment with Britain, and with "the wishful thinking of apostles of Atlantic unity since." The work is, basically, a narrative account and...