Contemporary Authors

• The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1987
• Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900 Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1998
• Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2003
• Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2007
• The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LN), 2015

1. Securing the fruits of labor : the American concept of wealth distribution, 1765-1900 LCCN 2014039723 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title Securing the fruits of labor : the American concept of wealth distribution, 1765-1900 / James L. Huston ; with a new preface by the author. Edition Louisiana paperback edition. Published/Produced Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Description xxiv, 482 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780807160459 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLS2016 034565 CALL NUMBER HC110.I5 H87 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 2. The British gentry, the Southern planter, and the Northern family farmer : agriculture and sectional antagonism in North America LCCN 2014033732 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title The British gentry, the Southern planter, and the Northern family farmer : agriculture and sectional antagonism in North America / James L. Huston. Published/Produced Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2015] Description xviii, 245 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780807159187 (cloth : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 151486 CALL NUMBER HD1761 .H87 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 LCCN 2007034288 Type of material Book Personal name Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Main title The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 / edited by Robert W. Johannsen ; foreword to the anniversary edition by James L. Huston. Edition 150th anniversary ed., Special commemorative ed. Published/Created New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. Description xxxviii, 329 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780195339420 (alk. paper) 0195339428 (alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0725/2007034288.html Shelf Location FLS2015 025166 CALL NUMBER E457.4 .L7726 2008 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) CALL NUMBER E457.4 .L7726 2008 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Stephen A. Douglas and the dilemmas of democratic equality LCCN 2006012899 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title Stephen A. Douglas and the dilemmas of democratic equality / James L. Huston. Published/Created Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, c2007. Description xi, 221 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0742534561 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780742534568 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0612/2006012899.html Shelf Location FLM2015 037858 CALL NUMBER E415.9.D73 H87 2007 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 037879 CALL NUMBER E415.9.D73 H87 2007 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 5. Calculating the value of the Union : slavery, property rights, and the economic origins of the Civil War LCCN 2003008363 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title Calculating the value of the Union : slavery, property rights, and the economic origins of the Civil War / James L. Huston. Published/Created Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2003. Description xvii, 394 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0807828041 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/unc041/2003008363.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip042/2003008363.html Shelf Location FLM2015 024310 CALL NUMBER E441 .H895 2003 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 035091 CALL NUMBER E441 .H895 2003 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 6. Securing the fruits of labor : the American concept of wealth distribution, 1765-1900 LCCN 97044939 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title Securing the fruits of labor : the American concept of wealth distribution, 1765-1900 / James L. Huston. Published/Created Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1998. Description xxiv, 482 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0807122068 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0b2o6-aa CALL NUMBER HC110.I5 H87 1998 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HC110.I5 H87 1998 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 7. The panic of 1857 and the coming of the Civil War LCCN 87002705 Type of material Book Personal name Huston, James L., 1947- Main title The panic of 1857 and the coming of the Civil War / James L. Huston. Published/Created Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1987. Description xviii, 315 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0807113689 CALL NUMBER HB3717 1857 .H87 1987 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER HB3717 1857 .H87 1987 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• James L. Houston C.V. - https://history.okstate.edu/images/CV/Houston%20vita%202015%20Aug.pdf

  7
  of 8
  1CURRICULUMVITAEofJames L. Houston PERSONALDATAAddress: 1107SkylineDrive,Stillwater,Oklahoma 74075Phone: (405)372-4166 Office:(405)744-8187 email:James.Huston@okstate.eduBirth: October5,1947,Canton,IllinoisMarried: KathyJaneSimmons,June28,1980Children: NoneEDUCATIONB.A.,DenisonUniversity(Granville,Ohio),1969(History) A.M., UniversityofIllinois,1974(History)Ph.D., UniversityofIllinois,1980(History)Dissertation:"ThePanicof1857andtheComingoftheCivilWar" Director: RobertW.JohannsenTEACHINGEXPERIENCE1975-1978 TeachingAssistant,UniversityofIllinois1980-1983VisitingAssistantProfessorofHistory,OklahomaStateUniversity.1983-1987AssistantProfessorofHistory,OklahomaStateUniversity.1988PromotedtoAssociateProfessorofHistory.1989-Taughtgraduatereadingsseminars(nineteenth2006PromotedtoRegentsProfessor2010AwardedRegentsDistinguishedResearchAwardAREASOFTEACHINGCOMPETENCE1.SurveyofAmericanHistory2.CivilWarandReconstruction3.AmericanEconomicHistory
  2RESEARCHINTERESTSa.Civil WarandReconstructionb.Americanpoliticalhistoryc.Americaneconomichistory, nineteenthcenturyPUBLICADDRESSES"PropertyRightsandSouthernSecession." AddressgivenattheUniversityofTulsa, January23,1998."PropertyRightsandtheComingoftheCivilWar." PaperpresentedtotheGeographyClub,March30,1998,OklahomaStateUniversity."DistributionTheories:TheNineteenthCenturyvs.TheTwentieth." AddressgiventotheDepartmentofEconomicsandLegalStudiesin BusinessWorkshop,September18,1998,OklahomaStateUniversity.''WhytheUnionHadtobePreserved." AddressgiventotheStillwaterDaughtersoftheUnion,February9,1999."DistributionTheoryWithandWithoutEquality:TheNineteenthCenturyvs.TheTwentieth." AnnualDeSantisLecture,Universityof NotreDame,March15,1999."AWholeLotofOutlining." AddressgiventoStillwaterArtsandHumanitiesWriters"SouthernCalculationandNorthernEmotions:HowtheWarCame." PapergivenattheLibraryofCongressCivilWarSymposium,November13,2002.InvitedforinformalpresentationattheCivilWarseminarofPro£GaryW.Gallagher, Universityof Virignia, March24,2004.InvitedtoEastCentralUniversity,Ada,Oklahoma,Colloquium,aspartoftheCenterfor theAdvancementofAmericanHistoryInstruction,January11-12,2005. Gave address,"TheEconomicPowerofSlaveryandAmerican SectionalConflict,"and "StrategiesforTeachingEconomicHistoryintheSchools."InvitedbytheHistoryDepartment,UniversityofCalgary,Canada,togive twopapers, Apri18,9,2005. Thepaperswere:"CalculatingtheValueoftheUnion: RethinkingtheAmericanCivilWar,"and"The2004ElectionsandU.S.Political History."
  3Presentedanaddress,"Labor's Fate,Labor'sFuture,"attheannualstateconventionof theOklahomaAssociationof LetterCarriers,BestWesternMotel,Stillwater,OK, onApril23,2005.PresentedanKeynotespeaker,StephenA.DouglasSymposium:FromQuincytoCongress. ''Winning theBattlesWhileLosingtheWar:StephenA.Douglas'sReputationin History." QuincyLincoln BicentennialCommission,QuincyUniversity,April19, 2008.PresentingaddressattheCivilWarSesquicentennialCotn1nemoration,TulsaCommunity College, Tulsa,OK,April,2010. "TheEconomicDifferencesBetweenNorth andSouth:WhereDoTheyLie?"Presentedfivelecturesinconnectionwith"TheMeaningoftheCivilWar,"aclassoffive sessionsofferedby theOklahomaHumanitiesCouncil,Fal12012.Presented talk on “The Abolitionists” general session of “Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle,” at the Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, OK, June 19, 2014.PUBLICATIONSArticles:"TheThreatofRadicalism:Seward'sCandidacyandtheRhodeIslandGubernatorialElectionof1860." RhodeIslandHistory,41(August,1982),86-99."FacinganAngryLabor: TheAmericanPublicInterpretstheShoemakers'Strike of1860."CivilWarHistory,28(September,1982),197-212."ThePanic of1857,SouthernEconomicThought,andthePatriarchalDefenseofSlavery." Historian,46(February,1984),163-186."WesternGrainsandthePanicof1857." AgriculturalHistory,57(January,1983),14-32."AbolitionistsandanErrantEconomy: ThePanic of1857andAbolitionistEconomicIdeas." Mid-America,65(1983),15-27."APoliticalResponsetoIndustrialism:TheRepublicanEmbraceofProtectionist
  4LaborDoctrines." JournalofAmericanHistory,70(June,1983),35-57."TheDemiseofthePennsylvaniaAmerican Party,1854-1858." PennsylvaniaMagazine ofHistoryandBiography,109(October,1985),473-497."EconomicChangeandPoliticalRealignmentinAntebellumPennsylvania." PennsylvaniaMagazineof HistoryandBiography,113(July,1989),347-395."TheExperientialBasisoftheNorthernAntislaveryImpulse." JournalofSouthernHistory,56(November,1990),609-640."ContinuitiesinSupportforKoreanPoliticalParties:AnEcologicalAnalysis1981-1985." WithRobertDarcy;Hyun,Chong-Min;andI

