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58CIVIL WAR HISTORY culture and historiography, meant that while some figures bask in multiple biographies , Seward's life lacked a modem study. This deficiency has now been remedied by Professor Emeritus Van Deusen of the University of Rochester, who was instrumental in bringing the rich collection of Seward Papers to the Rochester Library. From it and many other sources he has fashioned a biography that is impeccable in scholarship, yet one which he hopes the laymen will read with pleasure and profit. The picture of Seward which emerges is admiring but not adulatory. Van Deusen likes his subject, and he likes the balance which Seward tried to achieve between ideals and practicalities. Informed, moderated progressivism underlay Sewards' politics . That he achieved much less than planned was more the fault of the instability of the age than of any fatal flaw in the man. To cite the prime example, Seward's attitudes and actions on slavery, he never doubted the ultimate extinction of the institution. This was as much a moral necessity as anything else. Nevertheless, Seward shunned radicalism on the issue, always convinced that abolition had to be accommodated to national needs, even if this meant delay. Ironically, several statements inconsistent with his actual politics, created a radical image that may have cost Seward the Republican nomination in 1860. Van Deusen effectively describes the relations between Lincoln and Seward during the war. In these pages the Secretary's stature rises magnificently. Despite the disappointment of 1860, and despite the fact that he had politics in his blood, Seward worked wholeheartedly for his chief, and for the Union. The recent rise of the Adams Family in historiography and documentation, one might almost say that family's apotheosis, tended to obscure Seward's role in Civil War diplomacy. Van Deusen rectifies this with an approving account of Seward's handling of foreign relations, as well as a defensive clarification of his brinkmanship before the European powers early in the war, without slighting the Minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams. In general, Seward is presented as an optimistic expansionist, one who did not think that force was necessary to establish American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps beyond. The overall interpretation is conservative, more conservative than Seward himself, Van Deusen regrets the famous verbalisms, calling them "unfortunate slips." Seward supported Andrew Johnson, of course, and opposed Radical Reconstruction, which, according to Van Deusen "did so much to foster hatred of compelled equality and to create a solid Democratic South." The first part of the statement is debatable since it refers only to southern whites, the second part is incorrect. Seward, Van Deusen concludes, "lacked the moralistic fervor with which Greeley could move the minds and hearts of men. Seward's appeal was always on the practical side." Seward proved to be a much better administrator than a mover, a judgment he would have accepted, but with regret. Frank Otto Gatell University of California, Los Angeles The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery. By Gerda Lerner. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967. Pp. x, 479. $6.95.) From almost every point of view, the Grimké sisters were the most complex, intense, and unusual members of the antislavery host. The biographer who tries to recreate their lives in all their intricacies faces a formidable challenge. Aristocrats by birth and upbringing, these Charlestonians rejected their heritage in early womanhood, exiled themselves to the North, converted to Quakerism, joined the anti-southern crusade in its infancy, and even endured the hostility of northern race prejudice and social conservatism to plead for the rights of the Negro and of women. Sarah wrote the only antislavery appeal directed to the woman of the South, one of the most provocative documents to issue from the abolitionist press. Angelina, the more BOOK REVIEWS59 dynamic of the pair, who reminds one of James's Verena Tarrant in her vivacity, stage presence, and independence of spirit, won thousands of converts to the abolitionist cause on her New England tour with Sarah in 1837. Although rigorous logic and personal, acute observation determined the sisters' courageous stand against slavery, they displayed an unconventional anger about the failures and the sterile apathy of their...

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