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82CIVIL WAR HISTORY Rather, he has given us a realistic portrait of a humorless man, dedicated to a cause, evidently at the expense of a warm and close relationship with his wife and children. Well written and exhaustively researched, Professor Wyatt-Brown's biography is a noteworthy addition to the literature on the antislavery movement. August Meier Kent State University Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War. By Thomas H. O'Connor. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968. Pp. ix, 214. $7.50.) This is a generally sympathetic account of the leading Massachusetts Cotton Whigs, primarily the Lawrences. The author sketches the background of these textile magnates' rise, starting with the effects of the Embargo on the Massachusetts economy; he then picks up the thread of political history in the 1830's, and carries it down to the Civil War. The material will be familiar to readers of Josephson's Golden Threads, Brauer's Cotton versus Conscience, and Donald's Charles Sumner, although the emphasis on the Lawrence family and the gentle and approving handling of the moderate men of the center are factors which make the work swim against most recent historiographical currents. Too many of the pages, however, dwell in overlong fashion on thoroughly well-known details, recounting such episodes as the Boston anti-Garrison riot in 1835, and the effects of Harrison's death on Whig politics six years later. There are some errors (Channing is made to appear anti-antislavery, and Emerson is made an abolitionist too soon), and one real blooper: the assertion that Clay's omnibus bill passed in 1850. O'Connor cites Philip Foner's Business and Slavery several times in order to bolster his principal thesis: that important segments of the northern business community were not hostile to the South, and that these capitalists did not provoke a conflict with the agrarian slaveholders . It is true that the Lawrences and Appletons were leading "doughfaces," discounting Amos A. Lawrence's involvement in the emigrant societies organized to keep slavery out of Kansas. But for all their prestige and power (more economic than political), these Cotton Whigs, like the New York merchants who transported the southern cotton , may have been pro-southern islands on the American business map. O'Connor does not discuss other Massachusetts businessmen's reactions to the 'coming of the Civil War; nor does he examine the other side of his coin, the reactions of leading southerners to the textile magnates. New York shippers and New England textile manufacturers had nothing to BOOK REVIEWS83 complain about; they were milking the underdeveloped South. Resolutions of the many southern commercial conventions amply demonstrate that the colonials thought they had serious sectional grievances and that a real economic conflict existed in their minds, despite the sweet-talk of prosperous Yankee mill owners. Frank Otto Gatell University of California, Los Angeles Antebellum Natchez. By D. Clayton James. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Pp. 344. $10.00.) Local history (especially municipal history) emphasizing the social and economic developments of a particular society, but not at the expense of the political details, has been given a tremendous boost by the publication of Antebellum Natchez. Professor James is to be commended also for not concentrating all his attention on the grand and romantic aspects of the Old South and its landed gentry. He focuses much of his attention on the Natchez of ordinary citizens, small businessmen, and free Negroes, and the Natchez-under-the-Hill of brawling boatmen, professional gamblers, and bold-faced strumpets. He traces the history of the settlement from the days of the Natchez Indians through the plotting and intrigue of the French, British, Spanish , and Americans. The first seventy-six pages are as clear and concise an explanation of the French, British, and Spanish periods in the Lower Mississippi Valley as one is likely to find anywhere. Professor James has a most impressive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. In fact this is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the most praiseworthy feature of this volume. The author has not neglected to consult any possible source of information relating to Natchez before the Civil...

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