| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leonard L. Richards. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 228. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95.

In this book, Leonard L. Richards attempts to revive the so-called Slave Power thesis, an idea most famously articulated in the 1850s by abolitionists, Free Soilers, and Republicans. In short, the Slave Power thesis held that slaveholders dominated national politics and used their control to promote the interests of the peculiar institution. Richards believes that twentieth-century historians have been too quick to reject the notion of an aggressive slave power, dismissing it as the manifestation of a "paranoid style" in American politics (p. 18). 1

Richards devotes much of his first chapter to historical debate on the Slave Power theory, a discussion initiated by the scholar Chauncey S. Boucher in the 1920s. Richards believes the Slave Power thesis to be more complex than its critics have conceded, and he therefore sets out to clearly define the problem. He argues that Republicans such as William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln best made the case for the Slave Power thesis in the 1850s. In agreeing with Lincoln and Seward that the slaveholders exercised disproportionate influence in national politics, Richards suggests that southern political dominance rested on several elements, including the three-fifths compromise, sectional balance in the Senate, southern power to sway national party caucuses, and political patronage. . . .

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