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282BOOK REVIEWS do with antagonisms between subsistence folk and commercialfarming slaveholders. Perceptively Bruce dissects the choral verses of revival hymns, finding them curiously barren of imagery. He attributes this failing to a lack of political focus for agrarian resentment , but without an appreciation for the ethnic and economic character of a hog culture, so to speak, his explanation is not at all convincing. Using anthropological studies only in regard to campmeeting conversions and liturgies, he missed a rich opportunity. Professor Bruce's work is another reminder of the deplorable state of our understanding of the rural southern past. Historians have been too slow in utilizing recent work in rural sociology, too glib in offering up the indignant sop of class "oppression," too lazy in passing over vast archival resources. Like the "plain folk" he seeks to honor, Bruce is a victim of scholarly sloppiness in the field. Endowed with a keen analytical mind, the author needs only encouragement and better secondary studies upon which to build interpretation in order to help in the reconstruction of how people once lived in the non-slaveholding South. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University The Secession Movement in the Middle Atìantic States. By William C. Wright. (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973. Pp. 274. $15.00.) This regional study of the secession movement in five Middle Atlantic states surveys political opinions from the 1860 presidential election through the immediate post-Fort Sumter weeks. William C. Wright documents, state by state, the secessionist opinions of governors , senators, representatives, political parties and conventions, churches, newspapers and important cities and private figures. He describes as secessionists all those who wanted to join the Confederacy , those who desired a central confederacy, and those who preferred to let the South go in peace. The latter was by far the most popular because of the fear that a war would be fought on their ground. Wright finds that Maryland had the strongest secessionist movement , Delaware played a minor role, New Jersey favored a central confederacy, Pennsylvania had the weakest secessionist movement, and New York was dominated in its pro-southern opinion by New York City. He concludes that the Democratic party in all five states supported the secessionist movement and that it centered in those areas linked to the South by economic, cultural and social ties. He concludes, too, that the movement failed primarily because of inadequate leadership and the lack of a vehicle for legal expression of BOOK REVIEWS283 opinion. Support for all levels of Middle Atlantic secessionist sympathy ended with Fort Sumter. Wright is most believable when outlining the reasons for support of peaceable secession and in documenting the abrupt end of it after Fort Sumter. He is the least convincing when asserting the actual amount of support for secession. Too often facts are presented that lead to no conclusion, but on this point the conclusion does not follow from the facts, despite the established number of leading Democrats who supported peaceable secession. Instead of confronting the conceptual problem of basing "populace" support on the existence of elitist opinion, Wright ignores it, or more specifically, confuses it because he is at once confident of the amount of his secessionist support and still willing to admit that it is impossible to determine. Generally it is a case of unwarranted extrapolation. "Secessionist" is also not properly distinguished from "secessionist sympathy," in that it is too broadly defined to include not only those anxious to secede but those willing to allow peaceable secession. Using an array of both primary and secondary sources, Wright pulls together an impressive amount of documentation. At the same time his evidence is too often conceptually unevaluated. The book too frequently becomes a compendium of undigested facts that turn up as unintroduced and unidentified quotations. Indeed, an uncommonly large number of pages are comprised of five indented quotations that disguise rather than elucidate. The footnotes are at the end. Fred Nicklason University of Maryland John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civü War. A Study in AngloAmerican Rehtions. By Adelaide Weinberg. (London: Kingswood Press, 1973. Pp. 224. $6.50.) Probably no book of its time exercised greater influence in shaping British public opinion on...

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