John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civil War: A Study in Anglo-American Relations (review)

BOOK REVIEWS283 opinion. Support for all levels of Middle Atlantic secessionist sympathy ended with Fort Sumter. Wright is most believable when outlining the reasons for support of peaceable secession and in documenting the abrupt end of it after Fort Sumter. He is the least convincing when asserting the actual amount of support for secession. Too often facts are presented that lead to no conclusion, but on this point the conclusion does not follow from the facts, despite the established number of leading Democrats who supported peaceable secession. Instead of confronting the conceptual problem of basing "populace" support on the existence of elitist opinion, Wright ignores it, or more specifically, confuses it because he is at once confident of the amount of his secessionist support and still willing to admit that it is impossible to determine. Generally it is a case of unwarranted extrapolation. "Secessionist" is also not properly distinguished from "secessionist sympathy," in that it is too broadly defined to include not only those anxious to secede but those willing to allow peaceable secession. Using an array of both primary and secondary sources, Wright pulls together an impressive amount of documentation. At the same time his evidence is too often conceptually unevaluated. The book too frequently becomes a compendium of undigested facts that turn up as unintroduced and unidentified quotations. Indeed, an uncommonly large number of pages are comprised of five indented quotations that disguise rather than elucidate. The footnotes are at the end. Fred Nicklason University of Maryland John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civü War. A Study in AngloAmerican Rehtions. By Adelaide Weinberg. (London: Kingswood Press, 1973. Pp. 224. $6.50.) Probably no book of its time exercised greater influence in shaping British public opinion on the American Civil War than John Elliott Cairnes's The Sfove Power, published in 1862. The late Adelaide Weinberg's book consists of two parts: a study of The SL·ve Power and public response to it; and a collection of letters between the Irish economist and Sarah Blake Shaw, preserved in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. She was the mother-in-law of G. W. Curtis and the mother of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the first Negro regiment to be recruited from a free state, Massachusetts. Cairnes was a classical Liberal economist who viewed history in the light of economic determinism and naturally considered slavery the cause of the Civil War. He argued that a slave society had a bad effect on international commerce by enhancing the value of crude labor and by eliminating the necessity for education. This book does 284BOOK REVIEWS not develop Caimes's advocacy of a "Mississippi Compromise," which prevented G. W. Curtis from advising Harper and Brothers to publish The SL·ve Power in the United States. Though urging moral support for the North but fearing the techniques of despotism, Cairnes concluded that the North should not conquer the Confederacy but should hem it in east of the Mississippi, isolating the South until slavery had disappeared. Mrs. Weinberg's untimely death unfortunately prevented revision of the whole work and addition of further notes before publication. For example, in the title and elsewhere, Elliott is misspelled with one "t". Joseph M. Hernon, Jr. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Confederate Women. By Bell Irvin Wiley. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975. Pp. 179. $10.95.) For the most part the "Confederate women" in this little volume from the pen of an old master are of a special type. Mary Boykin Chesnut and Virginia Tunstall Clay were born within two years of each other, one in the Carolina low country, the other in the Alabama black belt. Each married a man eight years her senior who was already on the way to becoming a successful politician. Both loved the social-political whirlpool of Washington in the 1850's; both were intelligent , charming, politically astute—and childless. Bom a hundred years later each would have been a thoroughly liberated woman, possibly a politician in her own right. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century the yearning was visible, as Virginia Clay donned her sunbonnet and went vigorously campaigning for her husband's election to the Congress or as...