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BOOK REVIEWS The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Shvery Extension Controversy. By Eugene H. Berwanger. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. Pp. x, 176. $5.95.) White Americans of the nineteenth century were a racist lot—and not just in the South. Even if such now widely read commentators as Tocqueville had never told us this, the documentary evidence abounded for historians to bring forward. Instead they did not. While the laity clung to the legend of the abolitionist North and a Civil War fought to free the slaves, the academics did little better, allowing themselves to be diverted into such unresolvable debates as whether the Northeast or the Midwest had been the most important seat of the antislavery movement. In 1961, prompted by an emerging realization that the twentieth century northern ghetto was no haven for black Americans, historians began at last to explore what had been almost forgotten. Leon Litwack emphasized the widespread negrophobia that characterized northern antebellum society; Larry Gara challenged the cherished legend of the Underground Railway; and the following year C. Vann Woodward spoke out on what he convincingly termed The Antislavery Myth." The curtain of forgetfulness began to be swept aside on one of the most depressing landscapes in American social history. Now comes Eugene Berwanger's slim survey of the Middle West and Far West in the antebellum years. His discussion roves from the Upper Mississippi Valley to California, to Oregon, to the High Plains, closing with a brief analysis of "Western Politicians and the Negro Question." His message is clear: The West was overwhelmingly antislavery, true enough, but for the wrong reason. Instead of a genuine humanitarian opposition to the southern chattel system, instead of sympathy with Americans held in bondage, westerners were motivated by an absolute horror of a potential black population influx into the West—a region viewed as a Promised Land to be reserved for whites exclusively. In resisting the geographical spread of slavery they were really resisting the geographical spread of black people. And Mr. Berwanger concludes that racism was by far the most important ingredient in the western antislavery impulse. The author's argument proceeds in a straightforward, even astringent, style, utterly without flair, not even with anger. He lets actions and rhetoric speak for themselves. When his material achieves poignancy it is with such items as this, the testimony of an Arkansas slave who had once been liberated in California but who had voluntarily returned to bondage: "In California I was free," explained the black informant, "but there 183 184CIVIL WAR HISTORY was a wider difference between the white and the black man than in Arkansas. I labored hard, but I was a nigger and that was enough with the Yankees, and I preferred to be a slave with my old master, where I could be respected as such, than to be a free man among white men in a free state." As the new historiography on "free state" negrophobia approaches the end of its first decade, the point seems to have been made. Perhaps it is time historians, armed with studies like Mr. Berwanger's, returned to establishing with a great deal more precision than formerly just where—in terms of white northern social groupings—the strength resided that favored full civil equality for black Americans. Berwanger, for instance, places great emphasis on the results of popular referendums that excluded blacks from four western states; all together, negrophobia triumphed by 174,000 to 45,000 votes—or by a resounding 79.5 per cent. I for one would like to know more about that important 20.5 per cent minority than I think all the historians of western abolitionism have yet chosen to tell us. Robert R. Dykstra University of Nebraska Nat Turner's Skve Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects . By Herbert Aptheker. (New York: Humanities Press, 1966. Pp. iv, 152. $4.00.) Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian and theoretician, has turned back to his master's essay, written thirty years ago, to produce what purports to be an intensive look at Nat Turner's rebellion. The essay itself examines the context of the uprising and its impact as well...

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