• Oklahoma State University - https://history.okstate.edu/people-category/faculty-category/42-huston-james-l

  Huston, James L.

  hustonJames L. Huston
  Ph.D., University of Illinois

  Address 152 Murray (south)
  Email james.huston@okstate.edu

  Fall 2016 Office Hours: MWF 3:40-4:40

  Fields
  Civil War and Reconstruction; Labor; Civil War and Reconstruction; American political history; American economic history; nineteenth century

  I earned a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1980, and have been at Oklahoma State since. During that time I have published approximately thirty-five articles and five books. I am now working on a book on the American-British dialogue of equality and inequality and am preparing to submit it to LSU Press; I will be doing an article on secession for Frank Towers for an edited book of essays he is preparing, and my article in Civil War History in regard to Lincoln’s decision for war should be coming out in 2016. This year I finish my work on the Watson-Brown Committee to select the best book in Civil War History (Society of Civil War Historians).

  Courses Taught

  HIST 1103 – Survey of American History
  HIST 3653 – Civil War and Reconstruction
  HIST 3773 – The Old South
  HIST 4513 / ECON 3823 – Economic History of the United States
  HIST 5120 – Reading Seminar in United States History: 19th Century
  HIST 5220 – Research Seminar in United States History: 19th Century

• LSU Press - http://lsupress.org/authors/detail/james-l-huston/

  James L. Huston

  James L. Huston, professor of history at Oklahoma State University, is the author several books on the political and economic history of nineteenth-century America, including The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America.

Quote:
central proposition is simply stated. The sectional conflict that led to the Civil War stemmed from Northern farmers' fear that the plantation system threatened to spread into lands they considered theirs
the central case of this study remains compelling.
The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America
Daniel Kilbride
The Historian. 79.1 (Spring 2017): p125.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Listen
Full Text:
The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 345. $47.50.)

There is a lot going on in this book, but its central proposition is simply stated. The sectional conflict that led to the Civil War stemmed from Northern farmers' fear that the plantation system threatened to spread into lands they considered theirs: not only the territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War but the Northern heartland itself. This seems simple enough, but that proposition rests on an elaborate foundation. Northern farmers' fear was rooted in an awareness of the insatiable hunger for land on the part of slaveholders, one that inevitably forced family farmers into poverty, marginality, or emigration. And that awareness, in turn, came from Northerners' knowledge about British agriculture, in which agricultural workers labored under tenants who managed the great estates of the landed aristocracy. Those workers constituted a closely supervised, morally degraded, and utterly ignorant rural proletariat--slaves in all but name. Northern farmers saw that as their future if the plantation system was allowed to spread across the continental United States. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed to make that once-unthinkable potentiality into a real possibility, they jettisoned their allegiance to the Democratic Party and created another whose central principle was opposition to the expansion of the plantation system. And the war came.

James Huston's argument rests on a simple but crucial observation. The antebellum North was an overwhelmingly rural society, a generation of social historians' attention to market revolutions, urbanization, and industrialization notwithstanding. Huston is absolutely correct about that, and the ramifications for our understanding of Northern culture and society are significant--particularly for grasping the meaning of "free labor," a concept near and dear to the hearts of Northern family farmers. He maintains that this was a concept rooted in the country-village nexus, not in the North's burgeoning cities and factories, where (he says) the inapplicability of the free labor model was already clear.

Here, as he has done elsewhere, Huston downplays ideological causes for the sectional conflict in favor of economic ones. Those who think that the antislavery movement influenced Northern culture will find no comfort in these pages. Huston may be on solid ground here, but in other features his argument seems creaky if not downright anachronistic. His claim that the premodern, anticapitalist interpretation of the Old South still prevails is hard to square with a rash of recent studies by Ed Baptist, Frank Towers, Brian Schoen, Walter Johnson, and many others. He maintains against all evidence that the rural Northern middle class disdained gentility as an aristocratic affectation. And it seems unlikely that slaveholders adopted the plantation in emulation of the British estate; as Philip Curtin showed many years ago, the plantation system emerged from Old World experiments with sugar cultivation and displayed a remarkably consistent structure whether in Brazil, St. Domingue, Jamaica, or the United States.

Yet, despite these flaws, the central case of this study remains compelling. It does not require complex interpretive structures to unravel the causes of Northerners' fear of the slave power. Considering the plantation's unquenchable hunger for land and the insistence of white Southerners on their right to expand slavery into the federal territories, it was all too rational.

Daniel Kilbride

John Carroll University

QUOTE:
The work spans an enormous amount of material, both primary and secondary. This will no doubt contribute to the continuing discussions among historians about the Civil War and its various causes.
The British Gentry, The Southern Planter, and the Northern Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America
Megan Birk
Canadian Journal of History. 51.3 (Winter 2016): p623.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
Listen
Full Text:
The British Gentry, The Southern Planter, and the Northern Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America, by James L. Huston. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2015. xviii, 345pp. $47.50 US (cloth).

James L. Huston provides a social and statistical examination of the role that agricultural systems played in the divisions of the US Civil War. He argues that the differences between small family farms in the North and the massive landholdings of planters in the South provided the genesis of the sectional crisis.

In order to provide a long-range picture of that system, the first section summarizes the English system, where aristocratic land holders lorded over tenants, renters, and farm workers. Their large holdings, Huston argues, were the blueprint for portions of the future United States such as the Hudson River Valley and the South Carolina lowlands, where the headright system and royal grants allowed for the development of massive estates. Clearly, one of the major differences between the English system and the American version was the availability of land for expansion, making it almost impossible for colonial land owners to keep servants, tenants, or renters in place. As such, southerners who acquired vast holdings looked to slave labour as a way to manage and staff their enterprises. However, northern estate-holders opted for tenants and renters, a difference that is not thoroughly explained. The comparisons between impoverished English farm labourers and American slaves imported by force may make some scholars uncomfortable. African slavery is generally best compared to itself, since any labourer, no matter how poor and uneducated, usually got to legally marry, name their children, and avoid the risk of being sold away from family and friends. In other words, while there are valid points of comparison, which Huston does provide, the labour system of Southern planters might be better compared to Barbados or Jamaica than with England.

Moving forward, Huston delves into the ongoing debate about whether or not slavery was efficient or profitable. Historians and economists continue this discussion today, but many of the points relied on here are from older historiography including works by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. In addition, Huston focuses on the North as an agrarian society as opposed to an industrial one. This emphasis is important for readers unfamiliar with the more recent historiography of the antebellum North. The text is complete with statistical information about land holdings in the North and South, in addition to comparisons between slave owners and non-slave owners. The statistics provided also demonstrate the general lack of craftsmen in the South, since much of that work was completed by slaves. This altered the course of southern community building as it lacked the economic diversity found in the North, where farming communities featured more small towns and a more varied labour market.

In returning to the thesis that control of land and the need for access to land became the tipping point between the two regions, Huston provides a lengthy examination of the dialogue regarding free labour. He uses travelogues from Europeans and various statements from Americans to discuss the language associated with land, labour, and conceptualizations of freedom. There are a few brief mentions of how the two dueling American systems compared to that of Canada during the same period. The animosity between the yeoman system of the North and the planter domination of the South revolved around not only access to land--planters needed massive amounts, yeoman did not--it also involved political power and the marginalization of small farmers in the South. No northern farmer would want to be dominated by a planter, having once lived under their own autonomy. Southern planters controlled the political and financial circumstances of their neighbours, and their singular drive toward war, while not emphasized here, is another clear example of their abilities to overpower the majority of farmers in the region. The North, of course, had no such hegemony. The planter domination, and stunting of manufacturing, public education, and town growth, as well as a general lack of neighbourly cooperation make much better comparisons to the English system than does the labour.

