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BOOK REVIEWS59 brand of social history do not include the state; yet, by his own account, at crucial moments in American history the state played a decisive role in shaping the destiny of the American people. Faced with sectional disunion it failed to function effectively, and the tragedy of secession and civil war followed. During the second third of the twentieth century, on the other hand, the state played an increasingly dominant role in the processes of integration which for Berthoff hold the promise of a more orderly and satisfying social life. A bare outline of BerthofFs thesis fails to do justice to the wealth of historical detail and topical grasp evident on every page. He has read widely in monographic literature and has incorporated current findings wherever relevant. Nevertheless, the marks of a strong and distinctive historical intelligence are apparent throughout. The pattern of American history presented is one with which every student of our past will henceforth have to grapple. Stow Persons University of Iowa The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861. By Daniel Walker Howe. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Pp. viii, 398. $15.00.) No reader of Santayana's autobiography will forget the picture of old "Fanny" Bowen lecturing on through the 1880's, "self-repeating, dogmatic , rheumatic, and querulous," expectorating into a "vast bandana," rumbling "irrelevant invectives against John Stuart Mill" because thirty years before, when Bowen had been the editor of the North American Review, Mill had mentioned him in a footnote as "an obscure American." Of the dozen Harvard moralists treated by Mr. Howe, Bowen was the last survivor. Like him, three others held the Alford Chair in Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity; the Henry Wares, Sr. and Jr., taught divinity; Edward Tyrell Channing was a Boyleston Professor of Rhetoric; and Andrews Norton lectured on Sacred Literature before he delivered his notorious polemic against Emerson. To these academicians Mr. Howe has added a quartet of clergymen whose influence within the ambience of Harvard-Boston Unitarianism was such as to make them representative men: John Emery Abbot, a "saint" who died young; the literary Joseph Stevens Buckminster, ruling spirit of the Monthly Anthology; Joseph Tuckerman, pioneer minister to the urban poor; and, of course, William Ellery Channing. Each of these was in some important way a contributor to that "certain frame of mind that prevailed at Harvard" which is Howe's theme. These were the men who, by Henry Adams's boyhood, had "solved the universe" for Boston. How they did it and what came of it is Mr. Howe's subject. The story of early-nineteenth-century Harvard philosophy, its intellectual foundations and inner connections, its epistemology, ethics, 60CIVIL WAR HISTORY esthetics, psychology, and political economy has never been so well told. Clarity, depth, and thoroughness make this a valuable piece of work. If the second half of the book seems to lag somewhat, it is an accurate reflection of the failure of the Harvard idea in contact with social realities, particularly the slavery question. Howe makes a good case for his dozen worthies as "Christian humanists," but provides plenty of evidence that the famed Unitarian conscience was, much of the time, only the Boston business community in the pulpit. Again, it does not follow that commitment to "capitalism, theism, liberalism, and optimism " is enough to make this group "very much men of their age." It simply appears that such commitment was fully compatible with being not merely men of yesterday but even the day before yesterday. It is one of Howe's merits that he understands all this better than his readers, only occasionally letting go his hold. But because Andrews Norton, who labored years on a magnum opus to prove the historicity of Scripture miracles, was not really comic does not make him tragic. People who expected, as Norton and his friends did, that "conscience and self-love would normally reach the same conclusions," deliberately located themselves in a gray middle-distance between comedy and tragedy. From thence it was easy for their foot to slide into a page-bottom reference in the work of a genuine thinker. Fred Somkin Cornell University Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop...

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