The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North by Arthur ZilversmitReview by: Thomas E. DrakeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Apr., 1968), pp. 1237-1238Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1847545 .

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Americas 1237

of land companies, and some of the prominent efforts to found colonies beyond the mountains.

In denying the old thesis of an East-West struggle, Sosin suggests that there were few substantial western grievances and implies that the American fron- tiersman was neither very individualistic and inventive nor particularly demo- cratic. He argues these points very neatly in some places, as in his critique of Crevecceur's description of a social and religious "melting pot" on the frontier. At times, however, he beats some very dead horses, as when he argues that the mass of men elected their "betters" to political office. He fails to confront some of the more interesting questions raised by intellectual historians, such as the relation- ship of the frontier experience to violence in American society.

The Revolutionary Frontier is a good synthesis of a many-faceted subject, the individual aspects of which are more definitely treated in some of the works cited in Sosin's excellent bibliography. Cleveland State University JOHN CARY

THE FIRST EMANCIPATION: THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE NORTH. By Arthur Zilversmit. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I967. Pp. X, 262. $6.95.)

NEGRO slavery and the slave trade took deep root in England's northern colonies as well as in the South. Why, then, did the North, from Pennsylvania to Vermont and New Hampshire, unlike the South, come to renounce the slave system in the years of the Revolution and after? The answer, according to this fresh study of the abolition of slavery in the North, is not found in economics but ideology. I should call it idealism.

The author has made a thorough review of the pertinent sources on slavery and abolition in the North. His work in the records of the abolition societies and the state legislatures is more thorough than anything that has been done before, and it enables him to speak with authority on the difficulties of the struggle for abolition, particularly in states with large slave populations such as New York and New Jersey. His special studies of slave prices in those states and in Pennsyl- vania show that the price of slaves held high to the very end and that slavery remained valuable to individual owners even if it became repugnant to the com- munity as a whole.

To a few sensitive people, mostly Quakers, in the seventeenth century, slavery seemed evil and un-Christian. This feeling grew until by the middle of the eight- eenth century the Quakers as a group had renounced the slave trade, and by the Revolution they had emancipated their slaves. By then the libertarian ideas of the times brought them many allies, and these abolitionists, old and new, eventually persuaded the people of the northern states that the personal liberty for which they had fought should be extended to Negroes as well as whites. But it took years to convince the state legislatures that property rights, for which Americans had also fought, should give way to the right of freedom of persons. Even then they granted freedom only gradually, except in Vermont and Massachusetts, to be reserved for Negroes born subsequent to the passage of the emancipation laws, and only after an apprenticeship lasting many years. Slaveholders, particularly

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I 238 Reviews of Books the Dutch farmers in the Hudson River counties of New York and New Jersey, bitterly contested this invasion of their right to hold men as property.

Idealism finally prevailed over economic interest. But it seems certain that gradual abolition would have failed in the North as it did in the South if slave- holders had not been in a minority and slavery relatively less important to the economic and social system than it was in the plantation South. Compensation to slaveholders proved too costly to carry out in the North, and would have been out of the question in the South. Northern whites feared a large population of free Negroes, only to a somewhat lesser degree than southerners did. The victory of Christian ideals and liberal political philosophy was a narrow one.

The abolition of Negro slavery was as difficult a task as the problems of racial accommodation that we now face. Abolition did not automatically solve the prob- lems of race, segregation, poverty, bad housing, lack of education, and smoldering resentment that existed then and that plague us today. But freedom was the first, necessary step toward solutions, and The First Emancipation tells in full detail the story of its slow, patient, and nonviolent achievement in the North. Haverford College THOMAS E. DRAKE

PRESIDENTIAL VETOES, I792-I945. By Carlton Jackson. (Athens: Univer- sity of Georgia Press. I967. PP. x, 254. $8.oo.)

CARLTON Jackson has written a chronological history of presidential vetoes, pre- senting a paraphrase of each major veto message, a judgment of the underlying and the immediate reasons for it, a brief narrative of the congressional response, and a glance at public opinion on the controversy as reflected in the press. He has performed his task with evident craftsmanship, telling the story of the major vetoes in a clear, narrative style that gives the book continuity and readability and prevents it from being merely a compendium. The author divides his work into two parts, devoting nine chapters to the years I792-I869, and six to the period I869-I945. He discusses several administrations in most chapters, but allots three chapters to Andrew Jackson, two to John Tyler, and one each to James K. Polk and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The book rests on the obvious sources: the veto messages, standard biographies and articles about the Presidents, the records of congressional debate, and the newspapers most deeply involved in the veto at issue. But the accessibility of the sources should not obscure the author's difficult task of explaining the complex factors that underlay the decisions of successive Presidents to veto 1,762 bills passed by Congress between I792 and I945. The author has maintained impar- tiality in handling material frequently charged with high emotion and has given the reader a fair though abbreviated statement of the position of the contesting parties in every important veto controversy.

The presidential veto as a weapon in the struggle between the executive and legislative branches of the government has received less attention than it de- serves. As the present volume shows, the vetoes of a President often bring as much definition to his policy as his calls for legislative action. A study of vetoes over many administrations provides a valuable tool to measure the responsiveness of both lawmakers and Presidents to public opinion. Jackson's book brings into

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