Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832, and: The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY masons were eventuaUy victims of their success, for their Masonic enemies decUned in numbers during the 1830s and 1840s. Vaughan's monograph exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of traditional political history. Proceeding with the rise, decline, and fall of the party state by state (with an interruption for the Antimasons presidential campaign in 1832), he offers a from-the-top down, event-fiUed description of the party's leaders, conventions, election results, and legislative efforts. As even the most begrudging opponent of the new political history will acknowledge, parties and politics are more than this. Vaughan, however,hasmadenouseoftechniquesdevelopedinthe last two decades. Sometimes this leads to questionable conclusions. For example, he compares two elections in Massachusetts, and assuming a standing decision on the part of Whig and Democratic voters, awards the Antimasonic vote to the latter, whose numbers had increased. This then is old-school political history with all its virtues and sins. Vaughan has read widely in the manuscripthterature; hehas researched carefully, and he answers fulsomely the question, what happened? But because he is so preoccupied with events, The Antimasonic Party in the United States lacks any governing interpretation orsynthesis thatwould expand our understanding of American poUtical behavior. Jean Baker Goucher College Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Sfovery Debate of 1831-1832. By AUson Goodyear FreehUng. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xiv, 306. $30.00.) The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Conventionof1829-30and the Conservative Tradition in the South. By Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. (San Marino, CaUf.: The Huntington Library, 1982. Pp. ix, 218. $18.00.) AUson FreehUng's Drift Toward Dissolution is the first major study of the Virginia slavery debate of 1831-32 since Joseph C. Robert's The Road From Monticello, published some forty years ago. The book is aggressively revisionist in tone and argument. FreehUng's target is a "traditional" interpretation of antebellum Virginia that she associates most often with the work of Robert and Charles H. Ambler. While her focus is the legislative debate on slavery, she examines the broader context of geographical and poUtical conflict in Virginia from the early nineteenth century through the division of the state during the Civil War. There are extended discussions of the constitutional convention of 1829-30, the Turner rebellion, efforts to colonize Virginia's freeblacks in the 1830s, and the final phase of the commonwealth's "drift toward dissolution " in the 1850s and early 1860s. FreehUng's revisionist argument has several threads but can be summarized quickly. Historians have grossly misread the meaning and signi- BOOK REVIEWS177 ficance of the 1831-32 debate. Since a consensus existed among the delegates that Virginia should and would become a free-soil state, none advocated "perpetual slavery" for the commonwealth or defended slavery in unambiguously positive terms. The two opposing sides— "abolitionists" and "conservatives"—clashed over means, not ends. Conservatives opposed legislative, postnati emancipation as both unjust and impractical butnonetheless anticipated an eventual end to slavery in Virginia through the natural means of a domestic slave trade that would carry off the state's blacks to the cotton-growing region of the deep South and Southwest. Virtually all Virginians, Freehling suggests, saw their state's future to lie ultimately with the neighboring free-soil states to the north, and she cites Thomas Roderick Dew, author of the famous Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature (1832), to cUnch her case. The legislature rejected both immediate emancipation and perpetual slavery, adopting instead a compromise resolution that openly proclaimed slavery an evil and committed the state to future abolition. Thus contemporaries generally (and correctly) perceived the debate as more a victory of abolitionists than of eastern conservatives. Rather than marking a repudiation of Jeffersonian UberaUsm, it "dramatized slavery's tenuous status" (p. 167) in Virginia and represented a potentially momentous step toward the fulfillment of Jefferson's dream of gradual emancipation. What halted this antislavery momentum, according to Freehling, was the subsequent failure of colonization, which can be traced primarily to the refusal of Virginia's free blacks to participate . Nevertheless, Virginia remained long after 1832 a profoundly divided state in which debate over slavery had both a geographical and a class...