Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style (review)

BOOK RSVISWS Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style. By Roy F. Nichols. (New York: Atheneum Press, 1963. Pp. xiv, 334. $6.50.) Through the years, Roy E. Nichols has produced a succession of admirable books concerned mainly with American politics prior to the Civil War. Not least among his achievements has been his success in showing that a dean can still hold membership in the community of productive scholars despite the frenzied pace of modern academia. Here Dean Nichols has tried to place the American Civil War in long-run perspective. And in this effort he concerns himself specifically with "the problems connected with the invention, the construction and the adjustment of Leviathan," the American machinery of government "particularly those . . . associated with the legislative process in self-government." Dean Nichols begins his story with the religious ferment that began to disseminate from clandestine meetings at the White Horse Inn in Cambridge during the early sixteenth century, notes the intellectual contributions of Locke and Coke, and explains the preference of Americans, building on such precedents, for written constitutions. Unique in the American Leviathan as it emerged, during and immediately after the War for Independence , was the element of self renewal provided by the territorial process, helping on the one hand to keep the Republic "flexible and vital" but on the other, pregnant with danger because of the changing balance of power that might result as new states entered the Union. The compromises of the nineteenth century were "operational adjustments" but adjustments insufficient to prevent the development of "increasing friction" in the machine. To Professor Nichols the Kansas-Nebraska Act was one of the "least successful examples of American political ingenuity," because it failed to allow the process of building new communities to continue peaceably and efficiently, and it stimulated the growth of a political organization which was intent on destroying the finely balanced equilibrium of power between North and South. Now the American Leviathan proved inadequate in the face of "the intricate behavior patterns of an expanding society." More specifically the author explains this failure in terms of "cultural federalism," competing and overlapping cultural attitudes found in segments of the American population which undermined political stability. The South, Nichols suggests, lost the war in part through failure to create a satisfactory leviathan of its own and in part because the cultural ties between North and South were so strong that the Confederates could not summon 204 sufficient resolution to fight an all-out war. In the meantime the Republicans were "improving" the old Leviathan by passing legislation which elements in the party demanded and capped the process by dispatching a series of constitutional amendments to the states for approval. Students of Civil War causation generally consider Roy F. Nichols to be a "revisionist"; and too often he is simply mentioned in passing after discussions of the work of James G. Randall and Avery Craven. If emphasis on the complexity of the causes of the Civil War, if concern that aberrations in human behavior be considered, if the suggestion, overt or implicit, that the war was not inevitable, make the revisionist, the label is perhaps appropriate. But it should be stressed that Nichols' description of the Civil War era is a very different one than that of either Randall or Craven and more difficult for many historians to assess because it is more firmly grounded in social science thinking concerning culture and value orientations . Safe in their parochial ivory towers, most historians of the Civil War tender a kind of respectful inattention to his work, but as the infection of the social sciences spreads in the historical brotherhood the writings of Dean Nichols may assume additional significance. Anyone interested in studying them carefully can well begin with Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style. Allan G. Bogue University of Wisconsin Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey. By John Lofton. (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1964. Pp. ix, 294. $6.00.) Here is a conscientious effort to reconstruct the material circumstances which attended Denmark Vesey's famous attempt in 1822 to organize a slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina. The author courageously recreates what can be recreated of Vesey's own life...