Some assertions may strike readers as troublesome. The plantation as a self-sufficient food producing unit is still under scrutiny, and the southern planter did not "invent African slavery" (xi) as is asserted in the introduction. However, the statistical information should be useful for a variety of scholars interested in regional differences and agricultural history. The argument positioning agricultural issues as the focus of the war, as opposed to industrial differences, is on solid footing and supported by other recent works. The work spans an enormous amount of material, both primary and secondary. This will no doubt contribute to the continuing discussions among historians about the Civil War and its various causes.

DOI:10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05

Megan Birk, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

QUOTE:
excellent study
The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America
Adam W. Dean
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p933.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Listen
Full Text:
The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 345. $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-5918-7.)

James L. Huston's most recent work is an excellent study that addresses a similar topic as my own book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2015). Together, both works evidence a historiographical turn emphasizing the importance of the northern family farm in shaping Civil War politics. Huston's witty and iconoclastic writing style, earlier on display in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003) and in a political biography of Stephen A. Douglas, is engaging and refreshing. The argument is convincing, rigorously documented, and overdue in Civil War historiography.

In the last decade, both Huston and I put our fingers on a problem in the study of nineteenth-century America. The explosion of industry and corporate America after the American Civil War had seduced historians to look at the past with this future in mind. Ever since Charles A. and Mary R. Beard advanced the notion, scholars have wanted to believe that the war pitted an agrarian South against an emerging industrial juggernaut. Even the main philosophy associated with the Republican Party of the 1850s--free labor--has been interpreted as an urban ideology. Yet such claims run into some intractable problems. As Huston pointedly notes, "What connection did [Abraham] Lincoln have with urban industrialization? Answer: none" (p. 188). A bigger problem with the Beard thesis and its derivatives is "that some 70 percent of the northern population" was engaged in small farming (p. 77).

The reality of northern landownership suggests a much different picture of Civil War politics than has been told. The Union that went to war in 1861 was a nation of small farmers, owning or seeking to acquire 80 to 120 acres of land. These landownership patterns created an egalitarian ethos that prized manual labor and the ability of the poor to rise in material prosperity. The Confederacy represented large plantations where a "slaveholding elite presid[ed] over an impoverished mass of slaves and whites" (p. 223). These landownership regimes came into conflict during westward territorial expansion, instigating the war.

The origins of Huston's story begin in Great Britain and the English Civil War. New England Puritans, supporters of the parliamentary side, identified land distribution patterns as the key flaw in English society during the seventeenth century. Concentrated landholdings created a leisure class that mocked manual labor and ran roughshod over those deemed inferior in social standing. The English yeomanry struggled to gain freedom from wealthy landlords and from tenancy. Thus, in the colonies, New Englanders enacted land policies that promoted smallholders.

In the American South, however, the landed gentry proved victorious. Huston theorizes that large plantations derived economic advantages over smaller enterprises from "specialization of labor, economies of scale, and [the] ability to allocate labor as needed" (p. 168). Yet he ultimately maintains that planters decided to engage in slave agriculture because they wanted the lifestyle of the British gentry.

By contrast, Huston marvels at the small towns and regional cities of the rural North. Smaller farms required hard work and mutual dependence. Free men and women engaged in "bending, lifting, hoeing, shoveling, mending, and stitching ... all done by hand and with primitive tools" (p. 116). In return for this labor, as Huston shows, farmworkers were able to save their wages and purchase their own land, acquiring economic independence and prosperity. They also lived where they could trade with others for goods not produced on the farm.

Thus, unlike An Agrarian Republic, Huston places the origins of landownership differences squarely on human choice and British customs, not soil or climate. This is an important and needed revision of my work. While Huston would not be so crass as to argue that these differences led directly to war, they did create opposing political ideologies that would clash over slavery. Here, we are in complete agreement. The northern "family farm promoted equality, independence, local community, and self-mastery. The plantation evoked the ideas of inequality, a hierarchical order to society, and mastery over others" (p. 183).

Critics of Huston's book might note, as they have with my own work, that many small farmers were not supporters of Lincoln and the Republicans, but this criticism misses the point of both works. The vast majority of people in the North were farmers. Their physical interaction with the environment and the ethos produced by a rural society created a political ideology powerful enough to resist the slave plantation and all that it stood for.

ADAM W. DEAN

Lynchburg College

Dean, Adam W.

Huston, James L.: The British gentry, the southern planter, and the northern family farmer: agriculture and sectional antagonism in North America
I. Cohen
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.1 (Sept. 2015): p140.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
Huston, James L. The British gentry, the southern planter, and the northern family farmer: agriculture and sectional antagonism in North America. Louisiana State, 2015. 345p bibl index afp ISBN 9780807159187 cloth, $47.50

53-0438

HD1761

MARC

Huston (Oklahoma State Univ.) deals with what used to be called "scientific history." Although the book starts with King John, the discussion actually begins with debates in Cromwell's army between those who favored belief in inequality and those who favored equality. From this English background, a large number of Puritan immigrants settled in the New England colonies. Women and children made up a large portion of the population in what became New England, unlike immigrants to Virginia. New Englanders found the middle colonies similar to their own. The pattern of farming in the North was largely unchanged until the Civil War; however, slavery slowly became an issue in separating the South from the non-South when South Carolina and Georgia forced the authors of the Constitution to allow slaves to enter the country for a 20-year period before the new country could ban the Atlantic slave trade. Americans were unified through at least the aftermath of the War of 1812. But given the demand for cotton and slavery, the southern states became the "South" somewhere in the 1820s. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--I. Cohen, emeritus, Illinois State University

Cohen, I.

QUOTE:
Huston's scholarship is always interesting and provocative and is so here as he explores Douglas's life and reaches beyond him to think about the dilemmas of democratic processes in a pluralist society. This concise and informative work is a welcome addition to the literature about antebellum America,
Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality
Joel H. Silbey
Journal of Southern History. 75.1 (Feb. 2009): p149.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Listen
Full Text:
Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality. By James L. Huston. American Profiles. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2007. Pp. [xii], 221. $41.00, ISBN 978-0-7425-3456-8.)

Stephen A. Douglas's political career, which began brilliantly, ended with him on the wrong side of history. His early successes as an effective partisan leader in Illinois and as a powerful advocate in the national arena for the western brand of Jacksonian democracy ran aground on the rocks of the controversy over slavery's expansion. But for better or worse, James L. Huston argues, Douglas and his northern Democratic colleagues represented and reflected an important part of the American experience in the antebellum years, as the problematic principles of democracy were expanding and settling into the fabric of society. Huston, who has published a number of excellent studies of the economic impulses driving southern and national politics in the 1850s, here "examine[s] the unfolding of the principles of democracy and equality in the United States through the life of one who was at the center of the storm" (p. viii).

Huston retells the main events of Douglas's rise and fall, adding to that narrative an argument about the difficulties of achieving desired goals in a nation where there were persistent conflicts over the nature of society and angry differences about which specific policies were necessary to accomplish one's objectives. Huston's focus is on Douglas and the northern Democrats' perspective: their defining commitment to democracy and equality (for some, to be sure) as embodied, they argued, in Andrew Jackson, their common understanding of the nation's political economy, and their support for Martin Van Buren's notion of strong partisan organizations as the basic engines of democratic politics. These politicians were largely indifferent to the presence of slavery in their society, which was "just another property arrangement," and hostile to those who wanted to make it into a political issue (p. 147). When it became one in the 1840s, Douglas and many of his colleagues rejected the moral imperatives expounded by both northern antislavery advocates and southern extremists as excessive, dangerous, and uncalled for.

As he led his party in seeking to put through their desired policies, most particularly the extensive territorial expansion that, Douglas argued, was necessary to create wealth and expand equality, there were always difficult problems and dilemmas to overcome, what Huston calls "Gordian knots"--for example, squaring economic development and its resulting inequalities with the party's commitment to attaining democratic equality, or how majority rule could prevail when a minority refuses to accept a legitimately reached decision (p. ix). Douglas tried to cut through these barriers to democratic purposes in a fashion consistent with his beliefs, but he ultimately did not prevail, a failure that was the tragic culmination of his life.

