Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (review)

l64CIVIL WAR HISTORY talent for miUtary command, he held the regiment together on a grueling winter march deep into enemy territory, far from any chance of support. At the battles of Brazito and Sacramento, he met and defeated Mexican forces much larger than his own, thereby diverting troops from Santa Anna's army and contributing toTaylor's victoryatBuenaVistain February 1847.Afteroneofthe longestmarches in military history, he and his men returned to a hero's welcome at home. Dawson's engaging narrative is military history in the broadest sense. While he presents a lucid account ofthe campaign and its battles, he also explores the motivation of Doniphan and his men, their interaction with Mexican civilians, and the response ofpress and public at home to their exploits. Because he relies primarily on diaries and memoirs by the men of Doniphan's regiment, the book is both a study ofDoniphan's leadership and ofways in which his men, through their attitudes and behavior, their discipline or lack of discipline at crucial moments , shaped the outcome ofthe campaign. Dawson presents a fine case study of American war-making at mid-century. It fills a gap in Mexican War literature , and is also ofvalue to those interested in the background of the Civil War. Though Doniphan himself would take no active part in that war, he set precedents for it. Doniphan and his men were among the first American soldiers to march deep into hostile territory, assume the role of an army ofoccupation, and administer a miUtary government over a conquered civilian population, all the while continuing the fight against the enemy's army. It is beyond the scope of Dawson's book to demonstrate a direct impact of this experience on the Union army of 1861-65, but he does provide a beginning point for such a study. He also demonstrates that Doniphan and his men deliberately cast themselves in the role of the idealized citizen soldier, and were celebrated as such by their contemporaries. The success of the First Missouri, and of the American armies in general in the 1 846-47 campaigns, reinforced Americans' faith in the militia and traditional ways of making war and confirmed the belief that the Republic had no need of a large professional army. In this as in many other ways, the Mexican War would shape American's assumptions and behavior in the next conflict. Mary Ellen Rowe Central Missouri State University Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 322. $30.00.) Despite an abundance of studies of abolition and of slavery, no one has ever written a comprehensive history of violent efforts to overthrow the peculiar institution prior to the Civil War. Instead, abolitionists are generally remembered as pacifists and slave revolts as far less serious than elsewhere in the BOOK REVIEWS1 65 western hemisphere. Ifrecognized at all, antislavery violence is associated with the 1 850s and John Brown, Kansas, and the rescue of fugitive slaves. The ten original essays in this book offer an initial assessment of antislavery violence and suggest that it occurred in a wide variety ofcontexts, extended back at least to the 1 790s, reflected common cultural values, and had important consequences. Rather than proving divisive and destructive, violence, in the view of this volume's editors, served to bring abolitionists together as they defended slave rebels or John Brown. In short, politically motivated violence in this period, as in others, proved crucial in shaping historical events. The editors have divided the essays into two groups, one dealing with black liberators, the other with white abolitionists. Included in the first are essays by Douglas R. Egerton and by Junius Rodriguez detailing insurrectionary violence stimulated by St. Domingo in Virginia and Louisiana respectively; Stanley Harrold's study of Madison Washington (of the Creole) as a romantic hero; Carol Wilson's argument that black abolitionists outdistanced their white counterparts in realizing the necessity of violent tactics to counteract the Fugitive Slave Law, and a subtle, intriguing analysis by James H. Cook of Frederick Douglass's attitudes toward violent means in the 1 850s. In the...