The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study in Anglo-American Co-operation,1833-77 by Christine Bolt; John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civil War: A Study inAnglo-American Relations by Adelaide WeinbergReview by: Tilden G. EdelsteinThe American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Apr., 1971), pp. 482-483Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1858716 .

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482 Reviews of Books

sketches, landscape views, and plans and de- signs of ships.

Most regrettably this book lacks definitive documentation, though abbreviated references to sources are occasionally woven into the text. There is no bibliography or a related discus- sion of sources. The serious reader who will be impressed by the literary skill with which the book is written cannot but be concerned about its objectivity-is this fact or fiction?- except of course where the text relies on the Journal, which is in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

HERMAN R. FRIIS

The National Archives

CHRISTINE BOLT. The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study in Anglo-American Co-operation, i833-77. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press for the Institute of Race Relations, London. 1969. Pp. 197. $4.95.

ADELAIDE WEINBERG. John Elliot Cairnes and the American Civil War: A Study in Anglo-Ameri- can Relations. London: Kingswood Press. n.d. Pp. 224- $6o50.

Significant in the American antislavery cru- sade, especially during the 1830s and 1840s, were funds and encouragement received by American abolitionists from Englishmen of wealth, status, and political power. American abolitionists were bitterly surprised, therefore, when the British government, from 1861 to 1863, sympathized with the South. These two books examine the responses of English aboli- tionists to this official policy during the Ameri- can Civil War and Reconstruction era.

Christine Bolt, relying heavily upon news- paper sources, adds English evidence to his- torians' recent recognition that emancipation in America did not end efforts by former abolitionists in behalf of Afro-Americans. After emancipation, English abolitionists, and their American counterparts, did not feel displaced and retire from responsibility, nor did they bemoan the loss of a worthy cause. British freedmen aid societies raised an average of ?24,ooo annually for the relief and education of emancipated American slaves and arranged preferential rates with British shipping and railway lines to transport food and clothing.

Bolt's discussion of these deeds and the argu- ments directed at British public opinion are

the strongest parts of her book. Less con- vincing is her claim that British reformers were well informed about Reconstruction and fully supported it. She fails to answer satis- factorily Wendell Phillips' charge that the British allegiance to radical Reconstruction was primarily "an old clothes movement." Sug- gesting that English racism eventually under- mined sympathy for freedmen, she slights the presence of racism prior to emancipation. Many American historians now acknowledge that antislavery feelings before the war were not synonymous with equalitarian ones, but Bolt unconvincingly depicts widespread British racism as mostly a postwar development.

The late Adelaide Weinberg's book analyzes and reprints some essays and correspondence of John Elliot Cairnes, the distinguished Irish classical economist. The Slave Power, a thorough and well-known pamphlet published by Cairnes in 1862, warned Englishmen and Americans of the danger and economic in- utility of the South's peculiar institution. In- evitable soil exhaustion, the ' inefficiency of slave labor, Southern territorial aggression, and that section's dependence on the inter- state slave trade were fundamental to Cairnes's economic argument. But he also noted that Southern passions, habits, and politics per- petuated slavery. Laissez-faire economics, he concluded, falsely assumed that public and private good were synonymous. He deeply feared for the life of America, one of "only two great free nations in the world."

Weinberg renews Cairnes's importance for historians by clearly explicating his antislavery position and support for enfranchising the freedmen during Reconstruction. She does not discuss, however, Cairnes's sources: he de- pended heavily upon F. L. Olmstead and G. M. Weston, and his critics have argued that his failure to utilize also the work of Robert Russell, J. D. B. De Bow, and Edmund Ruffin invalidated his conclusions. While Weinberg obviously disagrees with Ulrich Phillips that Cairnes's analysis of slavery was filled with "grotesqueries," she concedes too readily the obsolescence of Cairnes's soil erosion argu- ment because she uncritically accepts the findings of Avery Craven and Lewis Gray. Un- available to Weinberg until her manuscript neared publication was Eugene Genovese's

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General 483

The Political Economy of Slavery, which promises to avoid Cairnes's "simplistic and mechanistic notions" but admittedly accepts most of hlis view of slavery-with the notable exception of the Englishman's conviction that the North represented political democracy. Had Adelaide Weinberg lived to complete her plan to revise the manuscript she surely would have said more than this about Geniovese's book: "Cairnes's reasoning here as well as in other places derives muclh support."

TILDEN G. EDELSTEIN

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

EDMUND IONS. James Bryce and American De- mocracy, I870-1922. New York: Humanities Press. 1970. Pp- 339. $12-75.

In 1927 H. A. L. Fisher published a two- volume biographical study of his friend James Bryce. Suclh works had been standard in Vic- torian and Edwardian England; clearly, nei- ther the war nor the example of Lytton Strachey had seriously undermined the "life and letters" convention. Edmund Ions, turn- ing to the same subject four decades later, expresses gratitude for the earlier volumes; but he suggests that Fisher did not "do justice either to the life, in all its various pursuits, or to the letters, in their range and volume" (p. 305). One's appetite is whetted; one looks for a modern biography that is less dominated by the requirements of friendship and the traditions of an earlier historical scholarship. The surprise-and it is that-is that Ions has written a biography that might jtist as easily have been published forty or more years ago. One has become so accus- tomed to reading "modern biography" that one finds Ions' study of Bryce a throwback to an earlier genre. This, to give only a single example, is how Ions describes the woman Bryce married whien he was already past fifty. Ions writes: "Thomas Ashton's daughter Marion shared her father's devotion to good works and liberal causes. Both at home and on civic occasions she often met her father's friend James Bryce, whose law lectures at Owens College drew large and appreciative audiences. Marion Ashton also possessed beauty, charm and intelligence. In April 1889

her engagement was announced to Professor James Bryce, M.P. They were married in July. It was a perfect match and their married life was one of great felicity" (p. 142).

It may be that our tastes have been too rudely used these last years to accept this kind of expression. Such a portrait is simply not credible to readers today. It is not only that the whole psychological dimension is missing in this biography, but that Ions has ignored the social dimension as well. We are given the most explicit information on where Bryce went, whom he visited, what he read, what he wrote, and where he lectured; but there is no analysis of what tied him to that very special group of Americans he came to know so well. How is one to explain the Anglo-American connection that developed in certain intellec- tual and social circles toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century? What signifi- cance did these connections have? Why was there such an easy communion between Bryce and his American friends? Why were there not analogous relations between these Ameri- cans and French or German scholars? Mr. Ions does not think to ask this kind of question. The book, inevitably, lacks both the psychological and the social dimension we have come to expect of modern biography. Ions' book reminds us of a vast literature that uised to be written in the Anglo-American world earlier in this century. This is not nec- essarily a criticism of the work; it simply in- dicates why one is so surprised when one starts to read it.

STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD

Brown University

JOHN B. BLAKE, editor. Safeguarding the Public: Historical Aspects of Medicinal Drug Control. Papers from a conference sponsored by the National Library of Medicine and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins Press. 1970. Pp. xi, 200. $7.50.

This book is essentially a verbatim report of the papers delivered at the Conference on the History of Medicinal Drug Control held in 1968 at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, where participants were 'asked to consider . . . problems relating to controls of the purity, quality, safety, and efficacy of drugs prescribed by physicians

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