Huston's scholarship is always interesting and provocative and is so here as he explores Douglas's life and reaches beyond him to think about the dilemmas of democratic processes in a pluralist society. This concise and informative work is a welcome addition to the literature about antebellum America, both its promises and its discontents, as lived by one of its major political figures.

JOEL H. SILBEY

Cornell University

Silbey, Joel H.

Stephen A. Douglas and the dilemmas of democratic equality
Reference & Research Book News. 22.2 (May 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Listen
Full Text:
9780742534568

Stephen A. Douglas and the dilemmas of democratic equality.

Huston, James L.

Rowman & Littlefield

2007

221 pages

$35.00

Hardcover

American profiles

E415

US politician Douglas (1913-61) came of age during a period when the favoritism that had been the norm of European politics for centuries was being dismantled in favor of egalitarianism. He was a major player in that process, says Huston (history, Oklahoma State U.-Stillwater) so his life serves as a good lens through which to view it.

([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)

QUOTE:
contends that the Civil War was the explosion of an aggressively conducted struggle over the slaveholders' claim that slave ownership was no different than control of other property, and thus no more subject to challenge, question, or restriction than the possession of other things.
for persuasively conveying the eminence of property rights in the drive toward secession and Civil War, and for its engaging literary style, the book is strongly recommended.
Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War
Daniel Rosenberg
The Historian. 67.2 (Summer 2005): p323.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Listen
Full Text:
Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. By James L. Huston. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xvii, 394. $45.00.)

The author of this study contends that the Civil War was the explosion of an aggressively conducted struggle over the slaveholders' claim that slave ownership was no different than control of other property, and thus no more subject to challenge, question, or restriction than the possession of other things. The book demonstrates how the Revolutionary-era assertion that slaves were a valid form of property grew into a demand that slaveholders could bring and treat that property as such anywhere upon the territory of the United States, a reflecting of the crux of American political history: "a fight between democracy and the rights of property" (9).

The book is divided into two sections. The first presents the evidence in support of the author's thesis. The second outlines how the debate produced political realignment in the 1850s. Appendices show that property rights contention periodically produces party reconfiguration over the course of U.S. history.

James L. Huston regards European settlement as an "invasion" with a property fixation. But safeguarding of property facilitated resistance to British taxation and produced a view among many patriots, contrary to contemporary justifications by slaveholders, that property was the justly earned "fruit of labor." When this argument was later expanded against them, slaveholders responded that both common and natural law proved that chattel slaves were legitimate property.

The author shows how racism anchored the property rights assumptions of Southern spokesmen. Secession was the outcome, not of the principles of states rights, Southern "independence," or agrarian resistance to industrial arrogance, but of a "hysterical defense of property rights" and their extension through the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, the promotion of territorial "popular sovereignty" whereby voters might freely decide to shackle others, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Dred Scott decision. Yet growing Northern antagonism to slave labor forced Southern leaders to conclude "that the Union was a heavy drag upon southern prosperity because of the possibility that property rights in slaves would not be enforced" (232).

Huston makes impressive use of his sources, particularly of scores of newspapers. He has wit, writing for example of historians who bend over backwards to show that Southerners "would never have been swayed by anything so crude as money" (58). He terms the oft-cited states rights motive "entirely a bogus application" of the local-federal dichotomy, actually a "by-product of property right" (119). Base assumptions undergirded compromises over slavery's expansion: "Where there's a buck, there's a will and a constitutional way" (147).

Occasionally, Huston generalizes the term "Southerners" without differentiation as to race or class, although also noting that planters monopolized wealth and prestige. He maintains that the "wealth of slavery stitched southern white society together," yet points out that slaveholders were "the potential ruling class of the South," although his book shows their domination as real, not pending (32, 37).

Nevertheless, for persuasively conveying the eminence of property rights in the drive toward secession and Civil War, and for its engaging literary style, the book is strongly recommended.

Daniel Rosenberg

Adelphi University

Rosenberg, Daniel

QUOTE:
One of the great strengths of Calculating the Value of the Union is that Huston contextualizes his property rights framework within a detailed narrative of political history.
There is obviously much to praise here.
Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War
John D. Majewski
Journal of Southern History. 71.1 (Feb. 2005): p160.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Listen
Full Text:
By James L. Huston. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 394. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2804-1.)

Although laid out in nearly four hundred pages of densely argued text, the essential argument of James L. Huston's Calculating the Value of the Union can be summarized in a few sentences. Southern planters, recognizing that slavery was worth billions of dollars to them, demanded a central government firmly committed to protecting property rights in slaves. Many northerners, fearing economic competition from slavery, sought to regulate its expansion--northerners increasingly conceived of human rights as ultimately more important than established property rights. These two visions of property and slavery collided alter the Mexican War and reverberated in the politics of the 1850s to produce the heated sectional conflict that led to the Civil War.

One of the great strengths of Calculating the Value of the Union is that Huston contextualizes his property rights framework within a detailed narrative of political history. The bulk of the book, in fact, is a discussion of party realignment in both the South and North in the late 1840s and 1850s. The analysis is filled with nuance, but Huston rarely loses his focus on elucidating that slaves, in the eyes of white southerners, were above all else extraordinarily valuable property that needed government protection. Huston expertly dissects the political rhetoric to reveal that antebellum Americans primarily put forward differing conceptions of property when debating slavery. Political historians, in particular, will appreciate the lengthy appendixes, which provide important theoretical discussions of why changing conceptions of property rights often lead to political realignments.

There is obviously much to praise here. Both the secondary and primary research--usefully compiled in a bibliography that runs for some forty pages--is extraordinarily thorough. Especially welcome is Huston's use of the often-ignored literature on the economics of slavery. Huston also provides persuasive critiques of other explanations of secession and Civil War. Progressive historians who focus on the tariff and other economic issues divorced from slavery, Huston argues, assume that northerners were "irrational, non-calculating fools" who somehow believed that a small increase in the tariff was more important than the huge southern market that supported northern industrialists, merchants, and shippers (p. 64). Huston similarly dismisses honor and other cultural differences. "Would honor have been so important in promoting southern secession," he rather pointedly asks, "if slaves had not been worth so much money?" (p. 60).

Huston has obviously made an important contribution to the literature on secession, but several key links in his argument are not entirely persuasive. According to Huston, Republicans worried that the transportation revolution would eventually allow southern slaves to compete against northern manufacturers. If slavery was as inefficient and unproductive as free labor proponents so frequently argued, why would northerners worry about potential competition from southern industry? On the other side of the sectional question, it is unclear why southerners interpreted northern actions to restrict the spread of slavery as a full-scale assault on property rights. Slaves were valuable, but did the inability of southerners to take them to California or Kansas materially decrease their value? Increasing slave prices in the 1850s suggest that slaveholders had great confidence that their property was well protected. Indeed, the rather incremental restrictions Republicans threatened to place on slavery seemed insignificant compared to the momentous gamble on successfully seceding from the Union.

If Huston's meticulous research and incisive analysis may not fully explain the pervasive mistrust and tragic miscalculations that characterized both sides of the sectional debate, it nevertheless lays an excellent economic foundation that other scholars will surely build upon.

University of California, Santa Barbara

JOHN D. MAJEWSKI

Majewski, John D.

QUOTE:
Huston has innovatively joined political and economic history to explain a world in which the right to vote seemed to spell economic success for freedmen, and in which laborers' agitation for standard wages seemed to threaten the very core of society. In Securing the Fruits of Labor, Huston has created a picture of the nineteenth century that most nineteenth-century Americans themse lves would have recognized.
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765--1900
Heather Cox Richardson
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 30.3 (Winter 1999): p538.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Listen
Full Text:
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765--1900. By James L. Huston (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1998) 482 pp. $65.00

This interdisciplinary study of American economic thought explains a central aspect of American life from the Revolution to 1900. Until the 1880s, the goal of politics was to preserve what Americans believed was at the heart of their political system, a distribution of wealth that observers incorrectly assumed was remarkably even. Why did nineteenth-century Americans content themselves with political fights when their real concerns were with the economy? Because, Huston explains, "Americans in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth [believed] that economic results were determined by the political system" (xiii). This simple, but heretofore elusive, point brings a whole new perspective to our understanding of the nineteenth century.

