Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

book reviews265 North, Foner has made an invaluable addition to our knowledge of the antebellum period. Michael F. Holt Yale University Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War. By James A. Rawley. (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969. Pp. vü, 304. $5.95.) Professor Rawley has written a very important and useful book. He provides much more than simply an excellent overview of the complex issues and events surrounding "bleeding Kansas," and the coming of the Civil War. Although he believes traditional interpretations of those factors as causes of the Civil War must be considered, the question of race was of paramount importance. The Civil War was, in his view, an irrepressible conflict brought on by a blundering generation. It was a blundering generation essentially because it was a "flawed generation," flawed by its belief in Negro inferiority. More specifically, he emphasizes the variety of responses to the long standing racial prejudice in America as the crucial element in the controversy over slavery in the territories during the decade before Sumter. Other historians have dealt with racialism as a cause of the Civil War, but Rawley is the first to apply the concept to the Kansas controversy, and he does it convincingly . With regard to Kansas, men who supported slavery opposed antiextension as a menace to stable race relations. Antislavery advocates viewed extension mainly as a barrier to white opportunity, not primarily as a detriment to Negroes. The questions raised by whites on this issue involved whether the black man in the territories would remain a slave, a second-class citizen, or be excluded entirely. Virtually no one advocated equal rights for him there. The national "folk belief" that the Negro was inherently inferior, that he represented an economic danger, and that race mixing must be prevented drastically limited the political choices open to the northern and southern politicians of the 1850s. This, more than anything else, destroyed any opportunity for successfully settling the slavery question short of war. "Race," says Rawley, "is the one thing that has defied the genius of the American people. If there had been no color bar, the United States probably could have coped with the issue of slavery." Rawley expresses disdain for the role played by most of the people, institutions, and proposed solutions connected with the Kansas controversy . Regardless of section, party, or political office, almost without fail, the American people and their leaders evaded, misunderstood, or misrepresented their responsibility for finding a just and lasting settlement in Kansas. Trapped by politicai philosophies inadequate to meet 266civil war history the needs of the era, hungry, in most cases, for political power, and above all, riddled with a gnawing race prejudice, they stumbled on from disaster to catastrophe. The Dred Scott decision, for example, drew from Douglas and Lincoln almost immediate racialist responses. Douglas used his belief in Negro inferiority to defend slavery, popular sovereignty , and opposition to what he described as the Republican tenet of Negro equality. He asserted that racial amalgamation would be the disastrous result of Republican policy. Lincoln, in turn, denied that Republicans desired social equality for Negroes, and used his belief in black inferiority to justify opposition to slavery, the necessity of containing the institution, and declared that Democratic policy would foster amalgamation. As the decade wore on, each of these men and their parties escalated their efforts, through word and deed, to convince the voters that they, rather than their opponents, represented the doctrine of white supremacy. During the debates over the Lecompton Constitution , southern congressmen and several of their northern colleagues found themselves agreeing that "slavery was the best arrangement for the inferior Negro." Border state Republican, Frank Blair Jr., introduced a resolution to colonize the Negro as the best solution to the race problem . Free soilers continued to argue with growing enthusiasm that exclusion of black men from the territories would provide increased economic opportunity for white men in a growing nation. It was essentially this hardening of racialism in America, expressed in a multitude of ways in the wake of "bleeding Kansas," that made the slavery problem so difficult to solve, and set the stage for civil...