The Slave Power: the Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860.

By Leonard L. Richards. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. [xii], 228 Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8071-2600-4; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2537-7.)

Leonard L. Richards acknowledges that several "well-known historians ... have given some credence to the Slave Power thesis" (p. 18). The historians he mentions in the text are Eric Foner, Richard H. Sewell, and William E. Gienapp; however, in two of his new book's longest footnotes, Richards lists another haft-dozen historians who have taken the idea of a Slave Power seriously (p. 18 n. 31; p. 19 n. 32). Nevertheless, Richards gives the subject far greater weight than these historians. In Richards's treatment the Slave Power emerges as a central theme in American political history.

The idea of a Slave Power rested on the constitutional clause that allowed southerners to count three-fifths of their slave population for purposes of representation and taxation. Richards shows that northeastern Federalists accepted the three-fifths ratio as long as they retained power but ultimately blamed it for their eventual defeat and downfall. In the election of 1800, the three-fifths ratio provided slaveholding interests with fifteen electors, more than enough to insure Thomas Jefferson's victory by eight electoral votes. "Without the so-called slave seats," writes Richards, Jefferson "would have lost the election and John Adams would have served a second term" (p. 42). In the Jeffersonian era the congressional caucus system for choosing presidential candidates enhanced the effect of the three-fifths ratio. Not until after the War of 1812 did northern Democratic-Republicans emerge as a sometimes majority, but the caucus system died just as Jacksonians emerged to forge a new proslavery alliance. John Quincy Adams blamed Jackson, whom he called the "Sable Genius of the South" (quoted on p. 25), for his presidential defeat in 1828.

Richards uncovers some surprises in his examination of Democratic "doughfaces," the northern men who voted with the South. The social reformer Robert Dale Owen, while a congressman from southern Indiana, voted regularly with the South. On the other hand, Lewis Cass of Michigan, widely denounced as a leading doughface, supported habeas corpus rights for accused fugitive slaves. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied those rights, Cass absented himself from the final vote on the amended bill. Of course Cass, like most Democrats and Whigs, rallied around the Compromise of 1850 (and thereby embraced the Fugitive Slave Law) in preparation for the presidential election of 1852.

Unfortunately, some central political players are largely ignored in Richards's study. Barely mentioned is Thomas Hart Benton, who strongly supported slavery in Missouri in 1820 but dramatically broke with the proslavery Democracy in 1850. Little is said about Francis P. Blair Sr., although he defined the anti-abolitionist stance of the Democracy in the 1830s and early 1840s before presiding over the first Republican convention in 1856. Silas Wright, the antislavery Jacksonian who Blair hoped would become the Democratic presidential candidate in 1848, also deserves more attention.

Richards demonstrates that the idea of a Slave Power had deep roots in American political history. But the impact of the idea was not equally powerful at all times: it was an idea that would resonate widely only when the free labor interests of the North became determined to seize the reins of national power.

LOUIS S. GERTEIS
University of Missouri-St. Louis