Voices from the Gathering Storm: the Coming of the American Civil War.

By Glenn M. Linden. (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2001. Pp. xxxii, 236. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8420-2999-0; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8420-2998-2.)

David M. Potter warned historians long ago about the fallacy of reading history backward. It is the historian's task, according to Potter, to move beyond the misleading perspectives provided by hindsight in order to understand the causes of the Civil War more completely. Postwar rationalizations by ex-Confederates about the causes of the war and the relative importance of slavery have for a long time dominated and clouded Civil War historiography. As a result, the sentiments of those who lived through the tumultuous period between the Mexican War and the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 have often been overlooked.

Glenn M. Linden has assembled a collection of primary sources by seventeen "voices"--southern and northern, black and white, men and women--from the period between the Mexican War and the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter. The goal, according to Linden, is to help readers "begin to think like those who lived before the Civil War" (p. xii). Linden provides brief biographies of each individual, some of whom need no introduction, while others are more obscure. The former category includes Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, John J. Crittenden, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Those in the latter category include Augustus Benners, a lawyer and plantation owner from North Carolina; Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, who was born in Massachusetts but moved to Mississippi in 1852 and became loyal to the Confederacy; and Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, a South Carolina widow who ran her own plantation of 2,600 acres and 209 slaves until Sherman's army burned two of her homes.

Linden provides relatively brief excerpts from the personal records of each of the seventeen individuals about such emotionally charged events as the Compromise of 1850, the fugitive slave controversy, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid, and Lincoln's election. Two themes emerge from the selections: the growing importance of slavery to contemporaries and their consequent reexamination of the nature of the federal union. Not only does the centrality of slavery come through clearly in the majority of Linden's selections, but readers are able to better appreciate how understandings of the "peculiar institution" were shaped by race, politics, and individuals' economic and social standing. The selections not only allow the reader to empathize with the historical participants, but more importantly, to appreciate the sense of uncertainty that pervades much of their writings concerning the immediate future. On neither side of the Mason-Dixon line did people demonstrate much awareness that the nation was moving steadily toward war.

Voices from the Gathering Storm is an extremely useful teaching tool that is sure to find a home in classes that use primary documents to understand history from the perspective of the participants themselves.

KEVIN M. LEVIN
St. Anne's-Belfield School
Charlottesville, Virginia