Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (review)

178CIVIL WAR HISTORY uted Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Paine, who tried to kill Seward) to the enterprise . As a CIA veteran, William Tidwell writes knowledgeably about the "Department of Dirty Tricks" inthe Confederate secret service. In addition to such well-known exploits as the St. Albans raid, the attempt to burn New York hotels, and other operations mounted from Canada, this book describes the mining of Potomac estuaries and the attempt of a Confederate agent to start a yellow fever epidemic in Washington by smuggling in infected clothing and bedding (yellow fever cannot be transmitted this way, but nobody knew that in the 1860s). Evidence for these activities is firm rather than merely circumstantial. Most fascinating—and chilling—is the authors' account of a Confederate plan to blow up the White House with Lincoln in it. This was to happen in mid-April 1865, after the failure ofkidnapping efforts. It was to be a final desperate move to disrupt the Union command system and enable Confederate armies to break free from Grant's and Sherman's grip. It was also designed as retribution for all the destruction Lincoln and his mininons had inflicted on the South (the Confederates had recently installed the phrase "Come Retribution"as the key for their cipher system). But Union cavalry captured the explosives team a few miles from the capital as Mosby's rangers were trying to infiltrate them into Washington on April 10. When Booth learned of this failure, the authors speculate, he put his own lastresort plan into operation. A Confederate explosives expert was captured with some of Mosby's men on April 10. And the confession of George Atzerodt (the man assigned to kill Andrew Johnson), missing for more than a century but discovered and authenticated by the authors, mentioned a plan to blow up the White House. Apart from this piece of evidence, the linkage of the captured explosives expert to such a plot is speculative, Booth's relationship to the affair more so, and Jefferson Davis's knowledge or authorization of these activities even more speculative. (The linkage of Judah Benjamin to some ofthese operations rests on firmer evidence; that may be why Benjamin fled the re-United States and never returned.) In any event, Come Retribution provides plenty offood for thought. It really does say something new about the Civil War. James M. McPherson Princeton University Unfree Labor: American Slaveryand Russian Serfdom. By Peter Kolchin. (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. xiv, 517. $27.00.) Consider that Russian serfdom and U.S. slavery both emerged from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, "under conditions of la- BOOK REVIEWS179 bor scarcity on the periphery of a modernizing Europe" (359), and that both systems of human bondage survived until the 1860s. Obviously we have here the makings for an exciting historical comparison, even though U.S. slavery, unlike Russian serfdom, had become a distinctively regional institution by the end of the eighteenth century. The possibilities for comparison were recognized in 1857 by the idiosyncratic Virginian George Fitzhugh, who declared in DeBow's Review that "excluding Russia, the South is the only conservative section of civilized Christendom." According to Peter Kolchin's impressive study of Russian serfdom and U.S. slavery , antebellum slaveholders were even more conservative than Russian serfowners, because the former proved far less willing than the latter to compromise with the forces of abolition circa 1860. Slavery and serfdom "became increasingly antagonistic to the emerging bourgeois world," argues Kolchin, "because they lacked capitalism's basic ingredient: a market for labor-power (that is, labor hire)" (360). If so, why did Southern planters raise up a much more formidable challenge to the economic and cultural advance of bourgeois capitalism than did Russia's noble landowners, or pomeshchiki? Unfree Labor emphasizes some fundamental structural and ideological differences between the two landed elites: Russia's landed nobility comprised absentee rentiers who took little interest in the internal affairs of their estates and "whose main loyalty was to tsar and country, not to region or locality" (58); but Southern planters comprised resident landowners who were directly involved in plantation management and who developed strong local...