The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877: The First Southern Strategy (review)

book reviews281 agent for the radical Agency Committee, he roused British opinion againstWest Indian slavery with American evangelical techniques while simultaneously winning applause in the United States for his attack on the American Colonization Society. Upon his return to the United States, he formed influential friendships with William Lloyd Garrison, James Birney, and Gerrit Smith, and carried out an itinerant campaign often fraught with danger. During 1839-1840, he once again turned his attention to the West Indies where he helped overthrow the insidious system of "Negro apprenticeship" whichhad succeeded formal slavery. The close of the 1830s, however, spelled the end of his antislavery achievements. Behind a style so eccentric that it troubled even Garrison lurked a fierce conservatism. Stuart was appalled when some American delegates to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London attempted to include women among their number. Stuart's friendship with Garrison, who had vociferously backed the women delegates, vanished in an instant, plunging Stuart into rabid enmity. During the last quarter century of his life Stuart became a bitter crank, a burden to his long-suffering friend Gerrit Smith, a tyrant to the woman hemarried late in life, and estranged from Weld and what remained of the old abolitionist community. He died largely unmourned and forgotten in 1865. Pulling togehter a full-scale Stuart biography from often fragmentary and geographically dispersed evidence was no mean task, and Barker rose to the occasion admirably. Stuart emerges from this well-crafted account as a living and breathing human being. There are, however, a few lapses. Most serious, Barker's failure to take advantage of the more recent secondary literature. Thus, while Dwight Dumond and Alice Felt Tyler are accorded an authority they have not had in years, die relevant insights of suchhistorians as Mary Ryan, Ronald Walters, and especially Lawrence Friedman are wholly neglected. Nor is Barker's (usually sober) revisionism always convincing. Stuart remains a relatively modest figure. Still, if Captain Stuart was not the biggest fish in the abolitionist pond, neither was he the small fry we had taken him for. Kenneth H. Winn Missouri Historical Society/Washington University The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877: The First Southern Strategy. By Richard H. Abbott. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Pp. xiv, 303. $25.00.) In this well-researched and clearly-written study, Richard Abbott examines the attitudes and actions of northern and western Republicans toward building a southern wing of their party from the mid-1850s through Reconstruction. Two chapters, heavily based in secondary sources, quickly take the reader from the party's origins to the end of the Civil War and a final chapter covers the Grant years, but Abbott's real 282civil war history contribution lies in the five chapters covering the critical years from 1865 to 1868. Still, the broader chronological framework heightens his findings which generally reinforce recent post-revisionist conclusions regarding intersectional party relationships after 1868. Abbott concludes that throughout the period, despite their desire to become a "national" party, Republicans always "stressed building their Northern base rather than extending their party into the South, and whenever the Northern and Southern needs conflicted the latter always lost" (p. 231). Although a few northern Republicans showed some interest in courting the small farmers and urban workers of the border slave states during the 1850s, as secitonal tension increased and the election of 1860 approached , they backed off and concentrated on the free states—a distressingly repetitious tactic in the campaigns to come. During the war years, Lincoln used patronage and the military to encourageand protect southern unionists, but there was no overall strategy and the emerging "Unconditional" and "Conservative" Unionists (a foreshadowing of the later factionalism in the southern wing) were left largely to their own resources during the campaign of 1864 and beyond. Worried about maintaining their hegemony in the North and fearing the impact of a Democratic South on their economic program after the war, northern Republicans differed over how to create a competitive southern wing. Some leaders argued for pursuing the "natural" white leaders, particularly those of a Whiggish background, while others thought the party ought to concentrate on middle and working...