Volume 43, Number 18 · November 14, 1996
A Hero of Antislavery
By Eric L. McKitrick
Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress
by William Lee Miller
Knopf, 577 pp., $35.00
When we consider the troubled history of race relations during the hundred and thirty-odd years since Emancipation, it seems scarcely credible that the North, virtually as a unit, could have been willing to fight a long and costly war whose root cause was black slavery and the free states' aversion to it. This is still sufficiently difficult to grasp that some historians have even been inclined to think slavery could not have been the 'real' issue at all. There must have been others, hidden or indirect but somehow more fundamental, such as clashing economic interests; some have argued that antislavery feeling was only one of several factors along with nativism and temperance, and by no means the most significant one, that account for the rapid rise of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s.
Review, 4726 words
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