Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850-1860, and: Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY overwhelming importance of President Tyler's policies in hardening die proslavery stance of the South. Altogether this volume convincingly clarifies die manner in which the white South moved toward a united and wholehearted political defense of slavery long before the political crisis of the 1850's and the emergence of Northern Republicanism. Less successful than the political narrative, however, is an overall interpretive framework that is rather ambivalent and eclectic. Cooper identifies his "politics of slavery" with "four major forces in antebellum soutiiern politics: the institution of slavery, southern parties and politicians, the southern political structure, and die values of southern white society"(p.xi). Although he then offers some effective analysis of the interaction of these factors, he does not succeed well in achieving a full or satisfying synthesis. Instead he seems torn between slavery as symbol and slavery as reality, between politics as cause and politics as effect, between Craven and Genovese. While slavery is the bedrock, proslavery rhetoric is considered a political weapon, and political and psychological motives are pronounced paramount in explaining the political process (pp. 59, 65, 105). Expressing fundamental disagreement with economic interpretations, Cooper ignores the question of whether or not slavery itselfshould beviewed as an economic institution The related question of race is also neglected, and somewhat surprisingly, in view ofhis own emphasis upon the sectional dispute over die territories, he too readily dismisses the background importance of national economic growth and geographic expansion. In this reviewer's opinion this is an important work that is more successful as an analysis of die character and evolution of the politics of slavery than it is as an explanation of the wellsprings of either that phenomenon or die secession crises. Northern Illinois UniversityOtto H. Olsen Politicians, Phnters, and Phin Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850-1860. By Ralph A. Wooster. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Pp. xvi, 204. $9.75.) Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress. By Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. Pp. xxii, 319. $15.00) Through study of secondary sources, manuscript census returns, state statutes, and private papers, Ralph A. Wooster again has written an indispensable study of the ante-bellum South. Wooster's collective biographies of state legislators, governors, judges, sheriffs, and county commissioners provide an unrivaled prosopographical analysis of Southern political elites. Like The People in Power, the companion volume on die lower South, Politicians, Phnters and Phin Folk has an impressive bibliography and discusses a number of important subjects. BOOK REVIEWS177 Contradicting usual interpretations, Wooster argues that die upper South was becoming more democratic on the eve of die Civil War. Although he confirms Eugene Genovese's observations about die importance of the planter in Southern politics, his central thesis contradicts Genovese's more recent argument that the Soutii was becoming less democratic as the Civil War approached. Wooster also stresses die often ignored local origins of these democratic reforms, such as the continuing intrasectional strife. Much of the book centers on state legislatures, which Wooster shows to be the center of state government, while the executive was die weakest branch of government. Throughout, Wooster shows that by abandonment of property qualifications for voting and holding office, emergence of elective rather than appointive offices, and reapportionment in accordance with shifting populations, die upper South tended toward democratization in the first half of the nineteenth century. Wooster is convincing with his thesis, but one is reminded of Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's reformulation of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis in which they define democracyin psychological terms rather tiian in terms of political institutions. Democracy is a manipulative attitude toward government shared by large numbers of people. People who believe they can and ought to have some control over the political institutions under which they are living are "democratic," particularly if they are willing to grant the legitimacy of diese feelings to all other people living in tiiat place. Elkins and McKitrick applied tiieir theory to the old Northwest and die southwestern frontiers, therefore this consideration of how people behaved within the political machinery seemsparticularly applicable to Wooster's concerns. Since Wooster combined political...