Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (review)

82CIVIL WAR HISTORY Holt's work has always moved easily back and forth between the electorate and political elites. Holt attributes his reordering of priorities to Richard L. McCormick's question: "What . . . was the connection between popular voting behavior and governance, the formulation and implementation of public policy?" (22-23). Holt believes that the early new political histories failed to show such a connection, and he cannot accept the notion that political leaders and voters "dwelled in entirely separate universes" (23). The two may have functioned, however, as he knows, with very different kinds of information. The policy question, moreover, does not arise from pure logic, but from a set of premises about how policy and voting are connected. The early new political history implied that voting and specific economic policies were usually disconnected, though voters did respond to parties' general postures regarding the use of the state for economic and moral development. Studies by Ballard Campbell, Ray Gunn, Robin Einhorn, and others have addressed directly the gap between voting and specific economic policies. Yet the raising of the question (though unfair as criticism) has had positive results. Holt's agenda, set now by this question and others, seems eminently sensible and destined to result in work as creative and useful as that contained within this volume. Ronald P. Formisano University of Florida Bright Radicai Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier. By Robert R. Dykstra. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. 348. $47.50.) Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier, by Robert R. Dykstra, is a compelling account of race relations and white attitudes toward racial, political, and civil equality in Iowa over the course of nearly five decades. Spanning the years from 1833 to 1880, Dykstra examines the racial attitudes of Iowa's white political leadership as they grappled with the question of how far they should go in extending racial equality to the state's black population. Although blacks never comprised even 1 percent of Iowa's total population between 1833 and 1880, white Iowans were consumed with the race issue and the place that free blacks would occupy in their community. White Iowans, Dykstra notes, were not predisposed to grant blacks racial equality during the antebellum era, and a "peculiarly virulent racism" (11) operated in some communities, such as Dubuque, by the late 1830s. Free blacks, for example, were disfranchised, and one African American was lynched for allegedly stealing a trunk of clothes. By 1 839, the Iowa territorial legislature, which was dominated by native Southerners, had passed a Black Code, modeled on similar restrictions in Michigan and Indiana. While the BOOK REVIEWS83 Quakers and the antislavery community protested vehemently against the racist prohibition, arguing that the Black Code denied African Americans due process because it prohibited them from giving testimony against whites in a civil proceeding, these racial egalitarians clashed with a formidable group of Democrats. Indeed, these "militant racists," as Dykstra labels them, ultimately triumphed, despite the later defeat of a black exclusionary law. Dykstra is particularly effective in tracing the changes in racial and political attitudes over time and in demonstrating that political expediency, party affiliation, and the "removal ofthe Democratic party's control ofpublic policy" (239) played important roles in the elimination of racial barriers in Iowa. The Hawkeye state, which Dykstra believes had almost no reason to be proud of its record on racial issues before i860, emerges during the postbellum era as a supporter of African American political and civil rights. Although this turn of events did not necessarily involve a change in racial attitudes among white Iowans, it does reveal the complex interaction of factors that was necessary to bring about racial progress in one nineteenthcentury Midwestern community. Bright Radical Star is an impressive book in its breadth, research, and use of quantitative analysis, particularly a multiple ecological regression. Dykstra 's conclusions are based on a solid core of local and county records, election returns, newspapers, manuscript census returns, and social scientific literature on race relations. This important study also breaks new ground on the antislavery movement in Iowa and the role that white abolitionists played to support...