The Revolution in the New York Party Systems, 1840-1860 (review)

276BOOK REVIEWS sion across space. In contrast to the importance of time to corporate freedom, there was a timeless element in federative freedom; the qualitative improvement stressed by the former gave way to quantitative improvement in the latter. A strict construction of the Constitution implied that a perfect order of freedom had been defined at the outset and only a rigid adherence to that order could insure progress for the nation. This neat dialectic between corporate and federative freedom was thrown into confusion in the late 1840's by the quarrel over the expansion of slavery and the "fruits of manifest destiny." A third concept, individual freedom, appeared and, as defined by the Free Soil position, dominated the following decade. Attacking the spread of slavery as a subversion of the national idea, mixing elements of both corporate and federative freedom, the Free Soilers added a sectional configuration and, more importantly, a moral imperative to the political debate, all of which added up, according to Wilson, to irrepressible conflict. The conflict's irrepressibility is rather assumed than conclusively demonstrated, although there is no doubt that, for Wilson, the Civil War was the inevitable consequence of the Free Soilers' alteration of the debate and their interjection into the discussion of factors that could not be resolved politically. Finally, the author offers an analysis of the political philosophy of William H. Seward, in whose career he finds the entire period summarized. Although identified with the phrase "irrepressible conflict," Seward provided the synthesis of the contending ideas of freedom and progress that might have saved the Union. No brief summary can possibly do justice to the many nuances of Wilson's thesis. Suffice it to say, that it makes much good sense. It is not, however, an easy book to read. There are simply too many threads to separate easily and the author's style occasionally obscures rather than clarifies them. For many scholars interested in this period, his study (as presented in this book) will not even be new, for it is based on eleven articles which Wilson published in a number of journals between 1967 and 1971. Focusing, as he does, on only one element of public expression (albeit a very important one), he does not, of course, tell the whole story but his work does add further dimension to other studies of American nationalism and the idea of progress during the early nineteenth century (among them the work of Somkin and Nagel, on which Wilson himself has relied to an extent). Robert W. Johannsen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The Revolution in the New York Party Systems, 1840-1860. By Mark L. Berger. (Port Washington, New York, and London: Kennikat Press, 1973. Pp. 172. $8.50.) BOOK REVIEWS277 This book describes the foundation and triumph of the Republican party in New York state during the years 1854-1856. Its thesis argues that by 1854 slavery, temperance, and nativism weakened the faction-ridden Whig and Democratic parties and thereby started a revolution that culminated in 1856, when the slavery issue pushed aside the other two issues and the Republicans emerged as the state's best organized and most sincere antislavery party. Most influential in helping along this process were the dramatic events of the slavery controversy in Kansas and the willingness of local factional leaders to use the slavery issue for their petty advantages. If we were to reduce the thesis to an equation it would read: factionalism plus slavery equals the New York Republicans. The men and events that dot this narrative are well known to all students of the period, and all play their familiar roles. Professor Berger offers a minor but welcome fresh insight when he credits Thurlow Weed as the master-builder who joined a varied array of factions into a winning Republican coalition. But the author strives for more than this insight; he attempts to show how the other two disruptive forces, temperance and nativism, lost out to slavery in the contest for political dominance. This he accomplishes by showing how Weed and his Republican allies took up temperance to attract that faction and then exploited the nativists' own factional divisions over slavery to bring them into...