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BOOK REVIEWS77 whether intersectional interaction rendered the abolitionists' experience with the social relations of slavery concrete. Perhaps because Harrold has uncovered no new veins ofaboUtionist activity in the South he tends to overemphasize the Southernness of several of his leading figures. Thus, Bailey moved south, to Washington, D.C, only after the poUtical successes of reformers created an antislavery party in Congress. Goodloe moved north to Washington, D.C, and later joined Bailey as editor of the National Era but did not return to his native North Carolina until after the Civil War. Vaughan, too, moved north from South Carolina to Cincinnati and successfully established the Louisville Examiner on antislavery principles in the mid- 1 840s. But by 1848 Vaughan had removed to Cleveland as an influential antislavery editor, and he laterjoined Joseph Medili on the Chicago Tribune. Harrold complains that historians of abolitionism have tended to make too much of their subjects' sectarianism and to exclude from the ranks of genuine reform political figures like Salmon P. Chase. But the implications of this critique for the Southern borderlands are not followed very far. When Chase took the lead in organizing the Southern and Western Liberty party convention in 1845, the people he hoped to draw to the antislavery cause were those who could distinguish politically between their interests and the interests of a slave power. When Francis P. Blair, Jr., appealed to the same groups in the 1850s and gained the support ofElihu Burritt, Gerrit Smith, and Theodore Parker, Harrold acknowledges that these abolitionists were "in search of intersectional and peaceful solutions to the problem of emancipation" (130). But, because the connections between these antislavery agitations and Northern aboUtionism were "negligible" (129), those in the Southern borderlands who were drawn to these appeals lie beyond the scope of Harrold's study. When those in the upper South who became unconditional unionists in the sectional crisis are included in the ranks of antislavery reform, the full dimensions of Northern reform's impact in the Southern borderland will begin to become apparent. Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis Correspondence ofJames K. Polk. Vol. 8: September-December 1844. Edited by Wayne Cutler. Associate editors, Robert G. Hall and Jane C. Defiore. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Pp. xxxvi, 588. $32.50.) On November 5, 1 844, twenty-four people (that we know of) sat down to write James K. Polk their impressions of the day's presidential election. At the head of a varied list, Andrew Jackson scrawled a few disconnected comments, of his "Trufst] in a kind providence" that the result "is in favor of democracy." At the opposite end, the unidentified Fitzgerald Tasistro offered congratulations from New York. The next day, thirty-nine more added their thoughts, and then 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY twenty-five more on November 7. Polk himself, true to the pattern already well estabUshed in these volumes, wrote almost nothing. During the first two weeks of November, he wrote three times to runningmate George M. Dallas trying to speculate on the razor-thin outcome in Tennessee. There are twenty-six preelection Polk letters printed, and four more in the calendar. The most prominent recipients are James Buchanan, Cave Johnson, A. O. P. Nicholson, Clement C. Clay, Fernando Wood, and Dallas. Polk's letters are not treatises on the issues. One effort by local Whigs to eUcit opinions drew an extended retort: You know my views, you know where they are printed, and you really aren't seeking enlightenment. Polk fretted about tactical details, often attempting to manage the itineraries of speakers and the printing style and distribution of speeches and essays. He regarded as ominous the alliance of Whigs and Native Americans in Philadelphia during the state elections and feared similar Whig overtures to the "Natives and AboUtionists" during the presidential election in New York. He worried about "imported and fraudulent " votes from Kentucky being cast in northern Tennessee counties and urged that observers challenge any man seeking to vote outside his residential district. The campaign of 1844 was complex both in shifting political alliances and in issues. Nativism, sectionalism, expansion in Texas, fear of disunion, economic rivalries—all these issues of 1844 are...

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