Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (review)

8oCIVIL WAR HISTORY The section on the corps is followed by a part covering "Miscellaneous Organizations" such as the "California Column," "Sibley's Sioux Expedition ," and the "Left Wing Forces in East Tennessee (Willcox)." In this part of the work Welcher sometimes gets down to the regimental level. He lists the black regiments (most of which eventually were designated as United States Colored Troops) including such units as the 54th Massachusetts and the ist South Carolina (which became the 33d USCT). Why such units are included in a reference work covering Western armies is not explained. The final section of the book contains discussions of individual battles and campaigns. Entries in each section are alphabetical or, in the case of the corps, numerical . The five-hundred-page battles and campaigns section reverses some of the information presented earlier. It lists the major units in each campaign and includes a narrative of the operations. One cannot help wondering why this book was published. Most of the basic information is accessible in more convenient and easier-to-use forms, such as Mark Mayo Boatner's Civil War Dictionary. The battle/campaign narratives are too long for a quick read (ninety-nine pages on the Atlanta campaign, fifty-four on Vicksburg), but they are not detailed enough for those who want a full account. The lack of completeness is made worse by the fact that the narratives naturally focus almost exclusively on the Federal forces. Some of the narratives border on becoming simply lists of what Yankee units marched to which points. None of the narratives contains a map, and readers unfamiliar with the areas of operations will sometimes have difficulty following the maneuvers. The Union Army, as Joseph Harsh noted in the review of the first volume cited above, is of very limited value. The second volume, however, does include an index to the complete work, thus correcting one of the major weaknesses that Harsh listed. Richard M. McMurry Decatur, Georgia Political Parties and American Political Developmentfrom the Age ofJackson to the Age ofLincoln. By Michael F. Holt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Pp. 365. $35.00.) The appearance of this collection of essays, most of them previously published , makes it possible to take notice ofthe highly creative and salutary role of Michael Holt in the field of antebellum scholarship, as a writer, lecturer, and, at the University of Virginia, mentor to undergraduate and graduate students who have gone on to contribute dissertations, essays, and books. The dust jacket touts him as "one of the leading specialists in the political history of the United States." True enough, and with regard to party dynamics, the BOOK REVIEWS8 1 Whig Party, and the politics of the 1850s in the North, Holt is unsurpassed. These essays show why. They range from his 1973 efforts to summarize the state of scholarship on the Democratic party and the Antimasonic and Know-Nothing parties, to several published in the 1980s, and to a previously unpublished 1990 lecture, "The Mysterious Disappearance of the American Whig Party." The early essays are still useful, and "The Antimasonic and Know Nothing Parties" remains a model treatment of these controversial social movements and third parties. It is the best short take on the social sources and politics of major populist upheavals which were both reformist and laced with intolerance. It should be read in conjunction with Holt's classic "The Politics ofImpatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism" (also 1973), which I still use in seminars. Included also is his provocative 1985 essay on the election of 1840 (which I have commented on elsewhere), three review essays dealing with Civil War causation in the North and South, and a bold foray into the 1860s, "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Union," in which he revises Eric McKitrick's well-known thesis regarding the utility of the Republican party to Abraham Lincoln in waging the Civil War. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is Holt's long introduction, which reviews each piece and reflects upon the evolution of his work over two decades. Evolution is the word that best describes the change in Holt's work, though he himself seems to think it has...