Iowa on the Eve of the Civil War: A Decade of Frontier Politics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS181 Yet brevity has its occasional drawbacks. To encapsulate the whole movement from its origins through Reconstruction in 168 pages of text sometimes causes Sorin to employ a didactic approach. As a consequence , some important issues are de-emphasized. Anxious to remind his readers that the abolitionists "were generally sincere idealists, impelled by a vision of a better society," Sorin does not deal as effectively as he might have with the views of John Thomas, George Frederickson, or especially of Stanley Elkins. There was, after all, in abolitionism a vibrant and potent romanticism which needs clear explanation, in conjunction with and even apart from the specific issues of abolitionist "guilt," "anti-institutionalism" or "status anxiety." Likewise, Sorin might have better served his readers had he given them a more comprehensive picture of the "traditional" southern culture, which abolitionists and antislavery partisans found so disturbing. These criticisms aside, Sorin has furnished a useful text which generally delineates the limitations, as well as the appropriateness of abolitionists ' visions and choices. His occasional practice of referring to the issues of today when explaining events of the past usually has a clarifying effect, not a distorting one. Professor Sorin writes crisply and provides a most useful bibliographic essay, qualities which make this book a most serviceable one for beginning students. James Brewer Stewart Macalester College Iowa on the Eve of the Civil War: A Decade of Frontier Politics. By Morton M. Rosenberg. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Pp. ix, 262. $8.95.) This is old-fashioned political history, with all the virtues and vices of that branch of Clio's craft. Ignoring the newer techniques of political analysis, the author gives us, for each year of the 1850's, the preliminary maneuverings before the parties' state conventions, who were contenders and who was nominated for what office, what each party platform contained and what it ignored, what the newspapers and the candidates talked about during the campaign, and, finally, how many votes were cast for the candidates in question. Yet, for all its old-fashioned approach, this narrative of Iowa politics contains and supports much that is current in American political history. It is Iowa Democrats who, as Holman Hamilton has pointed out on the national level, were popularly identified and politically rewarded as the supporters of the Compromise Measures of 1850. It is local issues, initially identification with the wrong railroad projects, later prohibition and nativism, which enable Whigs and Republicans to challenge the Democracy at die polls successfully. Foreshadowing the post-Civil War period, and recognizing the limited longevity of the slavery issue, the Republican party "tied its future increasingly to the railroad" (p. 126). The all-pervading racism of the day, which Eugene Berwanger, Leon Litwack, James Raw- 182CIVIL WAR HISTORY ley, and others, have demonstrated, is illustrated by the overwhelming rejection of Negro suffrage when the constitution of 1857 was approved. Democratic decline in Iowa was neither inevitable nor progressive: after suffering losses in 1852 and defeat in 1856, the party was successful in statewide elections in 1853 and 1857. The short-range impact of the Lecompton issue, as well as the importance of the "neglected period" of antebellum history, 1858-1859, are both indicated by the resurgence of the Iowa Democracy in the latter year when, led by Augustus C. Dodge, the party mounted a nearly-successful challenge to Republican control of the gubernatorial chair. The author accepts the contentions of quantitative historians like George Daniels and Robert Swierenga that German, Dutch, and Irish immigrants did not support Lincoln in 1860. Finally, Hawkeye politics in the antebellum decade is more the story of the suicide of the Democracy than of the triumphs of the Republicans . Nevertheless, this narrative fails to provide a totally satisfactory account of antebellum Iowa politics. The author opens his account with a description of the ethnic and geographic origins of the state's population . But in relating these factors to later political developments, his refusal to use any form of statistical analysis or correlation makes his conclusions about these groups' voting behavior tentative and disappointing . The subtitle of the book is misleading, for the frontier aspect of Iowa politics is presented in terms...