Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/683

 Garriso7i: M'eshoard Extension b-J2> Circuit and tried more cases than any other member of that bar; he was attorney for the IIHnois Central Railroad, the greatest corpora- tion in the State, and one which doubtless had its choice of legal talent; he was also counsel for the Rock Island Railroad, and other corpora- tions and individuals with important legal interests at stake; he was sought as legal arbitrator in the great corporation litigations of Illinois and he tried some of the most notable cases recorded in the courts of that State." Mr. Hill devotes his final chapter to " Lincoln, the Lawyer, as Presi- dent", and it is in this chapter, of course, that the chief interest of the non-professional reader lies. It reads more like an after-dinner speaker's response to a toast than like sober history. Its estimates of men and measures are often exaggerated, but it serves to emphasize the fact that among the many influences which helped to mold Mr. Lincoln's character as President, his long and varied experience at the bar in Illinois was one of the most conspicuous and important. The mechanical execution of the book is excellent, and a profusion of interesting illustrations, many of them new, adds greatly to its at- tractiveness. Floyd R. Mechem. The American Nation: a History. Edited by Albert Bushnell Hart. Volume 17. IVestivard Extension, 1841-1830. By George Pierce Garrison, Ph.D., Professor of History, Uni- versity of Texas. (New York and London: Harper and Brothers. 1906. Pp. xiv, 366.) The fifth decade of the last century was truly, as the editor of this series suggests, a " stirring period " in American history. It has been Professor Garrison's task to describe the administrations of Tyler and Polk as an epoch essentially complete in itself and markedly differ- entiated in spirit from the Jacksonian era which preceded, and from the ante-bellum period proper which followed it. Such an undei"- taking is not easy, for the period of the forties has usually been treated as a series of episodes in the history of the slavery question or as a prologue to that of secession and the Civil War. The difficulties sur- rounding the subject are not lessened by the fact that the volume is one of a series the dominant note of which is professedly national. If one were to write with an eye to the results of the great events of this decade, the growth of sectionalism rather than of nationalism might be stressed. The period was one of expansion, and Professor Garrison's thesis is that this expansion was the outcome of a national and not merely of a sectional sentiment; that the growing importance of the slavery question for a long time hindered rather than hastened it. The result of Professor Garrison's labors is a volume conceived in a spirit of fairness and executed with discriminating judgment. The two principal characters of the period were, of course, the two