George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist (review)

56CIVIL WAR HISTORY political liberty, Christian religion, and the Anglo-Saxon race. During the early nineteenth century, Price observes, two of the most ardent nationalists were President James K. Polk and Commodore Robert F. Stockton. They evidenced no doubts that the annexation of formerly Mexican territory to the United States would serve the interests of mankind. In a perceptive chapter on historiography, Price notes that not only the contemporaries of the period but later historians as well reflected the nationalist bias. Directing his major criticism at the works of Justin H. Smith and Eugene I. McCormac, he warns historians not to write history as a justification for the American government. In dealing with American relations with other nations , Price urges historians to view the United States from a detached perspective and not as an American nationalist. He seeks to employ this approach in his study of the Mexican War. As his major task, Price examines the so-called Polk-Stockton intrigue of AprilJune 1845. "The design," he writes, "was to initiate a war between Texas and Mexico prior to the completion of the annexation; the United States would then immediately come to the defense of the Texans and the responsibility for the war would not appear to rest with the United States. That war would enable Polk to accomplish one of the 'great measures' of his administration, the acquisition of California ." (47) According to Price, President Polk sent Commodore Stockton to Texas not merely to promote the annexation of Texas to the United States but to precipitate a war with Mexico in order to achieve the larger goal of expansion to the Pacific. The evidence which he presents, however, fails to prove his conspiratorial interpretation. This book offers nothing more than circumstantial evidence that Polk directed Stockton to undertake the activities in which he became engaged in Texas in the spring of 1845. But more than that, it provides no substantial evidence that even Stockton intrigued in Texas to begin a war for the annexation of California. The evidence which Price presents shows only that Stockton was prepared to resort to war with Mexico for the purpose of asserting the Texan claim to the Rio Grande; it does not prove conclusively that Stockton—or Polk—had yet, in the spring of 1845, linked the boundary dispute between Mexico and Texas with the California issue. As Price correctly observes, Polk later used the boundary dispute as a method to acquire California, even resorting to war for that purpose. But the evidence does not warrant the conclusion that the President intrigued with Stockton to start a war with Mexico for the acquisition of California in the spring of 1845. This book is based on thorough research both in primary and secondary sources. Among the many manuscript collections which he examined, Price used the papers of President Polk, Commodore Stockton, and Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft as well as the archives of the Navy Department. Utilizing these sources, Price offers the most thorough analysis available of Polk's relationship to the activities of Stockton in Texas in the spring of 1845. Lloyd Ambkosius University of Nebraska George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist. By Charles Crowe. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967. Pp. x, 316. S7.95.) George Ripley's life (1802-1880) spanned almost four decades of the nineteenth century and included three distinguished careers as theologian, social reformer and journalist. Although as the Brook Farm years attest Ripley was a man who could do an extraordinary number of jobs well, he was essentially an intellectual, more a man of thought and words than of action, and Charles Crowe's interesting biography is an essay in American intellectual history. In discussing Ripley's passage from Unitarianism to Transcendentalism Mr. Crowe shows that Ripley arrived at such basic transcendental doctrines as the belief in an "oversoul" prior to and "quite independently of Emerson," and that his own intel- BOOK REVIEWS57 lectual debt was greater to the French romantic philosopher Cousin than to the German thinkers. As much an individualist in his own way as men like Thoreau, Alcott or Theodore Parker, Ripley was able to challenge the impersonality of Emerson 's views on...