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Reviews of Books
outraged and challenged this "kind of slavery" in
court. Masters promised revenge, and when the two
men met on the road, he flew at McMillan's throat and
then flailed at him with an axe before McMillan
blasted him with his shotgun. Masters died swearing
vengeance.
The Masters killing is presented as a metaphor for
the cultural conflict that Bourke and DeBats say
divided the entire county and, by implication, the
nation. But when they explore the social and cultural
context of this event, the picture becomes much less
melodramatic. Instead of demonstrating serious social
divisions and the politicalization of cultural conflict,
diligent analysis of the social characteristics of voters
proves the "lack of connections between social profile
and voting choice" (p. 217). The authors find, among
other things, that the regional origin of voters had little
influence on party loyalty. Nor did economic standing
determine who voted Republican or Democrat, though
it had much to do with whether residents voted at all.
In the end, there seems to be little empirical support
for the idea that two social types, two cultures, two
visions of the future were in real conflict in Washington County.
When Bourke and DeBats turn to another variable,
neighborhood, new claims are advanced. The property
line between the feuding Masters and McMillan farms,
they assert, was like a "geological fault" line running
across the county. To the east was a land of abolition,
improvement, and northern culture; to the west was
southern in character. But again, the close analysis that
takes us through each voting precinct does not lend
consistent support to the generalization of a miniature
sectional crisis at play. The maps displayed show what
we might expect: pockets of Democratic strength
within a county dominated by the emerging Republican Party. It is also hard to see how this highly
particularistic analysis of the local context of politics
could ever be applied to a larger social canvas. If all
the world were Washington County, it appears that
partisan politics was less an expression of deep social
and cultural division within the voting population than
it was a means of containing and ameliorating such
conflicts. The hostility political parties seemed to give
vent to most vociferously was most often aimed at
minorities and outsiders-Indians, blacks, Catholics,
and alleged heretics-none a genuine threat to the
rule of the white Protestant majority that prevailed in
both parties.
Back east, meanwhile, the political system tried and
failed to contain conflict that divided the nation and
plunged it into a long and bloody war. Washington
County, Oregon, may have included some of the same
antagonistic elements at play on the national stage, but
it does not serve well as a microcosm of the coming
sectional conflict. Southerners coming to Oregon were
mostly from the Upper South, and they came west, in
part, to escape a slave society. Whatever the views of
northern and southern migrants on slavery, they
shared an antipathy toward blacks, and both voted to
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
exclude blacks, slave and free, from Oregon. In Washington County, there was certainly enough diversity
and strife among personalities and social groups to
provide fuel for a number of blood feuds, along with
less deadly conflicts, but the McMillan-Masters affray
seems to have been an anomaly rather than a metaphor for the local game of American politics. Although
Bourke and DeBats fail to prove their claims, they
have nonetheless provided us with a richly detailed and
valuable portrait of an American community in the
making.
DON H. DOYLE
Vanderbilt University
GUNJA SENGUPTA. For God and Mammon: Evangelicals
and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial
Kansas, 1854-1860. Athens: University of Georgia
Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 219. $35.00.
Sectional confrontation in Bleeding Kansas during the
mid-1850s was a crucial milestone on the way to the
Civil War. In this intelligent and carefully crafted
book, Gunja SenGupta makes an important contribution to understanding what happened in Kansas along
with its critical national repercussions. She brings a
fresh perspective to a well-known story in several
respects. Her documentation includes the territorial
census of 1855, which allows the reconstruction of
demographic data that are arrayed in thirteen tables.
Two full-page maps also allow the ready location of
events described in the tables and narrative.
Influenced by the work of C. Vann Woodward
(Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 [1951]), SenGupta argues that, by the eve of statehood in 1861,
mutual concerns bridged the ideological chasm that
had separated northern evangelicals and proslavery
advocates in Kansas during 1854-1860. She deftly
places her study in the context of the voluminous
secondary literature and thus provides an informative
historiographic overview. SenGupta's overall thesis
introduces a level of complexity to the apparent cleavage between free state and proslavery advocates in
Kansas: "I simply argue that the Kansas conflict was
more multidimensional than a dichotomous portrayal
of irreconcilable contending camps would imply" (p.
5).
With the revision of the Missouri Compromise,
Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854
had left the question of slavery in the former Louisiana
Purchase Territory north of 36° 30' to the process of
popular sovereignty. The rush to populate the territory
with partisans led free state and proslavery factions to
advocate antagonistic agendas and even open warfare
in the battle over the extension of slavery in the West.
Broad ideological affinities characterized both sides.
