Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/913

 Hart: Slavery and Abolition 903 " to show that there was more than one side to the controversy, and that both the milder form of opposition called anti-slavery and the extremer form called abolition were confronted by practical difficulties which to many public-spirited and conscientious men seemed insurmountable ". The record of the overcoming of these difficulties through political inter- vention is left for subsequent volumes in the series, while this' one, as a special monograph emphasizing the social and moral issues of slavery, supplies the blank on that subject purposely left in Professor Mac- Donald's excellent study of Jacksoniaii Democracy. From this point of view a unity and balance of treatment is well sustained except in the particular of the inclusion of the chapter on the " Panic of 1837 ". However necessary the financial events of Van Buren's administration there related may be to the general plan of the series, no additional light is thrown on the slavery question. The first three chapters (48 pp.) of the book parallel the social, intellectual, and commercial conditions of the North and of the South, somewhat to the. disadvantage of the latter, and supply the background for the divi- sion and contest of sentiment. This portion of the book introduces the first phase of the question, slavery and the Southern economic and social system, described in the following six chapters (87 pp.) with reference to the classes, whites, free negroes, and slaves both on the plantation and as to the slave mart. The remainder of the text (chapters x.-xxi.), a little more than half of the book, is devoted to the slavery contro- versy and the results of abolition ; stating and estimating the arguments pro and con, and giving an account of the rise and progress of aboli- tionism, of the split between the branches of abolitionists, and of the attitude of the states, nation, and certain foreign powers to the move- ment opposed to slavery. A final chapter (xxii.) contains a well sys- tematized bibliography with some critical comment, comprising the selected authorities, exclusive of the author's personal acquaintance and inquiries in the South, upon which the work is based. There are six illustrative maps and a frontispiece, a full length portrait of John Quincy Adams, the " inveterate defender of the sanctity of petitions ". A few manifestly typographical errors are to be noted, p. 25, 1. 20; p. 283, 1. 21 ; p. 295. 1. 10. Events are followed in the main from 1830 to 1841, but in a number of instances, especially in the first half of the book, it has been found necessary for clearness to trace movements such as enslavement, slave trade, or anti-slavery from origin to a culmination in 1850 or i860. Professor Hart says (p. 50) that "the English settlers at once began to enslave their Indian neighbors ", but he escapes the almost universal error of identifying the institution of slavery in America with the few negro servants imported into Virginia in 1619. The use of the term "slaves", however, as applied to convicts (p. 49), in view of his state- ments on servitude (pp. 49, 76), cannot be intended to be taken literally. Though he has no greater sympathy for slavery than the thinking