Reminding his readers that republicanism depended on "a nearly equal distribution of wealth among the voting citizenry" (xii), Huston maintains that the Revolutionary generation developed a four-part theory of wealth distribution that reflected the peculiar circumstances of Revolutionary America. Its foundation was the belief that wealth would be distributed equitably when all citizens embraced the labor theory of property/value, which dictated that an individual had an absolute right to value created by his own labor. Threatening an equitable distribution were both the political policies of aristocrats, who appropriated the fruits of others' labor, and the laws of primogeniture and entail, which transferred estates to future generations. Finally, Americans believed that population growth would eventually result in economic inequality as a shortage of land forced the nation to turn to manufacturing, with its inevitable extremes of rich and poor. This four-part understanding of the nation's political economy meant that Americans found the roots of economic inequality not in economic systems, but in politics.

Huston argues that this view of wealth distribution remained "nearly unaltered" from 1765, when its four themes were established, to 1880, when the commercial agrarian economy on which they were based disappeared (7). During this "essential era," Americans explored variations and different possibilities within those themes but held tight to their four basic premises. Discussing economic treatises and political speeches with remarkable clarity and a refreshing touch of humor, Huston explains the connection between political economy and political policies--a connection assumed by nineteenth-century Americans but obscure today. He examines the construction and transatlantic discussion of the Revolutionary thesis of wealth distribution, follows the explication of that thesis through antebellum politics, reveals the weakness of dissenters from the thesis, and explores the effect of the theory on white approaches to slaves and freed people. Believing that political machinations upset a natural economic system, Ame ricans relied on "utter laissez-faire" to achieve an even distribution of wealth.

Huston argues that the death knell for this critical "Age of the Revolution" was not the industrialization and rising market economy of the Jacksonian Era; it was the late nineteenth-century change in the nation's economic structure. The Revolutionaries' ideas about wealth distribution depended on a commercial agrarian economy with an expanding land base. When the world of dominant big business overtook the patchwork landscape of many small-scale proprietorships--a change that Huston's statistics indicate to have occurred in the decade from 1880 to 1890--Americans could no longer ignore vast inequalities in wealth. The labor theory of value/property fell before marginal utility theory that emphasized the relativity of value; the threat of aristocracy paled before the threat of corporations. Coming to terms with this fundamental economic change, Americans discarded laissez-faire and called for intervention in the economy to promote an equitable distribution of wealth.

Inevitably, there are openings to quibble with this book. Its exclusion of popular material leaves it vulnerable to suggestions of an elite bias; its traditional concentration on economic ideas will shock some social historians; its reformulation of republican theory will raise some hackles; its insistence that laissez-faire dominated America until the turn of the century will surprise students of state governments; its afterword elucidating Huston's own theory of distribution could lead to a charge that this is a book of philosophy rather than history. Fair enough. But even the strongest criticisms can not outweigh the fact that Huston has innovatively joined political and economic history to explain a world in which the right to vote seemed to spell economic success for freedmen, and in which laborers' agitation for standard wages seemed to threaten the very core of society. In Securing the Fruits of Labor, Huston has created a picture of the nineteenth century that most nineteenth-century Americans themse lves would have recognized.

QUOTE:
Securing the Fruits of Labor goes a long way toward explaining what Americans meant, and didn't mean, in an era in which that sentiment was a rhetorical commonplace of their politics.
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900
Daniel T. Rodgers
Journal of Social History. 33.2 (Winter 1999): p475.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Listen
Full Text:
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900. By James L. Huston (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. xxiv plus 483pp. $65.00).

Nineteenth-century Americans loved to boast that in no country on earth was wealth more broadly and more democratically diffused than in theirs. Into the ear of every passing foreigner they poured their convictions on this point. Americans still believe it, even though there is now no advanced industrialized economy in the late twentieth-century world whose wealth and income distribution is farther away from equality than that of the United States. James Huston's careful reading of nineteenth-century economic convictions goes a long way to unravel the history of that apparent paradox.

Nineteenth-century Americans took it as a point of faith that a widespread diffusion of wealth was indispensable to a lasting republic. At the same time, Huston shows, they rarely imagined that much sustained socio-economic work was necessary to secure it. The linchpin within this system of ideas was the labor theory of wealth. Let every economic actor enjoy the full fruits of his labor and a rough-and-ready economic equality would follow. Only two external forces could seriously derange this natural economy. The first was Malthus' nightmare--a piling up of populations beyond the economic capacities of the land. The second was the manipulation of the economy by men of artificial rank and status employing their privileged access to politics to leach wealth from those who produced it to those who did not. The Americans' answer to the Malthusian specter was Western conquest. It was the second nightmare, the nightmare of artificial economic manipulation, that shook them awake at night and fueled the rhetoric of their politics. That an economy might generate economic inequalities from within was, Huston shows, an idea that most nineteenth-century Americans tenaciously resisted.

It is the virtue of Huston's book to demonstrate how deeply seated these convictions were during the century and a quarter after the Revolution and how much ideological work they did. Pursuing his unit ideas through a very broad range of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, Huston carefully and persuasively pieces together an economic ideology that was rarely systematically enunciated but everywhere present. Like most strong ideas, these held more than one political valence. The labor theory of wealth and the "political economy of aristocracy" were staple themes among both labor radicals and social conservatives, slave holders and slavery's critics. They held the existing arrangements of wealth up to moral and political scrutiny even as they deflected attention away from the everyday processes of economic accumulation that created them.

It is where Huston turns from these sure-footed textual readings to context that disappointments begin to crowd in. Impressed by the stability of his unit ideas, Huston has chosen to frame his story as a narrative of long-term stasis and abrupt transformation whose exaggerations are puzzlingly at odds with the cautious tone of his substantive findings. For a century and a quarter, he writes, the American concept of wealth distribution persisted "without revision or deviation." And then, like the Deacon's one-horse shay, it fell apart utterly and absolutely. Into the 189Os, the axioms of the "Age of the American Revolution" endured; by 1900, they were "dead."

To explain this phenomenon, Huston posits a static economy dominated by small-scale agricultural and skilled craft production that endured, without essential change, from the 176Os into the 1890s, when it was suddenly and irrevocably overrun by large-scale industrial corporations. This reading of economic history in the image of the history of ideas leads to some peculiar distortions. The slave and cotton South falls almost wholly out of focus. Huston's assertion that the era had only one fundamental transformation and that the intensification of market relations cannot count as such seems, after two decades of historical work on the early nineteenth-century economy, a willful simplification. His assertion that the "unskilled worker" was a "person nearly invisible before 1880," will come as a surprise to the labor historians who have chronicled the nineteenth-century economy's army of poorly paid pick-and-shovel canal diggers, field hands, track layers, navvies, and general laborers.

Huston's notion of extraordinary immobility and catastrophic transformation does not serve his intellectual history better. For all their talk of the just and natural rewards of labor, nineteenth-century Americans also knew the market theory of wages, and they were quick to act upon it when it suited them. The public language of twentieth-century economics, by the same token, hardly shed all its moral convictions with regard to the distribution of wealth, as the deeply contested fights over minimum wage legislation and graduated taxation, among others, attest. Huston's simple correspondence theory of the relationship between society and ideas--in which deep economic structures and unit convictions move with the synchrony of a practiced ballroom dance pair--seems a throwback to a distant era in the sociology of ideas.

Readers who push their way past Huston's framing devices, however, will find the effort rewarded. "A general and tolerably equal distribution of... property is the whole basis of national freedom," Noah Webster declared in 1787. Securing the Fruits of Labor goes a long way toward explaining what Americans meant, and didn't mean, in an era in which that sentiment was a rhetorical commonplace of their politics.

QUOTE:
Huston demonstrates an incredible grasp of the relevant literature and an ability to distill it into an almost always readable form. His descriptions and analysis of the political, economic, social, and cultural threads that tied together into the American concept of wealth distribution are impressive. The result is a work of economic, intellectual, political, and social history that demands the attention of historians.
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900
Michael S. Green
Business History Review. 73.2 (Summer 1999): p275.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Business History Review
Listen
Full Text:
By James L. Huston * Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. 576 pp. Appendices, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $65.00. ISBN 0807122068.

