Wendell Phillips on Civil Rights and Freedom (review)

370CIVIL WAR HISTORY Treatment of Taney's judicial career minimizes historical analysis in favor of the personal view. Despite interpretative interjections, the Court's work—divided into the customary categories of contract, commerce, banking , and slavery—is treated mainly case-by-case, leaving the reader to fend for himself in regard to the larger picture. The contract decisions would have made more sense if seen as an implementation of the commercial ethos of the nineteenth century (as Willard Hurst has suggested). The confusions and contradictions of the commerce decisions and the institutional fragmentation which accompanied them could have been accounted for as a reaction, perhaps a representation, of new tensions within the post-1819 federal system from which Jacksonian Democracy itself arose. In short, the Taney Court and the Chief Justice himself might have been used more effectively as a mirror of the age—and vice versa. The failure to deal more comprehensively with the larger historical and legal scene makes it hard for Mr. Lewis to contrast successfully the Marshall and Taney Courts. In treating the slavery issue, the author zeroes in on the task of exonerating his subject from the judgment of history and the abuse of historians . Taney's personal views on the subject are convincingly shown to be moderate and humane—he emancipated his own slaves and genuinely hoped for gradual emanciption—and consistent throughout his career. The Court's fatal decision to broach the whole range of pohtical and constitutional issues in the Dred Scott case (though it might have avoided doing so on jurisdictional grounds) is defended not only as technically sound but as unavoidably necessary. On the former point Mr. Lewis will get little argument (and since Corwin and Swisher there has been little). The latter, however, is not supported by an examination of the nature of judicial statesmanship and remains improved. A discussion of the politics of the slavery issue and the brutal impact of the Scott decisions on the compromising function of party would surely have led to a less generous assessment of the Court's action. Taney emerges from the book as a man of humanity, one whose public life was devoted unselfishly and, with one tragic exception, brilliandy to the service of his profession and his country. The assessment rings true, but, for the full historical measure of his public contributions, the reader will have to turn to the earlier work of Swisher. R. Kent Newmyer University of Connecticut Wendell Phillips on Civil Rights and Freedom. Edited by Louis Filler. (New York: HiU and Wang, 1965. Pp. xxvii, 218. $1.95.) From 1837, when he first spoke out on behalf of abolitionism, until his death in 1884, Wendell Phillips performed a half-century-long devotion on behalf of improving the conditions of American life. Unashamedly radical, unrestrainedly liberal, and unambiguously egalitarian, Phillips BOOK REVIEWS371 was a goad even to reformers and a scourge to persons of standpat or retrograde social views. He left unturned few of the dark regions of midnineteenth century America, and he forced awareness of lower depths into the upper crust. Words were Phillips' weapons, and he wielded them effectively, rarely failing to draw blood. Professor Filler has performed a service in assembling this sampling of Phillips' outpouring, and in enhancing its utility with a headnote for each selection. To be sure, had this been my volume, greater attention would have gone to reconstruction issues. Certainly I would have included Phillips' speeches of April, 1866, and December, 1869, on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, respectively. But agreement is rare on which selections of a man's product should represent him. Quibbles must move aside. Anyone who is interested in widening his Civil War horizons, and m coming to grips witli a talented, vital, thrusting personality who was a major figure in the history of American libertarianism , has here an excellent means with which to begin. Harold M. Hyman University of Illinois The Antislavery Argument. Edited by William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease. (New York: Bobbs-MerriU, 1965. Pp. xcvi, 491. $2.75.) Publication of this volume of American antislavery writings coincides with a resurgence of interest in the origins and character of the movement to...