Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute & Sectional Crisis (review)

2Ö0CIVIL WAR HISTORY labor and to sell them further south before their freedom date arrived, thus enabling Northern whites to rid their states of the black population. Freehling maintains that people in the border South would have found post-nati laws acceptable because slavery was weakening there and they feared living in a biracial society. The idea is interesting, but it presumes that the Republican party would have remained in power long enough to accomplish the goal. Also, it might have been more difficult to achieve than Freehling implies, given border state opposition to Lincoln's gradual, compensated emancipation scheme in 1 862. At the same time, he was pushing the idea of colonization. Perhaps Freehling's most thoughtful observations come in his chapter explaining the Confederate defeat. A chief factor, according to him, was the loss of manpower—the 600,000 slaves who fled the plantations of the lower South. Slave flight proved Southern white notions about paternalism to be false. More importantly, the drain ofblack manpower made it more difficult for the Confederacy to raise food, ship supplies, and build fortifications. While both sides suffered losses through military desertions and draft resistance, there was no such mass exodus in the North. And, Freehling also points out, nearly 500,000 black and white Southerners served in the Union military, and this number was probably more than half the size of the entire Confederate army. Finally, Freehling laments recent emphasis on the social history of the period (he might have added military as well) and hopes that present and future historians will integrate the social and political history, for only by acknowledging the influence of all aspects of its history will the Civil War be understood fully. While I applaud this sentiment, I am not optimistic that it will occur soon. As I wrote in the first sentence, this is a thought-provoking book. Because it contains so many reflections on so many subjects, it should stimulate the reader to ponder some of the issues raised. The book may well be one of the more enlightening published on the Middle Period in 1994. Eugene H. Berwanger Colorado State University Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute ? Sectional Crisis. By Mark J. Stegmaier. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Pp. 448. $39.00.) This is an impressive work that unravels the complex relationships between the clashing political interests in Texas, the American Congress, and New Mexico. The author's interpretive thread that runs through the examination ofthe various interests is that the dispute over the boundary between New Mexico and Texas became the dispute, and the only one that threatened the survival of the Union in 1 850. No other topic, he claims, contained the "elements that, if not settled, could have directly led to military action, bloodshed, and civil war" (2). This provocative claim introduces the most problematic part of this careful scholarly reconstruction of the political struggle of 1 850. Precisely how the BOOK REVIEWS2ÓI boundary struggle might have led to war is not as clear as it might be. He argues that by the midsummer of 1850 the boundary-debt issue had become "the one issue that could precipitate bloodshed, which in turn could polarize national public opinion and possibly begin a civil war" ( 1 50). No other issue, he notes, "preoccupied the thoughts of politicians and newspapermen, for no other issue offered an opportunity for immediate bloodletting" (203). Blood itself, however , would not do, as "bleeding Kansas" attests. Nonetheless, the author has very ably shown that the issue studied was of great importance in the terribly complex set of bills that made up the Compromise of 1850. On the other hand, his provocative thesis about the centrality of his subject is less persuasive. The claim stands as starkly as it does because the author tends to place other elements of the monumental struggle of 1 850 (such as the fugitive slave issue or the resolution of the issue of slavery in the territories) on the periphery. He downplays the fugitive issue, for instance, an issue that aroused deep passions, florid rhetoric, and a lot of anger. It has been reduced so much...