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book reviews355 Here too we find die Negro forging his own freedom, a minority acting to leaven if not to revolutionize a racially prejudiced and resistant American society. At every point Negro activism is stressed. If any still suppose that American Negroes willingly accommodated diemselves to slavery and oppression, tiiis book should finally dispel die error. Negroes diemselves, die authors would have us believe, were largely responsible for dieir own emancipation and for such oüier later advances—legal and económicas they have been able to make. While some attention is given to die efforts of white liberals in behalf of Negroes, die total effect is to minimize dieir aims and accomplishments. In die process of emphasizing the role of Negroes in die antislavery movement and die Civil War, the work of white abolitionists is denigrated. Most abolitionists, including Garrison, are here portrayed as repositories of a racial bias diat made them unwilling to grant to black fellow workers their rightful place widiin die movement . Thus die emphasis throughout die volume is on what Negroes diemselves did—on dieir ideologies, dieir institutional developments, and dieir protest movements. Much of die focus too is on die urban Negro. The plantation slave is allotted significandy less space than the Negro in the antebellum cities. There, it appears, alienation and protest had dieir focus. For nineteenth-century blacks as well as for whites cities apparendy provided the principal setting for the thought and action that would eventually produce social change. Although in the nature of tilings some of the most striking interpretations and emphases presented here are certain to be disputed and perhaps ultimately qualified. Meier and Rudwick nonetheless have written an important book. It synthesizes the most recent scholarship in its field, presents die results of die audiors' own extensive research—much of it hitherto unpublished—and, in a most useful bibliography, suggests areas where further study is needed. Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy and Politics . By Frederick Merk. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pp. xiv, 427. $7.95.) For more than forty years Professor Merk has been diligendy researching the ins and outs of die Oregon dieme, while also finding time to write on other subjects, to serve professional organizations, and to provide truly sympathetic guidance for generations of Harvard students. The present collection of his essays, a baker's dozen of diem, represents the fruition of his decades of work on the Oregon subject. One of the essays, a long one, previously appeared as a book, Albert GaUatin and the Oregon Problem (1950). Eight others were originally published between 1924 and 1960 as articles, all but one of them in either the American His- 356CIVIL WAR HISTORY torical Review or the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. The remaining four are now presented in print for the first time. Taken together, the essays constitute a fairly complete history of the Oregon question as it figured in Anglo-American relations from the discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 to the conclusion of the partition treaty in 1846. There is some repetition in the various chapters, but only enough to lend continuity , and an introduction and a concluding résumé add further to the coherence of the book. It can be read as a continuous and unified account. In the introduction Professor Merk makes it clear that he views policymaking in no mechanistic way. The succession of Oregon crises and their final settlement, he concedes, can be understood in part as the resultant of certain forces—the "scientific interest" of explorers and their sponsors, the economic motives of fur traders, the religious enterprise of missionaries , the land hunger of home-seeking pioneers. But these forces "were merely marginal in their effects on the outcome of the Oregon dispute." (Even less important was sea power, the author argues in one of die newly published essays; "forces more potent than navies . . . took charge of Oregon diplomacy in the end.") In both England and the United States the "definitive forces" were diplomacy and politics. This approach, Professor Merk acknowledges, is "less fashionable" than it once was, but he hastens to explain that he treats diplomacy and...

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