The South and Three Sectional Crises, and: The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (review)

86civil war history chased or leased plantations and tried their hand at growing cotton. With scraps of biographical data from myriad sources, Powell identifies 524 planters and, for the first time, describes the Northern planters as welleducated young men of business and professional backgrounds from New England, New York, Ohio, and Illinois. In addition, Powell probes with intelligence and care his subjects' economic motives and social attitudes. Relying on a dozen relatively well-known individuals who recorded their experiences in memoirs (includingWhitelaw Reid in Louisiana , Albert T. Morgan in Mississippi, and Charles Stearns in Georgia), Powell describes a "Yankee planter movement" (p. 32) intent on modernizing the Southern economy and society with an infusion of Northern men and methods. How deeply such purposes affected the strategies of the mass of Northern planters must remain obscure, but it is clear that for an articulate few, postwar activities involved a working out of antebellum theories. Powell concludes that Northern planters, by striving to establish "a factory-like regimen on the plantations," (p. 80) brought bourgeois values to the South, self-consciously demonstrating to die former slaves and former slaveowners alike the proper, productive relationship between capital and labor in an industrializing society. They failed in part because they were unlucky and inexperienced, in part because they were undermined by Andrew Johnson, and in part because their goals could not be reconciled with the freedmen's expectations. On this last point, Powell equates die "industrial ideas" of the Northern planters with the "Manchester school of economic thought" (p. 76) and omits from his equation the persisting postmillennial optimism which enabled some reformers to look beyond die clash and din of laissez-faire capitalism to what Charles Stearns (and Wendell Phillips, among others) called the "cooperative principle." Significantly, Stearns's disillusionment with freed labor went beyond the former slave's unwillingness to identify freedom with the popular dictum, "root, hog, or die." As Stearns concluded in 1872, "co-operation is the great remedy for the ills complained of by working-men, yet the freedmen are not sufficiently advanced, intellectually , or morally, to render its adoption among diem, a practicable thing." (quoted, p. 83) The striking point in Stearns's case is that while his faith in progress reached beyond laissez-faire formulations, the advancing civilization which his ideology projected cast aside the former slaves and, one suspects, the former masters as well. Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis The South and Three Sectional Crises. By Don E. Fehrenbacher. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Pp. 112. $8.95.) The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War. By Kenneth M. Stampp. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Pp. 320. $15.95.) BOOK REVIEWS87 These two notable books come from two of the most distinguished historians of the middle period. Kennetii Stampp presents a collection of essays that deal with various topics, but focus on slavery and the coming of the Civil War. In his briefbook, originally the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures of 1978, Don Fehrenbacher analyzes threecritical sectional confrontations: 1820, 1850, and 1860. Stampp's collection of eight essays (two previously unpublished and the remaining six updated where necessary) attests to his distinction as a historian. Certain of the essays, especially a critique of Time on the Cross, an investigation of slave sources, and an examination of Lincoln's policy toward Fort Sumter, are elegant exercises illuminating that most troubling of questions, the handling of evidence. These tough-minded, judicious pieces ought to be assigned as primers to graduate students, and, for that matter, to many practicing historians. Stampp also reveals himself as a superb analyst of other historians' views. In "The Irrespressible Conflict" and "Race, Slavery, and die Republican Party of the 1850s" he presents careful, skillful expositions of a wide variety of writings on two perennial historiographical topics. Peeling away the outer layers, Stampp exposes the core of arguments with incisiveness and clarity . I do not think I have ever seen it done better. The substance of these essays highlights themes that Professor Stampp has pursued in his writing for thirty years and more. Here I must note one exception, his suggestive, albeit unpersuasive, psychological explanation for...