Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
The American Dilemma
By David Brion Davis
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
by Andrew Hacker
Scribner's, 257 pp., $24.95
The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present
by Jacqueline Jones
Basic Books, 399 pp., $25.00
In 1854 a perceptive Scottish bookseller, publisher, and promoter of public knowledge named William Chambers addressed the following question: did the United States 'contain within itself the germs of dissolution?' Chambers was not thinking of a civil war between slaveholding and nonslaveholding states. Recording his impressions after a tour of the country in a book entitled Things As They Are in America, Chambers pointed to the 'rigorous separation of the white and black races' in the North as well as the South, and noted that every white person with whom he conversed on this subject 'tended to the opinion that the negro was in many respects an inferior being, and his existence in America an anomaly.'
Review, 5725 words
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