Reviewed by Michael S. Green

As Mark Twain might have said about this subject, everybody talks about the distribution of wealth, but nobody does anything about it. When historians, contemporary critics, politicians, and economic theorists analyze taxes, poverty, and their relation to politics and society, they are actually dealing, often without specifically saying so, with this issue. Thus, a vast body of primary sources and secondary literature has been explicitly and implicitly devoted to the distribution of wealth in the United States. James L. Huston has mined this material, sifted it, analyzed it, and brought it together in a study of great value not only to specialists in business and economic history, but to all American historians.

Summarizing such a wide-ranging and important study may be even more daunting than it must have been to research and write it. "Declarations by all types of Americans from the Revolution to the Civil War indicated a fervent belief that the United States required - and indeed had obtained - an egalitarian distribution of wealth, but the declarations were marked by an absence of a delineation of principles of wealth distribution," Huston writes (p. xii). At the heart of this belief lay the principles of the American Revolution and the fears that the colonies would grow to resemble Europe, with its aristocracy and its wide gulf between rich and poor. According to Huston, "The heart of the specific interpretation is that during the Revolution public leaders had created four axioms that then became the American understanding of the distribution of wealth" (p. xiv). These were a commitment to workers receiving the proper fruits of their labors; opposition to aristocrats using their political power to deprive laborers of those fruits; a belief that inheritance laws enabled landowners to keep their holdings, thereby depriving others of access to that land; and a fear that population growth would, in turn, limit the availability of that land, maldistributing wealth even more.

Huston emphasizes the generation of the American Revolution, arguing cogently and convincingly that its members set the tone for this debate, as they did for virtually every public debate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and made clear their commitment to this cause. His argument is strengthened by the number of actors he quotes and analyzes.

Securing the Fruits of Labor also examines the distribution of wealth as it relates to the rise and fall of political parties, the labor movement, and the anti-slavery movement and abolitionism. In his last chapter, "The Foundation Cracks, 1880-1920," Huston observes, "And then the world suddenly and irrevocably changed" (p. 344). In the 1880s and 1890s, observers from James Bryce to Henry George found that, if anything, the term "maldistribution of wealth" barely scratched the surface of the problem: the haves and the have-nots became increasingly separated. Huston attributes this change to the large-scale corporate growth that historians traditionally have associated with the Gilded Age. To Huston, this had several important meanings, two of which seem especially striking. First, as he writes, "The republican theory of the distribution of wealth belonged to the agrarian republic, and the agrarian republic was no more" (p. 378). Secondly, the United States had become what its founders feared most: European in its economics.

No book is perfect, and Huston's work has definite flaws, some of his own making, some probably impossible to avoid. "Even the Civil War inaugurated nothing new; it was fought, by both North and South, explicitly on the principles of 1776 and produced no new institutions (with the exception of the Freedmen's Bureau) and no new ideas. The Civil War was not a 'second' American Revolution as much as a completion of the first American Revolution," he writes (pp. 149-50). Later, he notes, "The Civil War witnessed the greatest assault on the doctrine of property fights ever conducted in the United States" (p. 327). While this may not necessarily be a contradiction, he never develops in sufficient depth what seems like the logical next step: the war and its demands did much to create the corporations that devastated the agrarian ideal and its concomitant, the equitable distribution of wealth. Indeed, Huston's treatment of what happened to the concept of wealth distribution late in the nineteenth century seems almost cursory in comparison with his study of its creation, and cries out for further examination. His afterword succeeds in its goal of briefly summarizing what happened to this idea in the twentieth century, but leaves the reader hungering for more.

Huston demonstrates an incredible grasp of the relevant literature and an ability to distill it into an almost always readable form. His descriptions and analysis of the political, economic, social, and cultural threads that tied together into the American concept of wealth distribution are impressive. The result is a work of economic, intellectual, political, and social history that demands the attention of historians. Ideally, Huston will provide a follow-up volume.

Michael S. Green is professor of history at the Community College of Southern Nevada. He is completing his Ph.D. in American history, on the Republican party's ideology during the Civil War, at Columbia University. He is a contributor to The North's Civil War, a volume pending from Fordham University Press, and the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles on politics and journalism in Nevada.

QUOTE:
This graceful book provides a new account of electoral politics from 1857 to 1860, but the narrative provides little support to the book's central thesis.
The argument is made clearly and continuously. But the Panic of 1857 fails to move into center stage for a variety of reasons.The book is well documented and well written. Huston provides a vivid picture of the contemporary political debate.
The book provides a good context for studies of the 1850s.
The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War
Peter Temin
Business History Review. 62.4 (Winter 1988): p704.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1988 Business History Review
Listen
Full Text:
The Panic of 185 7 and the Coming of the Civil War. By james L. Huston. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. xviii + 315 pp. Tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50.

Reviewed by Peter Temin

This graceful book provides a new account of electoral politics from 1857 to 1860, but the narrative provides little support to the book's central thesis.

James Huston takes an unusual approach to the Panic of 1857. Rather than regarding it as an economic event, he examines the political role that it played on the eve of the Civil War. More specifically, he tries to draw a causal connection between the Panic of 1857 and Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860.

The argument is made clearly and continuously. Huston typically introduces a new topic with a reference to the panic. The chapter on the 1860 election, for example, opens this way: "The Panic of 1857 shaped the presidential campaign of 1860 in a number of ways" (p. 231). The succeeding discussion elevates the panic and economic offering to an important role in the political discussion. But the Panic of 1857 fails to move into center stage for a variety of reasons.

First, Huston often has difficulty in finding clear tracks of the panic in economic discussion. He has to fall back on statements like this one: "Thus in the aftermath of the Panic of 1857 protectionist theorists reiterated their claim that competition with foreign nations should be banned by a tariff if it resulted in the degradation of the American worker" (p. 106). it is true and important that economics was a vital part of political discourse, but the evidence that the panic sharply altered this discussion is weak.

Second, the party lines of the late 1850s were not primarily economic. Huston shows that the Democratic party had a consistent view of the panic, whereas the Republican party, did not. Abolition, not economics, was the glue that held the Republicans together. Huston's detailed account of the 1860 campaign in Pennsylvania-which he regards as the pivot on which the national election turned-shows the importance of economic issues like the tariff, but not of the panic itself.

Third, Huston accepts the view that slavery, not economics, was the cause of the Civil War. This stance severely limits the role of the Panic of 1857 in causing the conflict. The view itself does not seem to grow out of Huston's narrative as much as it was imposed on it. (See the footnote on p. 261.) The question of slavery in Kansas receives as much attention as the panic in Huston's account.

The book is well documented and well written. Huston provides a vivid picture of the contemporary political debate. His chapter (4) on economic thought is particularly interesting: Huston gives a thorough account of the pro-tariff position and of Henry Carey's views. Carey opposed David Ricardo's view of English agriculture, which emphasized diminishing returns, with an American view of unlimited land that improved as one moved West. Carey was concerned with distribution in an economy of plenty rather than with efficiency in an economy of scarcity Huston makes a case for renewed attention to Carey's works.

The book provides a good context for studies of the 1850s. Since it does not discuss individual firms, its interest for business historians is limited. But the book is a good account of the politics in this period and of the sources from which to learn more. Peter Temin is professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written on the connection between economics and politics in business cycles in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His latest book is Lessons from the Great Depression 9989).

