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Union & Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era. Ed. by David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997. xii, 231 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-87338-565-9.)
Contributors to this notable volume of essays share the twin distinctions of having completed graduate training at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and having been mentored in their professional careers by the noted Civil War-era scholar Richard Sewell, to whom the editors have dedicated the book. Consequently, each of the seven articles addresses some aspect of the political or racial experience of the nineteenth-century United States.
The book's first three essays offer interpretations of the political landscape that contributed to the sectional tensions leading to the war, and they challenge past scholarly assessments. Robert E. May argues that despite widespread theories to the contrary, antebellum presidents from...