Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/170

 1 60 Reviews of Books man of modern history and the goods which we received were those which he compelled his unwiUing victim to disgorge." Jefferson's re- lations with West Florida follow so closely, both in historical and in chronological sequence, upon the Purchase of Louisiana that the inter- jection, before the chapter on West Florida, of four excellent, but essen- tially unrelated essays, upon the Lewis and Clark expedition, slavery and slave-trade, the Chase impeachment and the Yazoo claims, decidedly weakens the interest in the narrative and breaks its continuity. Pro- fessor Channing intimates that the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was planned before the acquisition of Louisiana, was designed by Jeffer- son to pave the way for a possible future seizure of the western country and believes that the consummation of the purchase came " in the nick of time to save Jefferson from violating the code of international ethics ". The author declares the struggle over the Yazoo claims to have been " one of the most far-reaching in the political history of the United States ". The account of the long struggle is interestingly given but the facts presented hardly convince the reader that the opinion quoted is not somewhat too pronounced. Sobriety of judgment is, however, a marked characteristic of the work as a whole. The author is much more inclined to present the Scotch verdict of not proven than to hazard an opinion not fully warranted by the facts. This is noticeably true in the history of the Burr conspiracy, in which, in a treatment commendably free from bias, perhaps the verdict reached is the only possible one, namely, that everything was too hazy and indefinite in the mind of Burr himself to justify positive conclusions. The remaining chapters of the book deal with foreign relations, and with the domestic events occasioned by them, which led up to the war with England. With a sure and impartial hand the author reveals the intricacies of the struggle for and against neutral rights. The policy of commercial restriction, he states, was in part formulated by Madison and was as much his policy as Jefferson's. Professor Channing corrects both Adams and McMaster in the matter of the blockade maintained by English vessels, before the war, off the port of New York, and shows that the blockade was not such a continuous one as they suppose. The editor of the American Nation series says, in his introduction to this volume, that " the personality of Jefferson is in many ways the dominant note in the period" from 1801 to 1811. The editor's colleague has an excellent English style, well adapted to historical narrative, yet he does not seem to possess the dramatic power that makes a personality live again in his pages. Due credit is given to Jefferson, but the reader is not made to feel that his was the dominating, guiding personality of the early Republican period. The thesis implied in the title of the next volume in the American Nation series, The Rise of American Nationality, is admirably and con- vincingly sustained by its author, who displays decided literary skill in keeping this thesis constantly before the reader. The details of the nar-