| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. By Leonard L. Richards. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2537-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8071-2600-4.)

Did a vast, conspiratorial "slave power" control the country between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War? Prominent Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln and William Seward thought so, as did the editorial staffs of the New York Times and the Atlantic. Indeed, slaveholders occupied the White House for 50 of the 62 years between 1788 and 1850. Eighteen of 31 Supreme Court justices were slaveholders, as were the three men who served longest as Speaker of the House of Representatives. James Henry Hammond, a U.S. senator from South Carolina, boasted that slaveholders such as he had a stranglehold on the federal government and used it to extend slavery's reach. 1

Since the 1920s, many historians have dismissed the slave power thesis as a misappropriation of abolitionist-era rhetoric or a manifestation of a "paranoid style" in American politics. In this elegant and utterly convincing new book, Leonard L. Richards demonstrates the origins, high-flying successes, and ultimate failure of the slave power. In doing so, he reveals the believers in the slave power thesis to be far more than a collection of malcontents and status-anxious eccentrics, and he reconstructs just how far the southern reach extended during the country's formative years. . . .

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