Title: Magnificent Missourian
Description: There were giants in the Senate in the time of Andrew Jackson. One of them was Thomas Hart  Benton, five times a Senator from Missouri, the subject of Elbert B. Smith's new biography. For a giant, Benton has suffered a tremendous decline in reputation, not by being discredited, but by being forgotten. Clay, Calhoun, and Webster are well remembered, but the average American is unlikely to recognize Benton's name, and even educated men are likely to confuse him with the Missouri artist, his brother's grandson.

Yet historians have necessarily held Benton in their remembrance.  And now at last, doubtless stimulated both by the revival of interest in the Jackson period and by the need of a new Benton study utilizing all the source materials turned up in the twentieth century, two biographies of Benton have appeared within two years. 

Both are good. The first, Old Bullion Benton by William N. Chambers, is longer and more detailed than Elbert Smith's book. Smith has been able to profit from Chambers' research, particularly on Benton's background and early years, but he has sought not to add to Chambers' work but to present a shorter, more succinct account of Benton's career. I think he succeeds. For the scholar  there is no particular need for Smith's book in view of the fact that Chambers' book offers more details and is more carefully documented.  But for the general reader,  Smith's book has the advantage of being the shorter by more than a hundred pages and therefore of making the story a bit clearer and more direct, and the life somewhat faster moving. Both Chambers and Smith write well. 

Born in North  Carolina, admitted to the bar in Tennessee, Benton moved to St. Louis and entered the Senate when his new state was admitted to the Union. Bully Benton came to the Senate with a reputation for learning  and for pugnacity—he  had engaged in a rough-and-tumble brawl with Jackson and in a more formal duel had killed his man.  In time his pugnacity was restricted to verbal combat, but his learning grew, and though it sometimes bored  his colleagues and the spectators, it often proved useful—to historians, for instance, as it was exhibited in his Thirty Years View,  In his long career he served, first, Missouri and the West; second, his party  and its Presidential leaders, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk  (strangely, Benton never sought the Presidency himself); and, finally, the nation, when he thought its future   imperiled by the onslaught of abolitionists and nullificationists. 

Considering Benton's belligerency, it is natural to make his biography a tale of combat, and this Smith does. Most vivid of the combats through which the hero is conducted is his contest against the abolitionists and nullificationists, whom he saw as twin edges of shears that threatened to sever the nation's unity. Smith makes Southern sectionalists, like Henry S. Foote and particularly Calhoun, his villains, because he feels Benton's opposition to them cost him his Senate seat, as well as because he sympathizes with Benton's position in relation  to Calhoun. A well-told, exciting narrative tends to oversimplify the situations it portrays, and that may be a fault of this book.  So Benton, the protagonist, may appear here too often in a heroic role and too seldom as the pompous and tiresome verbalizer he sometimes seemed to his colleagues.  Yet the book is accurate, clear, and concise. If it is over friendly to Benton, it could hardly be otherwise; Benton was such a fighter that he made men choose sides.
Subjects: Riel Rebellion, 1885, Red River Rebellion, 1869-1870, Biography, History, Legislators, Benton, thomas hart, 1782-1858
People: Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858)