In the North, outrage over the repeal of the ban on
extending slavery led to the creation of the Republican
Party. Its slogan of "free soil, free labor, and free men"
fused Protestant morality and republican liberty with a
doctrine of economic progress that garnered popular
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893
United States
support and muted class differences. The idealized
benefits of liberal capitalism, shared by industrialist
Amos Lawrence, the preacher Henry Ward Beecher,
and radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, were
contrasted with the sloth, immorality, and backwardness supposedly rife in the Old South. Yet a survey of
195 heads of emigrant households from the North
shows almost fifty-five percent were mechanics and
artisans; farmers were a distant second at twenty-nine
percent. SenGupta ironically comments: "The very
economic forces that prompted an optimistic faith in
the possibility and desirability of spreading northernstyle progress to distant lands also threatened to strip
craftspeople of their traditional skills and undermine
their economic independence, long thought to be
essential for republican virtue" (p. 46). Furthermore,
the town of Lawrence was less a free-labor Eden than
a dusty settlement of crude dwellings whose pioneers
endured disease, extreme weather, and proslavery
ruffians.
Contradictions also beset the proslavery faction. The
opportunity to extend slavery into Kansas proved
quixotic. The census of 1855, taken when southerners
were numerically in a majority, showed that, out of a
total territorial population of 8,525, only 186 people or
2.2 percent were slaves. Most masters held only one or
two slaves; few cultivated the lush tobacco and hemp
fields that proslavery apologists had erroneously predicted would flourish there. Some 300 Missouri slaves
also fled their masters via Kansas's underground railroad; abolitionists, such as the legendary John Brown
and supporters of the American Missionary Association, provided remarkable assistance. Southern emigration schemes largely failed. Most emigrants were
young men from neighboring Missouri who were looking for a homestead. They were by no means uniform
supporters of David Atchison, whose staunch prosouthern sympathies pitted him against the formidable
Thomas Hart Benton. Southern emigrants were
staunchly for white supremacy, but that did not translate into a blanket endorsement for the policies of the
planter oligarchy. The promise that a slave society
meant opportunity for young white men rang somewhat hollow for Missouri emigrants struggling in the
unforgiving Great Plains.
Whatever the contradictions, the sectional antagonism in Kansas was real, as the North and South
sought to imprint their social vision on the West.
Violence and fraud unhinged Kansas politics and
national comity. The sack of Lawrence and Osawatomie by proslavery forces was met in kind by Brown's
retaliation in the Pottawatomie massacre. The bogus
proslavery Lecompton constitution, Preston Brooks's
caning of abolitionist Charles Sumner in the Senate,
the portentous schism in the Democratic Party, and
Brown's guerrilla raid at Harpers Ferry aJl had a direct
Kansas connection.
Yet Bleeding Kansas also provided a model for
national reconciliation foJlowing Reconstruction.
White supremacy, town boosterism, railroad develop-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ment, and banking promotion often brought former
opponents together in a common cause as Kansas
prepared for entry into the Union as a free state. In
SenGupta's exceJlent book, the case is weJl made that
Kansas was a symbol for sectional discord and national
reunion.
B. GOODHEART
University of Connecticut
LAWRENCE
JOHN ASHWORTH. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the
Antebellum RepUblic. Volume 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850. New York: Cambridge University
Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 520. Cloth $64.95, paper $19.95.
This first volume of a projected two-volume work on
the American political system and its relationship to
slavery and to capitalism is a provocative effort that
needs to be read on more than one level. It is, first, an
effort to construct a more suggestive Marxist analytical
framework than that used by such scholars as E. P.
Thompson, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Eugene
Genovese. Using his newly minted explanatory model,
John Ashworth also attempts to provide a Marxist
analysis of the coming of the Civil War. His overaJl
interpretive claims are that the war can be seen best as
the result of a bourgeois revolution and that this is a
novel view. The latter claim will surprise people who
thought that earlier students of the war-Charles
Beard and Mary Beard and Barrington Moore come to
mind-had seen it in similar terms. This, however, is
not the import of Ashworth's effort. His claims to have
created amore sophisticated mode of Marxist analysis
and to have explained the historical experiences of
people of the North and of the South that ended in
some of the worst carnage of the nineteenth century
are the points of moment.
Ashworth's attempt to create a strong materialist
explanation rests, to a large extent, on his rejection of
the notion that class consciousness is a necessary
component of the existence of classes and class conflict. Thompson's view was that classes exist when
people with common experiences recognize their commonality and express that recognition in relation to
others who do not share the experiences. Ashworth's
thesis is that consciousness of shared experience is not
essential for the existence of class conflict. A crucial
analytical concept that remains is exploitation: G. E.
M. de Ste. Croix, the historian of ancient slavery,
developed a similar view. Class, for Ashworth, is
defined in terms of the relationships "between two
groups at the point of production, where one group is
seeking to appropriate to itself some or aJl of the labor
of the other" (p. 13).
His rejection of the notion that consciousness is
imperative to an understanding of class and class
conflict also involves rejecting a Gramscian perception
of hegemony, a perception a scholar like Genovese
relies on. Among the conclusions Ashworth rejects is
that the quest for domination by slaveowners required
the conscious acceptance of the worthiness of a slave-
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1997