Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Conflict and Compromise: The Political Ecomomy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the AmericanCivil War by Roger L. RansomReview by: Douglas R. EgertonJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 446-447Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123418 .

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446 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Conflict and Compromise: The Political Ecomomy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War. By Roger L. Ransom.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xv, 317. Tables, figures, maps. $39.50; paper, $12.95.)

Historians, like southern orators of other days, never tire of refighting the Civil War. Roger L. Ransom, an economist turned professor of history, has produced a sweeping analysis of the middle period that does more than simply add to the growing body of literature on the causes of the conflict. Put simply, Ransom argues that in its mature form slavery was a healthy and highly mobile system that exploded across the South toward the new territories of the Southwest and

consequently attracted the moral wrath of the North. Unwilling to

give up their prosperous capitalist ways, cotton planters made the

logical-indeed, only-choice when confronted by a victorious party whose single issue was no slavery in the territories. In the end

compromise was impossible. War was unavoidable and necessary. Ransom's provocative thesis raises as many questions as it

answers. While vigorously dissenting from the Genovesian view of the cotton South as a noncapitalist, even seigneurial social system, the author declines to explain why the agrarian capitalists of Dixie found it impossible to come to terms with the industrial capitalists of the North. Ransom, however, is especially good when discussing the economic changes that took place in the South during the war and

Jefferson Davis's frantic efforts to modernize and industrialize. Political historians, who are notoriously uninformed on economic matters, will find the chapters on emacipation and the postwar years, much of which is drawn from Ransom's One Kind of Freedom. The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (coauthored with Richard Sutch, 1977) especially enlightening.

I cannot, however, agree with the jacket statement that

pronounces this work to be "an excellent introduction to the period." Although the documentation is drawn almost exclusively from

secondary works, the book contains more than a few errors. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee did not meet "at the Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia" (xiii), but at the McLean home in the village of Appomattox Courthouse. The Gettysburg address was not, contrary to myth, written "on the back of an envelope during the train ride on the day of the speech" (1). The Utah and New Mexico territories were settled without mention of slavery, not as

"unorganized slave territores" (111), and Mary Chestnut's Civil War (1981) is not a "diary" (183) and should not be used as such. Many

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BOOK REVIEWS 447

of the mistakes are trivial, although the confusion over the Compromise of 1850 is no small point and is especially curious since the definitive work of Holman Hamilton is the sole source cited on the topic. The simultaneous publication in cloth and paper implies the hope of classroom use. Instead, Conflict and Compromise is a work that should be read by scholars who will profit from the economic analysis but have the background to recognize the factual mistakes.

Le Moyne College Douglas R. Egerton

George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986. By Karal Ann Marling. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii, 453. Illustrations. $39.95.) Karol Ann Marling's witty, engaging study of the Washington image as a purveyor of national kitsch comes from a scholar clearly immersed in the more bizarre foibles of American society. Marling has drawn on an omnibus knowledge of and affection for the popular culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America-its newspapers, magazines, furniture, books, and houses-and its icons. Washington is the pivot on which she hangs a superb study of popular culture over the span of the last century, the central figure in the American search for a usable past. Marling's prose is so exuberant that it is easy to overlook the fact that the book has some important things to say about how Americans have viewed their history. She traces the popularizing of the Washington image from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, where the elaborate display of Washington artifacts and personal possessions were designed to humanize the great man and aid in his metamorphosis into a figure acceptable to a generation of Americans who had lost touch with their roots. The centennial spawned a plethora of Washington-related junk that found its way into households all over America: book ends, silver-plated spoons, coasters and pocket knives, George Washington dolls, commemorative plates. Indeed, the creation of Washington memorabilia became a thriving cottage industry. (Washington would have hated it all; it was the antithesis of the image he strove to project.) But in the process he evolved in the popular mind from the stern national paterfamilias of the early nineteenth century to a maudlin figure kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge or gazing fatuously at Betsy Ross as she stitched the flag. Successive generations, Marling points out, sought the ideals of a simpler, nobler time-furniture, houses, and such colonial restorations as Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg. "The

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