The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Volume 3, No Union with Slaveholders, 1841-1849 (review)

68CIVIL WAR HISTORY ates. On April 15 he wrote: "I am looking for a speedy move, one more fight and then easy sailing to the close of the war" (V, 47). This attitude he maintained during the next few weeks as the army inched toward Corinth. While various commentators have criticized HaIIeck for the agonizingly slow movement, Grant fully sympathized with the deliberate advance and continued to admire HaIIeck as "one of the greatest men of the age" (V, 102). At the same time his indeterminate status led him to ask, almost demand, that HaIIeck clarify his role or relieve him of duties. Halleck's reassurances notwithstanding, Grant almost resigned, presumably dissuaded by Sherman and others of his officers. What really saved Grant for the army was the troubles of another of his heroes, George B. McCIeIIan, whose failure on the Peninsula led to Halleck's appointment as General-in-Chief and Grant's appointment as commander in the West. This shuffling of commands strengthened Grant's wavering confidence and erased, or at least eased, his hurt feelings over the criticism that followed Shiloh. The general who now turned to consolidating his army prefatory to further movements southward had become a finely tempered fighting man. While military considerations preoccupied Grant, he also necessarily dealt with the flotsam and jetsam of war—refugees, partisan bands, the profusion of contraband slaves, and the omnipresent corrupt businessmen and politicians who sought to use the dislocations of war to their own advantage. These letters and papers are enhanced by scholarly, comprehensive footnotes, some of which are small essays. The clearly drawn maps are helpful and the illustrations well chosen. In all, this is a distinguished editing project, well worth the effort and, happily, modestly priced. John T. Hubbell Kent State University The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Volume 3, No Union with Slaveholders, 1841-1849. Edited by Walter M. Merrill. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1973. Pp. xxiii, 719. $30.00.) Every radical movement experiences declensions, perhaps to test the stamina and resilience of its advocates. For the abolitionist venture, the 1840's were such a time of low morale and internal bickering. To Garrison's credit, he did not despair. Unlike so many reform journals that once had graced the moral landscape, his Liberator survived office disputes and the decline of subscription lists. Yet, it is difficult to judge whether the new doctrinal theme he imposed on the American Anti-Slavery Society, "No Union with Slaveholders" (this volume's title ), was shrewd strategy as Aileen Kraditor contends or unnecessary diversion, an older historical opinion. Certainly the idea of northern BOOK REVIEWS69 separation failed to inspire the antislavery forces as a whole. While it did provide enemies a convenient target for abuse, one guesses that sectional war was hastened not a moment by the new twist in abolition logic. In any case, Garrison's correspondence in Professor Merrill's latest collection makes clear that the fetching slogan was not a political program anyhow. Garrison issued no call for Yankeedom Irredenta; the impulse for separatism was quite different from southern secessionist calculations. Garrison was chiefly a religious reformer with political overtones, though his effect was a reversal of that stress. To condemn national enslavement to black exploitation, greed, and southern hegemony, he combined contemporary fancies of moral perfectability with old Covenanter and Quaker means of soulful alienation from worldly corruptions —abstinence from oath-taking, voting, and officeholding. "In regard to my religious sentiments," Garrison explained to Elizabeth Pease in 1841, "they are almost identical with those of Barclay, Penn, and Fox" (p. 17). Disunion was a way of perceiving evil and contemplating the good. Testifying to this orientation, Garrison's letters deal less with the reigns of three slaveholding Presidents and expansionists policies beneficial to the South than with the timidities and neutralities of clerical bodies and individual religious leaders. Garrison's favorite terrain for battle was the world of ecclesiastical enterprise—the Temperance Conference of London, Father Matthew's southern tour against drink, Thomas Chalmer's fund-raising for the Scottish Free Kirk among Presbyterian Charlestonians, the embarrassed muddlings of the Evangelical Union. Symbolic of this distraction from power politics was...