Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848 (review)

76CIVIL WAR HISTORY While memorials, experiments, and appeals from well-recognized reformers all contributed, in the last analysis, real progress hinged upon convincing the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs that the proposed revision was necessary. Committee members tended to follow the course of the least resistance and to let petitions and proposals die in committee. Where agitation was strong enough to force debates, distinguished naval officers often prevented legislation by arguing that the proposals would injure die service. Eventually reform orientated officers helped dislodge measures from the committee so that they could be acted upon. Between 1828 and 1862 the practices of the United States Navy regarding the enlisted man were dramatically changed and the foundations were erected for a career enlisted service. Opportunities were also held out for die skilled and ambitious to gain the commissioned ranks. These changes, says Langley, were the naval equivalent of die rise of the common man. Based upon a remarkable amount of manuscript and documentary research , Social Reform in the United States Navy has all the other hallmarks of critical scholarship—clear cut organization and sound judgment My only criticism is one of style, especially the labored transitions. But tiiis does not dim the fact that Langley has made a valuable and welcome addition to serious naval studies. James M. Merrill University of Delaware Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848. By Kinley J. Brauer. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967. Pp. vii, 272. $7.50.) This study describes the contest within die Whig party in Massachusetts over how to deal with die problem of territorial expansion growing out of the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. Underlying the growing rift between die Cotton Whigs and the Conscience Whigs during the years from 1843 to 1848 was a fundamental dispute over how to resist the spread of slavery. The manufacturing element which dominated the Whig party in Massachusetts believed that the continuing prosperity of that state (and die perpetuation of their own affluence) depended on the maintenance of the protective tariff law passed in 1842. This required that no policy be adopted that might antagonize the Southern Whigs, whose votes were easily numerous enough to kill the act. The antislavery minority of the Whig party, led by men many of whom were die descendants of former state political leaders but whose families had suffered "social dislocation" during the seizure of power by the manufacturers , insisted that the slavery question was one of moral principle, and that die Cotton Whigs had betrayed their heritage by placing "concern for money above concern for man." As C. F. Adams wrote in 1846: "The great Whig party is capable of higher, nobler purposes than die worship of mammon. . . . Our object is to elevate our party to its true position, to give it nobler views and a nobler aim." BOOK REVIEWS77 Yet the Conscience Whigs despised the Garrisonian abolitionists because of die latter group's radical ideas about die Constitution and property rights and dieir not infrequendy repeated demands for die secession of Massachusetts from die Union if harsh measures were not adopted against slaveowners . Thoroughly researched in manuscript materials and lucidly written, tiiis is an excellent short work about an important and long-neglected topic. Norman B. Ferris Middle Tennessee State University Federalism in the Southern Confederacy. By Curtis Arthur Amlund. (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 140. $4.50.) This is a book not about Unionist sentiment, but about government in the Confederacy. The author, who teaches government at North Dakota State University, asks two major questions: first, how did the Confederacy differ in dieory from die Union? Second, was die practice of die Confederacy consistent widi its dieory? To answer these questions, the author begins with a conventional summary of the celebrated controversy that developed in the United States between 1789 and 1860 over the issue of whether the Constitution was a compact among the states or whether, as John Marshall held, the United States government emanated directly from the people and owed its powers "emphatically and truly" to them only. Next, Professor Amlund adds a chapter giving a paragraph-by-paragraph resumé of the Confederate Constitution . His not...