Booknotes: Between Extremes

New Arrival:

• Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North by Jack Furniss (LSU Press, 2024).

Much of the recent scholarly attention paid to the U.S. home front during the Civil War has been defined by the management of internal strife and political division along the path to Union victory, but it is just as profitable now and then to reassess (and appreciate) the scale and power of the common ground that existed within northern society. As author Jack Furniss writes in his introduction, the "core contention" of his book Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North is that the "centrist politics" of a collection of Union parties composed of allied Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated Whigs "played a critical role in enabling Union victory in the American Civil War by allowing northern voters to support revolutionary changes for conservative reasons" (Pg. 2). A related facet of the study is its claim that the North's two-party system was much less stable during the period than popularly believed.

From the description: "Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln’s administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments―indeed the entire war effort―depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss’s Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war’s radical outcomes."

This one will definitely go into the 'to-read' pile. I have my fingers crossed that a couple more LSUP titles from October and November that I was hoping would arrive before the end of this month make it in.