Canada and the United States
Calvinists, should impress readers regardless of discipline. But even without the numerous minor errors, or
a warning that Philadelphia's "Native American" Party
in the 1840s did not speak for the American Indians (p.
61), it is clear that Smith is writing for those more
familiar with political theory than with the historical
period under review.
Her central concern is to show the evolution of what
were considered proper ways of conducting polities in
a democracy. Part one, "Mob Action," deals with the
way in which popular rioting was no longer seen as
legitimate, once actual "democracy" was established in
1789. Part two, "Public Debate," traces the intellectual
strengths and weaknesses of the "Neoclassical" and
"Enlightenment" models of oratory and debate. Part
three, "Narrative Testimony," suggests the meansnotably the narratives of ex-slaven—by which the abolitionists appealed not to reason but to moral sympathies.
There are apparent omissions. Smith may explain
the absence of voices from the South, or from vigilantes, by noting that her account is largely confined to
the perceptions of literate urban northeasterners, especially in Philadelphia. More puzzling, in a long
account of several ways abolitionists might have explained how we apprehend moral truths, is the Jack of
any mention of the Quaker doctrine of the "inner
light," which was surely familiar to many of them. But
the more important problem is not with the content of
her arguments but with whether anyone at the time
actually cared, or was listening.
Smith routinely ignores her own caveat about literate northeasterners, violating all the rules of modern
social history by claiming that whole categories,
"Americans" or "antebellum Americans," variously
"believed" or "understood" a number of points on
which, by definition, Americans actually disagreed
powerfully (if indeed they were aware of them at all).
Most fundamentally, that is, a historian would like to
see fust who, or how many, real historical figures
actually agonized over the issues that, with enormous
subtlety, Smith discusses. Medieval scholastics debated
with each other, as do modern political theorists, but it
is less clear that some actual subset of "antebellum
Americans" ever shared her unease with the fact that,
for example, in the "Neoclassical model," an oration
delivered by a figure of known probity has no more
intellectual substance than one delivered by a scoundrel. Did Theodore Weld really need the theoretical
justifications Smith supplies (a discussion of the several definitions of the word "sympathy" goes on for
pages) for publishing ex-slave narratives, with their
appeal to emotion rather than logic? Contemporary
protesters against, say, the World Trade Organization
may welcome intellectual support and would doubtless
appreciate comparison with the abolitionists. But any
similarities they might imagine, however vague, would
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1357
stilt be simpler, sturdier, and more visceral than the
ones that this book attempts to sketch.
ROGER LANE
Haverford College
LEONARD L. RICHARDS. The Slave Power: The Free
North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. Pp. x,
228. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95.
In this book, Leonard L. Richards attempts to revive
the so-called Slave Power thesis, an idea most famously articulated in the 1850s by abolitionists, Free
Soilers, and Republicans. In short, the Slave Power
thesis held that slaveholders dominated national politics and used their control to promote the interests of
the peculiar institution. Richards believes that twentieth-century historians have been too quick to reject
the notion of an aggressive slave power, dismissing it as
the manifestation of a "paranoid style" in American
polities (p. 18).
Richards devotes much of his first chapter to historical debate on the Slave Power theory, a discussion
initiated by the scholar Chauncey S. Boucher in the
1920s. Richards believes the Slave Power thesis to be
more complex than its critics have conceded, and he
therefore sets out to clearly define the problem. He
argues that Republicans such as William H. Seward
and Abraham Lincoln best made the case for the Slave
Power thesis in the 1850s. In agreeing with Lincoln and
Seward that the slaveholders exercised disproportionate infiuence in national polities, Richards suggests
that southern political dominance rested on several
elements, including the three-fifths compromise, sectional balance in the Senate, southern power to sway
national party caucuses, and political patronage.
After defending the Republican interpretation of
the Slave Power, the author pursues a two-fold agenda.
First, Richards seeks to demonstrate that southern
domination of national polities was a real phenomenon
and to trace its origins and changing manifestations
over time. Second, he portrays the origins and evolution of the Slave Power as a theory, examining the
growing northern belief that slaveholders wielded disproportionate power in the political system from the
ratification of the Constitution until the Buchanan
administration.
According to Richards, the Missouri Compromise
brought northern anger at southern political power to
the forefront, yet Missouri was admitted as a slave
state when fourteen northerners voted with the South
on the Missouri bill. An examination of such northern
supporters of the South, or doughfaces, marks the
distinctive contribution of this book. Richards examines the way that doughface votes in Congress affected
the southern legislative agenda on measures such as
the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the annexation of
Texas, the gag rule controversy, and the Wilmot
Proviso.
Richards argues that doughfaces were more likely to
OCTOBER 2001
1358
Reviews of Books
be Jeffersonian Republicans than Federalists, and
were much more likely to be Democrats than Whigs.
