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Booraem V Hendrick, The Formation of the Republican Party in New York: Politics and Conscience in the Antebellum North (New York and London: New York Univ. Press, 1983, $52). Pp. 296. ISBN 0 8147 1045 X.

How was the Republican party created in a "typical" Northern state in 1854—56, and why was it able to triumph over the older major parties? This elegant, unduly modest book approaches these questions with an all-too-rare appreciation of the persisting, almost inertial power of the older parties, amidst the turbulent evangelical passions of the 1850s. Even in 1854, when antislavery Democrats began to join Freesoilers in a new Republican party, leaders of the embarrassed state Whig party opposed fusion, recognizing the difficulty of directing their supporters into cooperation with old enemies. Only in September 1855, as the progress of fusion in other states threatened to isolate the New York party, did the Whigs " surrender" to the Republicans and so take control of the new party, which was soon organized on the basis of the old Whig "machine." This takeover was not merely the work of cynical political manipulators. The author rightly emphasizes the limited power of state leaders, in an essentially decentralized political system. Even the formidable Thurlow Weed was no boss, but a conciliator, a broker among different interests within his party; and he threw his influence behind fusion only when county leaders began to appreciate the persisting threat of Know-Nothingism to the local Whig vote. Even then it proved difficult to transfer Whig votes to the new party, many former supporters especially in the cities turning to the American party as the vehicle of anti-Democratic Unionism. Such evidence implicitly casts doubt on Michael Holt's thesis that politics became sectionalized, in The Political Crisis of the ISJOS (1978), primarily because the Jacksonian parties had lost their power to counteract divisive pressures. What drove the realignment, as this fine book makes clear, were the disputes over slavery expansion; in particular, events in Congress and Kansas — the attack on Charles Sumner and the sack of Lawrence — in the spring of 1856 radicalized opinion and turned both original Know-Nothings and antislavery Democrats against parties which sacrificed freesoil principle to national unity. The KnowNothings turned to a Republican party that shared their evangelical moralism even as it publicly eschewed nativism and temperance, while the adherence of Barnburner Democrats undermined Whig predominance and ensured that the Republican party could now take no firm stand on the old party issues. Thus a proper awareness of the persistence of the Second Party System finally reemphasizes that the new major party that emerged from the crosscurrents of the 1850s primarily represented, after all, the determination of most northerners to resist the aggressions of the Slave Power.