Kilbride, Daniel. "The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America." The Historian, vol. 79, no. 1, 2017, p. 125+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490718209&it=r&asid=3207331d569613247e5f14341c30012b. Accessed 9 July 2017. Birk, Megan. "The British Gentry, The Southern Planter, and the Northern Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America." Canadian Journal of History, vol. 51, no. 3, 2016, p. 623+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477085853&it=r&asid=2c1e6467f6a2ea8fdc63585f5cadb244. Accessed 9 July 2017. Dean, Adam W. "The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 933+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867690&it=r&asid=b2256e6d324615d13d77cc6f879c6a9f. Accessed 9 July 2017. Cohen, I. "Huston, James L.: The British gentry, the southern planter, and the northern family farmer: agriculture and sectional antagonism in North America." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Sept. 2015, p. 140. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA428875039&it=r&asid=9056a1d78f19a8818213d54b8c14cdc2. Accessed 9 July 2017. Silbey, Joel H. "Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality." Journal of Southern History, vol. 75, no. 1, 2009, p. 149+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA194278494&it=r&asid=2af2f1118c4be608b52dd9b6849ef268. Accessed 9 July 2017. "Stephen A. Douglas and the dilemmas of democratic equality." Reference & Research Book News, May 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA162864548&it=r&asid=3e5d31ebfe697e3f81d10e2ba53de50c. Accessed 9 July 2017. Rosenberg, Daniel. "Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War." The Historian, vol. 67, no. 2, 2005, p. 323+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA135466426&it=r&asid=8c94c2da7874cf5018a3be2141b657e5. Accessed 9 July 2017. Majewski, John D. "Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War." Journal of Southern History, vol. 71, no. 1, 2005, p. 160+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA129014350&it=r&asid=7ed70780e8e258744851107dcbb103fd. Accessed 9 July 2017. Richardson, Heather Cox. "Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765--1900." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, p. 538. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA59280381&it=r&asid=7344fe6f32798c5f2e953705d7b2d93a. Accessed 9 July 2017. Rodgers, Daniel T. "Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900." Journal of Social History, vol. 33, no. 2, 1999, p. 475. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA58675459&it=r&asid=5ee43719b70e368ad9816851721df1d0. Accessed 9 July 2017. Green, Michael S. "Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900." Business History Review, vol. 73, no. 2, 1999, p. 275+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA55834345&it=r&asid=790896e06708fae8f9ffd49bc4b05344. Accessed 9 July 2017. Temin, Peter. "The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War." Business History Review, vol. 62, no. 4, 1988, p. 704+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA8190585&it=r&asid=97d567d1f32abf16181032bcc7515f5f. Accessed 9 July 2017.

• Civil War Book Review
  http://www.cwbr.com/civilwarbookreview/index.php?q=3158&field=ID&browse=yes&record=full&searching=yes
  Word count: 1672

  Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War

  by Huston, James L.
  Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
  Retail Price: $45.00
  Issue: Winter 2005
  ISBN: 0807828041
  Capital cause

  Economics spurred the Civil War

  After publishing two important studies on 19th century economic history--one on the Panic of 1857 and its contribution to the coming of the Civil War and the other on the distribution of wealth in America from 1765 to 1900--James L. Huston has now completed an investigation into the causes of the Civil War. And his conclusion, not surprisingly, is that its origins were economic. Economic explanations of the American Civil War have come and gone over the years, but the author claims the underlying cause that he considers critical has been overlooked by most, if not all, historians. A claim of this magnitude is bound to get the pulses of Civil War historians racing. So what is Huston's insight?

  After an opening chapter on the role of slavery in the American Revolution and in the deliberations of the constitution-makers at the Founding in 1787, Professor Huston lays out his argument in chapter two, entitled The Origins of Southern Aggressiveness. At the heart of the conflict between the two sections, he argues, was the immensely valuable property that slaveowners held in the form of their human chattel. After examining the 1860 census, the author calculates that the wealth tied up in slaves was greater than that in railroads and manufacturing combined. Totaling about $3 billion, slave property constituted 18.75% of national wealth. And, of course, its owners would try desperately to hold onto it. Indeed, the slaveholders would have had no alternative but to conform to what Huston terms on page 65 the oldest social law that virtually all political philosophers have underlined: many men will kill other men to keep their property or extend [expand?] it. After answering absolutely not to the question of whether the slaveowners would have seceded if their slaves were valued at only $300 million, rather than $3 billion, Professor Huston concludes the chapter on page 66 with the bold assertion that At the root of the controversy over slavery was the wealth invested in slavery. Remove the wealth, and the controversy, like a Cheshire cat, fades away with a knowing grin.

  There are a couple of problems with these claims. First, the author seems to be suggesting that the slaveowners would have obeyed the oldest social law about killing to protect one's property only if the value had been very great, that is, a good deal more than $300 million, even though the latter number is hardly chicken-feed. So is there a cut-off point at which nobody would kill or die to protect their property? I imagine there is, but what amount would it have to be? Perhaps there is another social law to determine the marginal value that would compel property owners to start the killing.

  The second problem is far more significant, however. After reviewing the historiography of Civil War causation between pages 57 and 65 and dismissing most of it, Huston claims that previous historians have not placed the pecuniary value of the slaves at the center of their interpretations. This charge is unwarranted, if not preposterous. Only a few explanations of the sectional conflict have argued that the southern economy was not prospering or was in a state of crisis or decline in the 1850s, Ulrich B. Phillips and Eugene Genovese being two of them. Rather, the pecuniary value of the slaves to their owners has rarely been questioned. In response to Huston's Cheshire cat analogy, all but a few would say that if you remove the wealth, you would have removed slavery itself. And so of course, the controversy would fade away. Indeed, most historians have added other kinds of value that slaves possessed besides their pecuniary value as an investment and an asset, making slaveowning even more valuable and hard to give up. The three most obvious of examples are slaves' value as the solution to the planters' need for a cheap and coercible labor-force on their labor-intensive plantations, for the status that possession of them bestowed on their owners, and as the foundation of the South's racial order. If worth and value of this kind is added to the monetary one, then slaves were indispensable. And naturally, their owners would have moved heaven and earth to keep them, as in fact they did.

  To demonstrate how important the slaves were to their owners as a very valuable property and how this preoccupation fueled the sectional conflict, the author devotes chapters three, four, and five to showing how the issue of property rights was at the center of the acrimonious dispute in all three branches of the federal government during the 1840s and 1850s. In this contest, the southern slaveholders insisted that the rest of the nation acknowledge, in statute and constitutional law, their right to possess property in persons. Furthermore, the same issue was at stake in the western territories as well, where the South's political leaders again tried to obtain national protection for their right to take slaves beyond the states and into such areas of new settlement as New Mexico and Kansas. But this has never been in dispute. The question of whether slavery can be recognized as a nationally sanctioned institution has always been regarded as essentially a matter of property rights.

  But actually the dispute was about more than that. For the debate over slavery was also about what kind of labor relations would be the norm in America? Would labor be free or would it be slave? And, in fact, Professor Huston's chapter on the North that follows his seminal chapter two is called Free Labor and the Competition of Slaves. A critical aspect of the sectional conflict that made the contest even more difficult to resolve, an aspect incidentally that has been of consuming interest to historians since Eric Foner's elucidation of the free labor ideology in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1970), was that the question of slavery was not just a pecuniary matter. The matter of slavery also concerned the kind of labor system that would dominate the nation, and the racial composition of the population of the new territories. To isolate the property element of slavery as the primary, or real, cause of the sectional conflict and the ensuing civil war is not very helpful. And perhaps that is why historians in the past have not tried to do so. For slavery was a multi-faceted institution. And all of the features of this species of property, this peculiar property, had, by the late 1840s, succeeded in provoking a visceral response among non-slaveholders outside the South that was extremely hard, in fact impossible, to manage and contain politically.

  The last two chapters of Calculating the Value of the Union move away from economic origins and the dispute over property rights in persons. Instead, they focus on the collapse of the Whig party in the South from 1846 to 1853 and the rise of the Republicans in the North between 1854 and 1860, two political developments which together produced what has been called the realignment of the 1850s. The theory of party realignment, with its highlighting of certain presidential contests as critical elections, has played a major role in American political science and also in history since the 1970s. Realignment theory explains the course of American political history and development as a series of party systems, the fifth and last of which emerged in the New Deal era after the critical election of 1932. An extremely mechanical, complicated and schematic method of periodizing American political history, this theory has fallen on hard times in recent years, primarily because there has been no critical election or party realignment for 70 years. This development has upset the cyclical appearance of new party systems, a pattern established for the 19th and early 20th centuries when the theory charted the First through Fourth Party Systems. Realignment theory has also been subjected to considerable criticism from political scientists, the most devastating of which was David Mayhew's Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre, published in 2002.

  Despite all this, Professor Huston feels compelled to revitalize this dying theory and, in a 14 page Appendix A, he offers a scheme to resuscitate it. Then, in Appendix B, he demonstrates at great length, for another 29 pages, how the realignment of the 1850s can be used to reconfirm the theory. This realignment broke down the Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats and created the Third Party System of Democrats and Republicans as a result of the critical election of 1860. The upshot of this excursion into electoral realignment is that a book which began with a claim to reinterpret the Civil War as a crisis with economic origins has metamorphosed into a test-case to prove the continuing viability and relevance of a theory of American party development that is no longer as intriguing or fruitful as it once was. In his preface, Professor Huston shared with his readers his initial inclination to prepare several articles laying out his thoughts and speculations on these two topics. He decided instead to put them together and write a long book on the coming of the Civil War. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a book without cohesion that does not offer the broad-ranging reinterpretation of the origins of the American Civil War that it promised. Perhaps James Huston would have been advised to heed his own instincts and publish two provocative articles, leaving to others the task of assessing, and maybe trying to apply, his suggestions.

