| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael William Pfau. The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series.) East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2005. Pp. vii, 248. $59.95.
Michael William Pfau's book is not really a historical work. Rather, it is a book written by, and apparently for, students of communications studies, and particularly of conspiracies. This is a field with its own theories, language, and controversies that can be of importance to historians only in as much as it affects consideration of the influence of the three opponents of slavery mentioned in the book's title.	1
Pfau distinguishes the antislavery conspiracy theories of his subjects from those of William Lloyd Garrison, who, "eschewing politics ... opted for the withdrawal from the tragic secular world in favor of a brighter millennium or a jihad that would forever end the blight of slavery" (p. 156). Thus, as he suggests, Garrison fit more completely Richard Hofstadter's idea of the paranoid style at the fringe of politics. Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln, however, were more positive. Inasmuch as they referred to a slave power conspiracy, they did so for political purposes. And they proved that conspiracy rhetoric was not necessarily confined to the political fringe After all, they eventually created the Republican Party, which, far from constituting a fringe organization, soon became the second major party in the country. Moreover, while Chase and Sumner were still certain of the existence of a slave power conspiracy, Lincoln was more cautious and merely mentioned its probability.	. . .

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