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BOOK REVIEWS65 gressional and state posts; yet it rapidly lost strength in succeeding elections. Without a well established national organization and with little to say about local or state issues, many members made no concerted effort to perpetuate the party as a viable third party, but advocated coalition or fusion with one of the major parties as the best means to obtain their anti-extension ends. Indeed as Blue recounts this period, it was not only the Van Bürens, but more dedicated antislavery party leaders, such as Salmon Chase of Ohio, Henry Wilson and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts who often appeared more interested in advancing their own personal and selfish political ambitions than in promoting the unity of the antislavery cause. Yet not all Free Soilers were willing to compromise their principles. Their small group in Congress fought valiantly to resist the Compromise of 1850 which in their minds was a further surrender to slavery, not a final settlement of the sectional issue. By 1853 the party was regaining some strength as the demise of the Whig party became imminent . Blue's work is essentially a leadership study with emphasis on the national phase of the parry's history, and events in Ohio, New York and Massachusetts, which influenced the party's strength, although the party's efforts in the other northern states receive attention. The author also examines the motivation of antislavery men, such as Abraham Lincoln who rejected the party as impractical and Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass who rejected the party's racism. Blue tells a comprehensive and well documented story of the emergence and role of the Free Soil party in 1848, but it is his study of the party's efforts in subsequent years as it paved the way for and then acquiesced willingly into the ranks of the new Republican party in 1854 that is most valuable. Blue's study is impressively documented and contains a fine bibliographical essay on Free Soil sources. It is another significant contribution to an understanding of the antislavery movement and its nuances before the Civil War. C. F. VanDeventer University of Wisconsin Platteville The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858 to 1870. By Jean H. Baker. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973. Pp. xv, 239. $11.00.) The Civil War ripped through Maryland, turning its land into battlefields , dividing families, disrupting society and creating turmoil in politics . Ephemeral political movements and parties rapidly rose and fell in response to crises external and internal. But furious political flux was only the surface reality, argues Professor Jean H. Baker of Goucher College. Patterns formed in the late 1850's continued to under- 66CIVIL WAR HISTORY lie Maryland politics, and traditional shibboleths, loyalties, fears, and hatreds persisted as the stuff of electoral victory. As Baker perceptively notes, Maryland's party system endured not only war-time changes, but also a persistently anti-party milieu. Majorities and minorities both pandered to the dislike of professional parties, and new political movements usually began by calling for the submergence of parties and by claiming to be "spontaneous" mass movements of people. Baker's interyear correlations of election returns by county, and her detailed analysis of party elites' composition, strategies, and legislative voting, support her thesis that "the war did not provide a convenient dividing point in the history of Maryland's political parties. The period of partisan realignment occurred before the war, and during the ensuing decade citizens clung doggedly to the allegiances forged in the 1850's." The Democratic party, particularly, survived defeat, defection, and disrepute , hung on to its power base in county committees through the war years, and rebounded during early Reconstruction to win a new hegemony as the White Man's Party and best guarantor of racial purity and "The Union as It Was." Baker is quite persuasive in showing the continuity of structure, strategies, and personnel, and in revising several myths regarding wartime Unionist dominance and Democratic resurgence . As a brief against the "Civil War Synthesis," and in its analysis of formal strategies, explicit symbols, and some characteristics of political leadership, this is a very satisfying study. But much more could have been done...

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