  Michl Perman is Research Professor in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author most recently of Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (2001) and a second edition of his Emancipation and Reconstruction (2003).

• Edge Induced Cohesion
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012/10/08/book-review-the-panic-of-1857-and-the-coming-of-the-civil-war/
  Word count: 908

  QUOTE:
  It is remarkable that, to my knowledge, this is the first book that combines the political and economic history of the Panic of 1857 and shows how it played a pivotal, if neglected, role in the timing of the start of the American Civil War. If you are a reader of the Civil War with a tolerance of statistical analysis and an interest in economic and political history, this is an excellent work that deserves to be read.

  Book Review: The Panic Of 1857 And The Coming Of The Civil War
  Posted on October 8, 2012 by nathanalbright
  The Panic Of 1857 And The Coming Of The Civil War, by James L. Huston

  It is remarkable that, to my knowledge, this is the first book that combines the political and economic history of the Panic of 1857 and shows how it played a pivotal, if neglected, role in the timing of the start of the American Civil War. In many ways, the Panic of 1857 shows alarming similarities to today–an economic downturn that led to massive unemployment, a debt and solvency crisis within the United States, calls for austerity that sabotaged political power, in the midst of a deep sectional crisis in American politics. The authors do not draw any parallels between the situation of the 1850’s and the contemporary crisis over similar political and economic causes, but these parallels are available to the reader who chooses to draw them.

  The book is organized in a chronological and thematic fashion, with ten chapters that look at such issues as the Panic of 1857, the political and economic explanations of the panic, the resulting panics in Congress that combined economic with sectional problems about slavery, the election of 1858, an austerity-minded Congress dominated by Southerners and their sympathizers that alienated key support for Democrats in Pennsylvania, the economic recovery and the connection of the Panic of 1857 with the rights of free labor in the north, and the election of 1860, after which a short but powerful conclusion follows. The book contains a narrative flow, and careful primary research, but is also full of statistical analysis to prove the pivotal importance of economic affairs (including a moderate tariff) to the decisive swing of Pennsylvania from a Democrat-leaning to a Republican-leaning state between 1857 and 1860 that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president and the start of the American Civil War.

  There are a variety of conclusions that one can draw from this carefully researched and carefully reasoned work. For one, the success of Lincoln and the Republicans was not a certain outcome, as both major parties had the possibility of consolidating support. The initial weakness of the Republicans as a coalition of diverse interests became a strength in flexibility, while the insecurity of the Southerners in control of the Democratic party led to a rigidity that alienated Pennsylvanians more concerned with economic matters (like a tariff that protected their mining and industrial interests) and led to increased strength by Republicans who took the opportunity given to them to forge a coalition that included business interests and upwardly mobile laborers, as well as economic and political conservatives susceptible to protectionism and nativism. The fact that Pennsylvania was the pivotal swing state of 1860 made the rigidity of Southern Democrats (a major tactical error) decisive in giving victory to the Republicans, and thus inducing the insecure Deep South slave states to secede in order to protect their immoral institution of slavery.

  It is therefore ironic that moderate Pennsylvania, the only state where economic interests in aftermath of the Panic of 1857 trumped concerns over the expansion of slavery and its competition with free labor (and the resulting degradation of free labor to something approaching the status of a slave), ended up forcing the issue of slavery upon a deeply divided nation in 1860. Since the Panic of 1857 divided the Democratic coalition and ultimately led to a fusion of economic conservatives with free soil Republicans in border Northern states like Pennsylvania (as the author demonstrates statistically for economic history as well as through a careful analysis of the primary source material for political history), and Pennsylvania proved decisive in givin victory to the Republicans, the author shows that the short-lived Panic of 1857 had a vital and neglected role in the timing of the American Civil War.

  As a proud Unionist Pennsylvanian, I find this irony both poignant as well as satisfying in its well-researched and well-written argument. The author sensibly concludes that some definitive crisis was inevitable between slavery and freedom within the United States, given the contradiction between the ultimate aims of the North and South. And the moral and economic elements of slavery and free labor tended to become connected to other elements–such as land grant colleges (reflecting assumptions that increased education would lead to increased job opportunities), cheap Western land (that would lead to internal immigration that would decrease the supply of labor and lead to increased wages), as well as internal improvements (which would help the internal development of the western states). Southern opposition to these widely popular bipartisan Northern goals led to a political situation that led to Republican victory in 1860, with all of those fateful consequences. If you are a reader of the Civil War with a tolerance of statistical analysis and an interest in economic and political history, this is an excellent work that deserves to be read.

• Indiana Magazine of History
  https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/view/12396/18499
  Word count: 644

  Graham A. Peck
  Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality
  By James L. Huston
  (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2007. Pp. xi, 221. Illustration, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $39.00.)
  James L. Huston's book presents an intriguing reinterpretation of the life of Illinois' famous antebellum senator. Huston uses Douglas's life to shed light on America's path from its pre-revolutionary heritage of "hereditary preferment and inequality" to a future based on the then-revolutionary axioms of human equality (p. vii). This transition, experienced most dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century, posed difficult dilemmas: which Americans were equal, in what ways were they equal, and how would their equality be maintained? In no small measure, writes Huston, these dilemmas shaped the politics of antebellum America and the life of Douglas.

  Huston contends that Douglas's impressive leadership in building the Illinois Democratic Party in the 1830s reflected his strong commitment to a more egalitarian society. The Democrats stood for the equal rights of the people against the special privileges enjoyed by elites. In order to acquire the political power to press for such rights, however, the Democrats needed to create a party organization to express the people's will. This was Douglas's great contribution as an early partisan political leader in Illinois, and his reward was political preferment and influence.

  But the politics of egalitarianism quickly became more divisive. As an advocate of commercial development, Douglas differed from those in his party who believed that the promotion of commerce exacerbated class divisions and imperiled democracy. Hence he supported many commercial enterprises - including those that required government support, such as the building of the Illinois Central Railroad in the early 1850s - as long as they promised widespread social benefits. However, Douglas did realize that commercial growth generated sharp disparities in wealth and income. The solution that he and the Democratic Party endorsed in the 1840s was national expansion, which promised cheap land for poor and rich farmers alike. Yet Manifest Destiny likewise challenged egalitarian ideals, primarily because despised non-white inhabitants lived in lands coveted by Americans. Douglas, like almost all Democrats, advocated the expulsion or subordination of such peoples upon acquisition of their territory. Ironically, the Democrats' promotion of equality among white Americans both justified and promoted wider inequality.

  National expansion also raised the thorny issue of slavery, which profoundly challenged the Democrats' creed of equality. The Mexican-American War left the United States with a vast domain to settle. Most Southerners desired to plant slavery in the new territories, believing they had a constitutional right to do so; anti-slavery northerners implacably opposed them. This division threatened to rend the Union. Douglas's solution, embodied in the Compromise of 1850, enabled territorial settlers to regulate slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. But popular sovereignty was something of a conundrum. On the one hand it reflected egalitarian ideals, because the people's will decided slavery's fate. On the other, it subsequently legitimized the right of some humans to enslave others in a nation whose democracy rested on the presumption of equality. Douglas resolved the dilemma by maintaining that non-white races were "utterly incapable of governing themselves" (p. 85). Although northern Democrats, persuaded by this reasoning, considered popular sovereignty a reasonable sectional compromise, most southerners demanded that the federal government protect territorial slavery. Ultimately, Lincoln's election impelled southerners to abandon a Union that they believed disregarded their rights. Ironically, secession thus illustrated the most fundamental dilemma arising from the political creed of equality. Perceiving secession as a destruction of democracy rather than a defense of liberty, Douglas supported the Republicans' effort to maintain the Union by force.

  GRAHAM A. PECK, associate professor of history at Saint Xavier University, Chicago, has published articles about Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

Word Count