He traces the evolution of Martin Van Buren and his
followers from doughfaces to Free Soilers, bringing
many Democrats to lambast the Slave Power by the
1840s. By 1848, Richards argues, the doughface phenomenon was largely limited to Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, and the West. During the Pierce administration, Stephen A. Douglas emerged as the leader of
congressional doughfaces, and Richards examines the
demise of the northern wing of Jacksonianism in the
wake of Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act. Richards
shows that, by the 1850s, the number of northern
friends of the South had declined spectacularly.
By emphasizing the crucial role played by northern
doughfaces as swing voters, Richards's book highlights
the tenuous nature of the proslavery coalition in
Congress in the antebellum years. Tables and maps
illustrating the breakdown of closely fought Congressional votes help provide a composite portrait of the
doughfaces, a group that too often has been defined by
the careers of a few highly visible leaders. Richards
effectively makes the case that the doughfaces were
crucial to maintaining the domination of a Slave
Power, and this book will long remain an indispensable
source on the topic of northern support for slavery.
Richards's book leaves the reader wanting to know
more about how southern politicians worked to influence their northern allies. Research in the manuscripts
of southern politicians might have illuminated the
negotiations and deals surrounding Congressional
votes on key sectional issues examined by Richards
and helped to strengthen his case for southern control
of national polities. Moreover, the work would have
benefited from additional attention to the ideological
underpinnings of the Slave Power thesis. Greater
detail on political culture and the evolution of political
attitudes toward the South would more fully explain
the rise and fall of the proslavery coalition in Congress.
Stil!, Richards offers an effective examination of
northern polities in regard to the slavery issue, and he
convincingly defends the Slave Power thesis. His painstaking examination of key votes and deft portraits of
political jockeying among northern Democrats add a
valuable new dimension to our understanding of the
polities of slavery.
WALLACE HETTLE
University of Northern Iowa
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER. A Covenant with Color: Race
and Social Power in Brooklyn. (The Columbia History
of Urban Life.) New York: Columbia University Press.
2000. Pp. xii, 325. $35.00.
Craig Steven Wilder's book joins a number of superb
and ambitious recent works that explore the intersection of working class studies and urban history. Studies
by Tera W. Hunter, John K. W. Tchen, Kimberley L.
Phillips, Leslie M. Harris, and Sundiata Cha-Jua, for
example, move over many decades and place commu-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
nities of color in relationship to white elites, to white
workers, to the state, and to regional, national, and
sometimes international economies. These works
promise to transform social history. Even• in such
impressive company, however, Wilder's stylish and
inventive book stands out.
Wilder studies Brooklyn, the city in which he grew
up, in a way that illuminates the continuing burdens of
racism over an astonishing 350-year sweep, even as it
decisively demonstrates changes in the forms white
supremacy took. His ten chapters are both chronological and thematic but the chronologies overlap fascinatingly. Thus, for example, a chapter on the commercial revolution covers the 1797 to 1876 period and is
followed by one on Irish-American/African-American
relations from 1800 to 1865. This structure bespeaks
the author's close attention to change over time and
also to multiple processes.
Drawing on Barbara J. Fields's important work, the
book regards race as an ideology and consistently ties
racism to power. Although sometimes schematic, the
emphasis on "greed" rather than "hate" (p. 12) as the
driving force in white domination provides excellent
glue for the early chapters on race and social power
and on "Little Masters." The latter chapter excels at
showing how tightly interwoven slavery was in the
development of Brooklyn, onder both Dutch and
British colonialisms, despite small units of familybased production. Refusing to see "intimacy" as preeluding "brutality" (p. 30), Wilder also provides fine
accounts of African-American resistance to slavery.
The sections on the opposition of Brooklyn masters to
emancipation, and on the city's ties to trade in southern-grown "Queen Sugar," show how proslavery polities survived slavery in New York. Material on banking
and slaveholding complements and extends Ronald W.
Bailey's fine work on slavery and northern capital.
As Brooklyn grew industrially and commercially, it
went from being almost one third African American in
1800 to two percent in 1850. In considering these
years, Wilder shows how incorporation of white workers, and especially Irish immigrant workers, created a
narrow white class consciousness in Brooklyn. His
portraits of the heroism of black abolitionists, the
isolation of white abolitionists, and the workings of
white polities present well-known figures (such as
Henry Ward Beecher and Walt Whitman) in wholly
new ways and introduce the reader to figures who
ought to be well known (William J. Wilson, who wrote
as "Ethiop," for example).
Emancipation nationally left the cross-class "legacy
of mastery" alive in Brooklyn, according to Wilder.
Post-Civil War exclusions prevented full citizenship,
generated North-of-Dixie Jim Crow, and, above all,
precluded the development of an "ordinary black
working class" in Brooklyn. Wilder dissects the impact
of blacks being excluded from skilled work in the Navy
Yard, from building trades jobs, from better-paying
municipal jobs—indeed, according to a 1985 study,
from 130 of 193 industries in New York City's private
OCTOBER 2001