Review - "William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter" by C. Evan Stewart

[William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter (November 1860-April 1861) by C. Evan Stewart (Twelve Tables Press, 2026). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, chapter notes. Pages:xiii,205. ISBN:978-1-946074-46-1. $20.95]

As the momentous 1860 Republican National Convention approached, the general expectation was that New York's William Henry Seward would be the party's presidential nominee. The man himself clearly anticipated it, and was crushed by the defeat. Nevertheless, while Seward failed to reach the pinnacle of American political aspirations, he still saw himself as a man on a mission. After President-elect Abraham Lincoln retreated into an extended stretch of pre-inaugural silence after his great victory, a choice deemed "masterly inactivity" by some and a grave mistake by others, Seward went to work indefatigably trying to prevent further defections from the Union, seven states having seceded in close succession that winter of 1860-61. Seward set out, presumptuously, to act as the power behind the throne, a 'Premier' of sorts who would sagely guide the inexperienced Lincoln through the coming political shoals.

The hardline Lincoln and the more moderate Seward both sought to avoid war, but they weren't on the same page when it came to risking escalation. Seward's mollifying approach during that time, which included unauthorized dealings with southern representatives, provoked strong reactions, including accusations that he was a disloyal Republican. The historical literature has been similarly critical of his actions. More sympathetic is C. Evan Stewart's William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter (November 1860-April 1861), which presents Seward's diligent conciliatory efforts as an organized plan, distinct from Lincoln's own apparent lack of a clear plan, to avoid intersectional conflict long enough to keep the balance of restless slave states within the federal union and cool national passions. It may have been a vain hope in hindsight, but it was also considered possible, given time and absent provocation, that a resurgence of unionist pressure, both from within and without, might force the already seceded states to reconsider their folly.

As Stewart outlines it in the book, Seward's plan to save the nation unfolded in three parts. Unlike Lincoln, who steadfastly adhered to his party's national election platform opposing any further extension of slavery and was fiercely partisan in placing Republican interests above all else, Seward adopted a conciliatory approach open to what he felt were moderate concessions. So the first part of Seward's plan, as explained by the author, was to conciliate Border State Unionists [in the context of his analysis, Stewart's definition of "Border States" also encompasses the Upper South] by supporting some sort of acceptable territorial compromise. One option was to allow a proslavery New Mexico. Citing a private statement by Lincoln himself indicating that he might budge in the case of New Mexico (a unique exception to his otherwise uncompromising stance that was likely rooted, as biographer Michael Burlingame and others have suggested, in the widespread belief that slavery itself was impractical there), it seemed like a possibility. However, when considered within the full context of Lincoln's firm and longstanding opposition to slavery's extension, it is not surprising that compromise proposals such as the "New Mexico Plan" or the "Border State Plan" went nowhere.

Even if Lincoln had been explicit in accepting some level of backtracking on his previous pledge regarding slavery's extension, he would have encountered significant, perhaps overwhelming, opposition among his newly formed Republican coalition. Nevertheless, Seward did leverage his considerable influence in a strong attempt at lobbying fellow Republicans to unite with Border State Unionists in some common cause. This was the second part of his plan. The basis of this common cause would be Lincoln's own set of proposals, which included stronger federal legislation (with safeguards against abuse) enforcing the fugitive clause of the Constitution, insistence that state laws contradicting the federal statutes be repealed, and that the Union be preserved.

Intertwined with the second, the third part of the Seward plan involved reorienting the face of the national crisis from it being primarily a matter of 'proslavery versus antislavery' to 'union versus disunion,' the latter question far more unifying. Unlike Lincoln, Seward had personal relationships with key southern leaders and understood their concerns and perspectives, and Stewart credits Seward with clear success in this key part of his plan, which was primarily directed toward Virginia. While it is debatable how much credit should be awarded to Seward personally, overall success is evidenced by the clear unionist majorities that emerged from the winter debates among state delegates in critical Upper South states such as Virginia and Tennessee. The conditional versus unconditional nature of that pro-Union support is not explored, but the point is that the efforts of Seward to center the political discussion on the choice between union and disunion resonated in slave states outside the Deep South. This status quo was maintained until the Lincoln administration attempted to force the issue in Charleston Harbor, the resulting acts of "coercion" (as many southerners of all stripes termed Lincoln's insistence on maintaining a military presence in the harbor but especially his national call to arms after the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter) ultimately pushing the Upper South into the secessionist fold.

Seward was among those who favored withdrawing federal forces from Charleston Harbor. It is one of the great what-ifs of events leading up to the outbreak of the war. Abandoning Fort Sumter could be interpreted as being symbolic of weakness that would only embolden the secessionist movement, but it could also be part of a wily political strategy that avoided igniting the crisis' most dangerous powder keg by giving up a strategic point that was by all measures indefensible while still maintaining possession of the other U.S.-held fortified installations in the Deep South, such as Fort Pickens, which were defensible. Regardless, Lincoln's risky actions placed Seward's cherished conciliatory campaign in a profoundly awkward, to put it lightly, position that ended up catching fire from all sides. Seward's backdoor dealings, which included unauthorized promises that could not be kept, both destroyed his credibility among the southern allies he had cultivated for weeks and months and deeply angered fellow Republicans who felt that Seward was betraying their party's avowed principles.

A compact 5"x7" hardcover with roughly half its pages filled with explanatory chapter notes, Stewart's narrative account can be read in a single sitting. Every reader would do well to pay close attention to the notes as they are not only composed of source citations but are crammed with interesting nuggets of background information and additional discussion, the latter including deeper looks into the documentation along with judicious measurement and analysis of competing interpretations from Lincoln scholars, Seward biographers, and other leading historians.

C. Evan Stewart's William Henry Seward's Quest to Save the Nation During the Secession Winter does not try to argue that Seward's plan was superior to Lincoln's handling of the crisis, or that it could or would have eventually brought about reunion without war. One wonders about the degree to which some of the more fantastical elements of Seward's scheming, particularly his infamous memorandum proposing a means of reuniting the country through declaring war against European nations Spain and France (which Stewart believes to have been more threatening tool, part of a combined domestic and foreign strategy, than earnest desire), have unduly overshadowed the totality of his efforts. Rather than seeing Seward's Southern Strategy to be an unqualified failure, Stewart concludes that Seward's post-election plan "indisputably bought the administration time to get into place and start to wield the levers of power." With inflamed passions all around, how much longer Seward's conciliatory process could have been maintained remains an open question. In the end, Lincoln's decision to directly risk war by resupplying Fort Sumter upended Seward's moderate course, but Stewart seems to agree with keen observer Henry Adams that it was "right to make the effort even if overruled" (pp. 197-98). William Seward's role in the Secession Winter will always be a topic of discussion rife with disagreement, and Stewart feeds the debate with a balanced assessment that offers a great deal of food for thought.

Review - "The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation" by John Bicknell

[The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation by John Bicknell (Stackpole Books, 2025). Hardcover, 2 maps, photo gallery, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:v,290/372. ISBN:978-0-8117-7665-3. $32.95]

When it came to what was to be expected from those individuals who were the most politically motivated appointments to the Union Army's high command, public confidence in John Charles Fremont's ability to produce battlefield victories ranked at or near the top. Though his Mexican War career was controversial, and he was recognized much more for frontier exploration than organized fighting capacity, the famous "Pathfinder of the West" entered the American Civil War with a reputation that paid off with a lofty appointment as one of the Union Army's highest ranking major generals. As author John Bicknell argues in The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation, while battlefield glory in the Civil War entirely escaped Fremont, his legacy as an early and leading proponent of military emancipation was unparalleled. In Bicknell's estimation, Fremont, much more so than David Hunter, Benjamin Butler, or any other of the slate of prominent Union generals who targeted slavery early on, deserves to be remembered by history as the "military embodiment" of emancipation.

As Bicknell explains, Fremont did not plan to immediately go into military service. At the beginning of the conflict he was in Europe, where he facilitated significant arms purchases for Union forces. Amid the general rush and confusion among competing buyers, along with no little amount of trans-Atlantic miscommunication, Fremont's financial dealings were often, perhaps unavoidably, conducted in irregular fashion. Similarly haphazard procurement procedures led to accusations of waste and fraud throughout Fremont's subsequent tenure in Missouri as commander of the Department of the West. Much of the opprobrium was directed toward Justus McKinstry, Fremont's chief quartermaster, whose actions were given wide latitude by his superior. The author's own assessment of the accusations of official malfeasance in Missouri, and how much blame Fremont himself earned, is judicious in its approach. Taking the measure of administrative disorder on Fremont's end along with the likelihood that unofficial shortcuts, sketchy or not, were necessary to address crisis in the face of broad neglect from distant Washington, Bicknell's 'plenty of blame to go around' handling of the matter has merit.

It was during his abbreviated tenure at the head of the Department of the West that Fremont experienced the political meatgrinder that would plague every top commander in Missouri. As was the case with Nathaniel Lyon and William Harney before him, practically everything in Missouri ran through the very powerful Blair family. Like Lyon, but unlike Harney, Fremont, at least initially, had the support of the politically conservative but uncompromisingly pro-Union Blairs, who were basically the long arm of Lincoln in state and departmental affairs. Bicknell traces how the relationship mutually soured, a situation exacerbated by Fremont arresting serving officer Frank Blair. As the author keenly observes, it also didn't help Fremont's standing that key emissaries from Washington who were sent to Missouri to report on conditions there were far from impartial in their investigations and submitted slanted reports hostile to Fremont. Of course, any discussion of the home, military, and political life of John C. Fremont has to include his close partner in all of it, wife Jessie Benton Fremont. Their package-deal relationship has been explored at length in many publications, and this study ably traces the many ways in which Jessie's unflagging support and personal interventions aided, and at times hindered, her husband's Civil War-period military and political activities.

Among the growing list of ways in which the general aggravated his civilian masters, it was Fremont's penchant for striking out on his own path, even to the point of insubordination, that got him into the most amount of hot water with the Lincoln administration. Fremont is perhaps most remembered by Civil War students for his 1861 declaration of martial law in Missouri that included a revolutionary order forever freeing all slaves held by those in rebellion. While the order was immediately and fulsomely praised by many in the North, Lincoln, caught off guard and deeming such a weighty political decision the exclusive domain of the chief executive, immediately rescinded the emancipation measure. Fremont's refusal to revise his proclamation, forcing Lincoln to do it himself, was the strongest signal that his tenure in Missouri would likely be short. That impolitic reaction, combined with his failure to offer much relief to the besieged defenders of Lexington in September, placed Fremont's remaining military freedom of action in Missouri on a very short leash. His ponderous fall campaign into southwest Missouri achieved nothing of great note (partially due to persistent logistical limitations), and Fremont was finally relieved altogether on November 2, 1861, ending a tumultuous 100 days in command.

The book is clearly not intended to be a detailed examination of Fremont's generalship, providing only big-picture narratives of his operations and no tactical-level discussion of his battles. Sympathetic to Fremont's 1861-62 department commands occupying logistical backwaters, the author largely defends the general's operational conduct as reasonable when faced with the supply, transportation, and environmental challenges presented to him at the time. Bicknell agrees with Jeffrey Patrick, one of the most astute students of the 1861 campaigns in Missouri, that Fremont did not 'abandon' Lyon in the Missouri interior as much as he judged (correctly, in their estimation) securing the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to be the department's overriding strategic priority. As Mountain Department commander, Fremont's chief generalship woes, according to Bicknell, were his lack of enterprise and willingness to countenance calculated risks necessary to reap greater rewards. Fremont was, unlike Grant, not one of those commanders who could accept the limits he was presented with and simply do the very best with what he had in terms of men, equipment, and supplies. While outlining where he deems Fremont ill-used by the Lincoln administration and by history, the author nevertheless concludes that there's no evidence to support belief that Fremont was competent to lead a major army in the field.

There are a few niggles to bring up in the Missouri coverage, mainly in the area of the author's terminology choices. For example, Bicknell improperly calls the Missouri State Guard the Missouri "Home Guard," and he applies the "conditional" unionist brush to a large group of steadfast loyalists (Lincoln cabinet secretary Edward Bates being the most prominent among them) who would be more appropriately represented with the term "conservative" unionists.

Upon Fremont's departure from active service in mid-1862 after refusing a subordinate position in John Pope's Army of Virginia, he quickly fades from view in most general histories of the war, only to briefly reemerge during the nomination process of the 1864 presidential election season. However, Bicknell's more focused study offers a great deal of insight into Fremont's remaining military and political aspirations during this lesser-known gap period. His research reveals that Fremont maintained a wide base of support in the North, and not just among radicals, for both further command opportunities and high political office. On the military legacy side of things, Bicknell feels that Fremont made a major error in declining to pursue a leading role in organizing and commanding black troops. His reasonable supposition is that Fremont's wide popularity combined with his earnest regard for black freedom and advancement made returning to the war at the head of black troops his best remaining opportunity for producing a major military contribution to the Union war effort.

