The South and the Concurrent Majority (review)

164CIVIL WAR HISTORY ary Taylor, because the latter preferred that his daughter not marry a soldier. The documents reveal the enmity as short-lived, and although the Zachary Taylors could not attend the wedding, a large number of other Taylor relatives in attendance clearly indicates warm family approval . And for whatever combination of reasons, Davis decided to leave the Army anyway before taking a wife, "my individual interests interfering with my duties," he wrote shortly before the wedding, (p. 402). Malaria struck both newlyweds and after Sarah Knox Taylor's tragic death, Davis attempted to recoup his own health and to ease the pain of losing his wife of only three months by touring Cuba. During the next several years he spent much time at his brother Joseph's sumptuous home, "Hurricane," (a place very interestingly described in a note on p. 247), and he became a small-scale planter. The 1840 census return listed him as the owner of forty slaves, with twenty-nine engaged in agriculture. He never fully regained perfect health—the most serious residual malady being eye trouble. Beginning possibly as a congenital defect, the eye was aggravated after Davis's malaria in 1835 and he suffered recurrent attacks thereafter. In youth Davis showed only the dimmest glimmers of his later consuming interest and ability in politics. In 1839 he wrote, "you will perceive that when I wrote of Politics I am out of my element and naturally slip back to seeding and ploughing -----" (p. 455). To criticize this volume, one might, for example, pick at the shortness of Andrew Jackson's biographical sketch—only twelve lines, one of the briefest in the collection. Or one might be disappointed that Ethan Allen Hitchcock's sketch omits reference to his Civil War service on the innovative and important Army Board—a body turned to frequently for counsel by Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. Further, the editors refer to Davis's post-West Point schooling at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri as "what we today would call basic training" (p. 106), when in reality they are referring to the precursor of the Infantry Officer's Basic Course—quite advanced and different from the more familiar "basic training." Finally, the volume makes no mention of one of Davis's West Point roommates, Samuel Peter Heintzelman, or his diary which is in the Rare Book Collection at the United States Military Academy. But these and other "shortcomings," aside from the limitations of extant documents amount to little more than personal opinion or preference. This first volume of Davis papers heralds a research tool of monumental proportions. Herman Hattaway University of Missouri-Kansas City The South and the Concurrent Majority. By David M. Potter. Edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Carl N. Degler. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Pp. viii, 89. $4.95.) This book consists of the three Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in BOOK REVIEWS165 Southern History given in 1968 at Louisiana State University by the late Professor Potter of Stanford. Those acquainted with his work will recognize the carefully-turned phrase and closely-reasoned logic that have characterized his previous scholarly efforts. However, as these essays were initially presented to a popular audience, there is an absence of professional jargon and scholarly paraphernalia. His theme is the manner in which the South, although a minority, was able to maintain a position of power in the national government for nearly a century. While the techniques he describes are well known, Potter's provocative addition is the thesis that the South accepted John C. Calhoun 's theory set forth in his Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution while rejecting his methods of achieving a concurrent majority. Instead, the South has been able, historically, to gain and hold a point at which negative power could be exercised by such tactics as control of committee chairmanships through seniority, use of the twothirds rule prior to 1936 to dominate the Democratic party, and exercise of the Senate right to filibuster. Although that region's power to obstruct has been greatly reduced, Potter concludes that "one important way of understanding the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle...