The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influence of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS365 Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut . By Edmund Fuller. (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Pp. 110. $5.95.) Edmund Fuller's account of the Prudence Crandall incident, which involved the closing of a school for girls in Connecticut in 1834 because it accepted black students, is written for "general readers" who know little about abolitionism. It is a narrative account of the incident, drawn from contemporary sources, that is supposed to be "relevant" to the understanding of racial problems today. Although the book is filled with extensive quotations, it has no footnotes or index. Nor does Fuller seem to have read any of the recent scholarship on the abolitionists. His comment on William Lloyd Garrison's famous manifesto is that "they are the words of a fanatic; and fanatics, even in just causes, are dangerous men." Fuller's book is all the more disappointing because his subject has a real potential. The events surrounding the affair provide an insight not only into the early tactics of the abolitionist movement, but also into the attitudes of the abolitionists toward the education of the free Negro . Fuller's account of the Prudence Crandall affair, in short, is poor history. It will be of little interest either to historians or to students of abolitionism. Clifford E. Clark, Jr. Carleton College The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influence of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861-1865. By Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972. Pp. xi, 435. $10.00.) For more than a decade Wilfred B. Yearns' The Confederate Congress has been the sole comprehensive study of the Congress of the Confederate States. It now has a companion, but one radically different in form. Professors Alexander and Beringer have produced a wholly quantified analysis of the relationships between legislative voting and certain personal and constituency characteristics of the members of the Confederate Congress. The book opens with a brief introductory essay describing the research design employed. The first three substantive chapters deal with member attributes, including a number that are merely descriptive, but concentrating on such potentially influential considerations as former party allegiance, stand on secession, absolute and relative (in the member 's home county) wealth, absolute and relative slaveholding, constituency wealth and slaveholding, and exterior-interior status (that is, whether the district represented by the congressman was or was not occupied or immediately threatened by Federal troops). In the next six chapters the authors attempt to assess the influence of 366crviL war history these factors on voting in the Provisional Congress and on five issue areas in the First and Second Congresses. For this purpose they have analyzed almost four-fifths of the roll calls recorded in the Journals. Roll-call set performance scores and scale analyses are the primary tools employed, with the "strong" (i.e., "pro-Confederate") position on performance scores being established on the basis of the authors' evaluation of the measures voted upon. The issue areas explored are those involving conscription, impressment of private property, habeas corpus suspension, economic and fiscal problems, "The Price of Nationhood," and "Determination and Defeatism." In a penultimate chapter the authors engage in extensive cross-tabulation of votes in an effort to establish "The Determinants of Decision Making." The last chapter summarizes their findings and states their conclusions in somewhat more generalized terms. Finally, seventy-four pages of appendices present an extraordinary amount of the data upon which the study is based. In none of the issue areas examined can any real evidence of antagonism be found. Consequently, the discussion deals with differing levels of support for the "pro-Confederate" position. Alexander and Beringer conclude that absolute and relative personal wealth and slaveholding and constituency wealth and slaveholding had no significant influence on voting performance, except in a very few instances involving economic and fiscal issues. Former party membership was an important consideration, however, and a member's stand on secession strongly affected his subsequent voting performance. But the most influential factor was the occupation or threat of occupation of the member's home district by Federal troops. Such "exterior" members consistently took a much "stronger" position...