Content area
Full Text
The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics. By Christopher Childers. American Political Thought. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Pp. [xiv], 334. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1868-2.)
In The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics, Christopher Childers presents a muchneeded study that shows how "the concept of popular sovereignty . .. surfaced and evolved during the era of the early American republic" (p. 5). Childers eloquently describes how the idea of self-government that emerged during the Revolutionary era allowed both northerners and southerners to make arguments for or against the expansion of slavery. Childers successfully demonstrates to his readers that popular sovereignty was not something developed by Lewis Cass in 1848 as a solution to the Wilmot Proviso during his failed presidential campaign. Instead, the Michigan senator built...