Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War. (Book Reviews).

Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War. Edited by Jon L. Wakelyn. Shades of Blue and Gray Series. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 392. $39.95, ISBN 0-8262-1264-6.)

This book is a companion to Jon Wakelyn's earlier edited work, Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill, 1996), and thus completes the reprinting of important southern pamphlets on secession and political issues during the war years. In this volume, Wakelyn has selected eighteen unionist pamphlets for republication that delve into topics such as slavery and its abolition; the nature of southern secession; the conspiratorial nature of the slaveholding class; the false claims of prosperity and independence that Confederate leaders had made; the tyranny of Jefferson Davis and his supporters; the brutalization of unionists throughout the South; and the need for federal power to protect unionists and disfranchise secessionists.

Wakelyn has done an admirable job of editing these documents. In his introductory remarks to each, he summarizes the main themes, provides biographical information, and sets the stage for an understanding of the writer's unionist viewpoint. Moreover, he has wisely edited parts of these documents, trimming the often lengthy quotations typical of most nineteenth-century politicians. At the end of the book, Wakelyn lists other unionist pamphlets not included in this collection and discusses their contents, merits, and defects.

The pamphlets are of varying degrees of interest, part of which depends upon the purpose of the reader. Some works are technical law treatises, while others are mired deeply in state activities. I enjoyed most the treatises by Anna Ella Carrol on the errors of secession, Robert Jefferson Breckinridge on the need to preserve the Union, Bryan Tyson on the religious defense of slavery, Charles D. Drake on the acceptance of emancipation, Michael Hahn on the aristocracy of the slaveholders, and Andrew Jackson Hamilton on the conspiracy to destroy republican government. While all of Wakelyn's chosen authors write on some topics of merit, it needs to be said that they also often write on less-than-thrilling subjects and resort to well-known arguments long understood. There is much in their writing that can be described by no other word than boring. That may seem a harsh description, but compared with the writers on secession, the unionists do appear quite bland.

One other observation about these pamphleteers can be made: A significant number of them advance a pure class analysis of secession. They insist that to protect their slave property, slaveholders took the South out of the Union. The slave-owning class, according to these unionists, feared and wanted to destroy rule by the majority; secession thus represented the victory of the wealthy elite over the people. What is interesting about this line of reasoning is that most of these writers came from a border-state Whig background, and in light of the continuing literature on the upper-class sympathies of the Whig party, this analysis comes as a shock and indicates that historians may have overlooked some vital aspects of Whig political thought.

This book is a good introduction to southern unionist thinking, but for the researcher it serves at best as only a point of origin. Too many details of activities in the states during wartime have to be understood before the pamphlets can be used to illuminate important trends. However, the work can be profitably used in the undergraduate classroom: Between the two collections of pamphlets by secessionists and unionists, teachers now possess an excellent resource to construct essay assignments for students. Jon Wakelyn has indeed performed an important service for the profession.