Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860 (review)

Book Reviews97 Both "The Cotton South, 1826-1835" and "A Decade of Nationalism, 1836-1845" surpass the last part in several ways. But "The Slavery South at Noontide, 1846-1852," on the whole, has the richest and most varied offerings both for die layman and for die specialist. In addition to Griesinger HaU, LyeU, the elder Mackay, the Pulszkys, Robinson, Sarmiento, Scherzer, and Wagner, here are such famous names as Audubon, Bryant, Considérant, Sidney Smith, and N. P. Willis. More meritorious than the works of some of these people are those of John R. Bartlett (who ran a boundary line between Mexico and the United States), the Abbé Em. Domenech, Xavier Eyma, Charles Lanman, the panoramist Henry Lewis, Franz von Loher, Thomas Low Nichols, and Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wordey. The Civü War fan, curious as to the war's raison d'être, assuredly should not turn his back on those materials. Dipping into them, he is apt to be charmed. Saturating himseU, he wiU become enthralled. Only manuscript letters and contemporary newspapers are capable of giving delvers and artists a more authentic recreation of our country during the second—and part of the third—quarter of the nineteenth century. Holman Hamilton Lexington, Kentucky. Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860. By Avery O. Craven. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. Pp. jriv, 115. $3.00.) when an historian disttlls and compresses into four essays three decades of conscientious study on one phase of American history, the result should be both provocative and enUghtening. In this respect Mr. Craven's 1958 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, Civil War in the Making, 18151860 ,are exceedingly rewarding. And when that historian has recorded his conclusions repeatedly over the span of time in such volumes as Edmund Ruffin, Southerner (1932), The Coming of the Civil War (1942), and The Growth of Southern Nationalism (1953), he exposes himseU to charges of inconsistency. Mr. Craven has recognized this risk in his preface when he asserts that "no historian is ever permitted to grow or to change his mind. An opinion once expressed, even in public lectures where generalizations are inevitable, must be lived with as a permanent conclusion for the rest of his life." Mr. Craven denies diat inconsistency is an "unpardonable historical sin" and entertains the suspicion that "historical truth" is never easüy found, for even weU-established facts take on new and strange meanings when viewed from different angles. Mr. Craven has looked for new angles and found diem, he admits, in die writings of James Mahn, Roy Nichols, AUan Nevins, David Potter, Fletcher Green, and James RandaU. If these writings have influenced his notions of what brought war to America in 1861,they have not produced, he says, any "complete change of opinion." Mr. Craven's effort to span the middle period with four overlapping themes leads to some inescapable repetition, but also to a certain originaUty and clarity. His first essay, entided "The Repubhcan Party and Slavery," 98CIVILWAn history analyzes die Northern threat to die Soudi. If he goes beyond his earlier writings, it is in his emphasis on economic factors. After 1815, from New England to Pennsylvania, he writes, "Men's bodies were being pushed pellmell into die modem world of finance-industrial capitalism, whüe dieir minds were left behind with the problems of adjusting the old to the new." These changes were creating a new industrial leadership, a new working class, and critics of die new order. The second course of change, writes Mr. Craven, emanated from the reform urge of the rural Yankee belt which stretched from Vermont and Massachusetts, across New York, into the regions of die Great Lakes. Here were die foundations of die antislavery crusade. By the 'forties, then, the great barrier to progress, as the North understood it, and to a Christian, democratic society had shifted from local conditions to the aristocrats below the Mason-Dixon line. Slavery was holding back the nation. The North could preserve itseU only by gaining control of die Federal government, and if the Democratic Party did the bidding of the South, then it, too, must have its power destroyed. The cold war between North...