Expansion and Imperialism (review)

266CIVIL WAR HISTORY the needs of the era, hungry, in most cases, for political power, and above all, riddled with a gnawing race prejudice, they stumbled on from disaster to catastrophe. The Dred Scott decision, for example, drew from Douglas and Lincoln almost immediate racialist responses. Douglas used his belief in Negro inferiority to defend slavery, popular sovereignty , and opposition to what he described as the Republican tenet of Negro equality. He asserted that racial amalgamation would be the disastrous result of Republican policy. Lincoln, in turn, denied that Republicans desired social equality for Negroes, and used his belief in black inferiority to justify opposition to slavery, the necessity of containing the institution, and declared that Democratic policy would foster amalgamation. As the decade wore on, each of these men and their parties escalated their efforts, through word and deed, to convince the voters that they, rather than their opponents, represented the doctrine of white supremacy. During the debates over the Lecompton Constitution , southern congressmen and several of their northern colleagues found themselves agreeing that "slavery was the best arrangement for the inferior Negro." Border state Republican, Frank Blair Jr., introduced a resolution to colonize the Negro as the best solution to the race problem . Free soilers continued to argue with growing enthusiasm that exclusion of black men from the territories would provide increased economic opportunity for white men in a growing nation. It was essentially this hardening of racialism in America, expressed in a multitude of ways in the wake of "bleeding Kansas," that made the slavery problem so difficult to solve, and set the stage for civil war. It is regrettable that the publisher elected to delete much of the fifty pages of documentation that appeared in the original typescript. Nonetheless , this book has added an important new dimension to our understanding ofthe Kansas crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Gerald W. Wolff University of South Dakota Expansion and Imperialism. By Shomer Zwelling. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970. Pp. ix, 150. $3.50. ) Selectivity of quotes seems to be the "thing" for those students of American history searching for modification of the "Graebner thesis." This was true of William Goetzman's attack on this thesis and it is only slightly less true in this slim volume of criticism. Zwelling misreads or neglects the qualifying points in Graebner's Empire on the Pacific and focuses on items that were either taken out of context to appear as the main emphases or which stem from reading Graebner's evidence upside down. Zwelling's predominant concern is to prove that Whigs did not sup- book reviews267 port expansion, that nearly all the arguments for ports came as rationalizations by the Democrats, and that Polk was not limited by ports in his push for empire. Most critics of the Graebner thesis assume that he tried to discount the force of the pioneers, that he gave the mercantile mantle to Polk exclusive of other motives, and that he attempted to prove that Polk and the Whigs came together in some sort of secret alliance to promote a Whig program. This study falls into the same trap. In truth Graebner does ride the commercial theme as the main basis of the final limits of westward expansion. Perhaps he overstresses it as do most new interpretations of historical theses; but, there can be little doubt that he establishes, for whatever reasons, ports as the concern of the people who finally shaped that border from California to Oregon. Zwelling is right in stating that the Democrats used the commercial theme as a lure to catch Whigs and Graebner does not deny this. Zwelling is wrong, however, when he tries to prove that Whigs were not interested in ports. His own evidence establishes that interest and then denies that it was advanced for any reason except to steal the thunder from the Democrats in order to say that Whig interests were of more validity and therefore if they should give up on Oregon they lost more by doing so. This is a flimsy argument in part because it ignores, as Graebner pointed out, that Whigs had long eyed the Orient trade through West coast ports...