The JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY has received a copy of Charles E. Benton's "_Troutbeck: A Dutchess County Homestead_," with an introduction by John Borroughs. Among the beautiful illustrations in this pamphlet is that of Webutuck River at Troutbeck during the performance of the "Hiawatha Pageant" at the fifth Amenia Field Day, August 15, 1914. A. A. Schomburg's _Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry_ has been published as one of a series of monographs edited by Charles F. Heartman of New York. It is a valuable work. The Argosy Company, Georgetown, British Guiana, has recently published a work entitled _Black Talk_. This book consists of notes on Negro dialect compiled by C. G. Cruickshank. It is an interesting and informing volume. THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY VOL. II--APRIL, 1917--No. 2 I THE EVOLUTION OF THE SLAVE STATUS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY Slavery and freedom were constituent elements in American institutions from the very beginning. In the inherent antagonism of the two, DeTocqueville recognized the most serious menace to the permanence of the nation.[122] Slavery, which came in time to be known as the "peculiar institution" of the South, gradually shaped the social, moral, economic and political ideas of that section to fit its genius. The more democratic tendencies of the free industrial order of the North served by contrast to crystallize still more the group consciousness of the South. In this wise the erstwhile loyal South was slowly transformed into a section that was prepared to place local and sectional interests above national, and the result was secession. Just as it was not loyalty to inalienable human rights in the abstract that brought about the abolition of slavery in the North, but rather the gradual expansion of the idea of liberty through the free give and take of a vigorous democracy in which economic and social conditions militated against slavery, so it was not loyalty to States' rights in the abstract that brought about the Civil War but rather the alien group consciousness of the slave States which was the outgrowth of totally different economic and social conditions. It is the object of this paper to trace the influence of these various factors upon the status of the slave.