In his earlier study of the 1856 presidential election, Bicknell argued that Fremont's political campaign, though unsuccessful, paved the way for Lincoln's victory in 1860. That "pathfinder" theme connecting Fremont and Lincoln continues in this study. Fremont's next great trailblazing role, this time in military emancipation and application of hard war (with the conciliatory Lincoln trailing behind Fremont in follower status), is a principal part of Bicknell's narrative and analysis. Though the strength and implications of that line of thinking, as presented in the book, certainly possesses numerous elements of truth, it is also the case that that viewpoint benefits very heavily from the advantages of assessing history through the lens of hindsight. It is easy to see now that Lincoln's confidence in southern unionism and concerns over Kentucky's continued loyalty were overblown. However, given what was known and what was unknown at the time, one can argue that Lincoln's calculated caution was well justified, or at the very least not worthy of moral disdain to the degree exhibited by the abolitionists of the time. In comparison to those contemporary critics, the author is more nuanced in his criticisms of Lincoln's reticence.

In 1864, Fremont made it abundantly clear that his third-party presidential candidacy was primarily aimed at defeating Lincoln's chances at a second term. He told all who would listen that he would gladly drop out of the race once someone with better radical credentials than Lincoln received the Republican nomination. However, once he saw the writing on the wall that Lincoln was staying firmly in the race and retained broad-based support, Fremont, to his credit, stepped down rather than risk being the cause behind losing the White House to the Democrats in a three-way contest. He also wanted it made known that his withdrawal was unconditional, which caused some anxiety among the backroom deal makers but did not end up derailing anti-radical Montgomery Blair's exit from Lincoln's cabinet.

As revealed in John Bicknell's The Pathfinder and the President, the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and John C. Fremont was never a close one and quickly dissolved into mutual antipathy. Close reading of Bicknell's study essentially erases any thought that the pair's partnership could have been more productive had just a few things gone differently. The two men were just too far apart in personality and political disposition, and Fremont lacked the military ability to make better use of the high command opportunities that came his way. The modern Civil War literature has produced numerous fine studies of the many complications involved in managing a coalition war effort of pro-Union radicals and conservatives, and Bicknell's study of the Fremont-Lincoln relationship also offers readers another set of keen insights into the inseparability of political considerations from military affairs amid such a conflict. While Fremont was in many ways his own worst enemy when it came to antagonizing the president, he was also the target of powerful forces arrayed against his radical political alignment. The degree to which Fremont deserves credit for leading a cautious President Lincoln along the path toward military emancipation remains open to further debate, and, as the author maintains, the matter also raises intriguing questions in regard to how much the war might have been shortened (if at all) had Lincoln sustained Fremont's emancipation edict in Missouri, but Bicknell's arguments on both counts are a force to be reckoned with among the doubters. Highly recommended.

Review - "Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North" by Jack Furniss

[Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North by Jack Furniss (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,260/334. ISBN:978-0-8071-8218-5. $50]

It's useful to keep in mind that the Republican Party, which followed the seismic collapse of the national Whig Party as well as a collection of short-lived transitory political parties, was still in its infancy during the 1860 presidential election cycle when it triumphed over the fatally fractured Democratic Party. As Russell McClintock perhaps explained best in his 2008 book Lincoln and the Decision for War, the incoming president, mindful of his party's youthful fragility, prioritized party unity over countenancing any compromise measures that might threaten promises enshrined in the party's electoral platform. Upon southern secession, the northern (or Douglas) Democrats assumed the role of the national Democracy in the United States, seemingly restoring the two-party system broken during the previous electoral cycle.

Contesting that interpretation, Jack Furniss's Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North critically argues that stressing restoration of a stable, oppositional two-party system during the Civil War period creates a false impression of an overall political structure better described as a fluid system in which inter-party coalitions on state and national levels were instrumental in propelling the United States to victory. As Furniss powerfully contends, it was the fusion of Republicans, Douglas Democrats, and independent old-line Whigs into state-level Union party arrangements, the persistence of which no one could predict, that harnessed and maintained the pro-war support of the country's vast conservative middle. On the most fundamental level, the members of that majority shared the same veneration for the Union and the popular government it represented, and with that came unqualified respect for the outcomes of free and fair elections.

The wartime Democratic Party as principled and loyal opposition (versus an unprincipled obstructionist, even treasonous, fifth column dangerous to the survival of the republic during its gravest existential crisis) is something that historians have struggled with for a very long time. Published viewpoints, and the influence they have had on scholarly contemporaries, have been all over the map. The most recent trend, exemplified through Jennifer Weber's Copperheads (arguably the most widely read and referenced study on the topic), returns the emphasis toward presenting a portrait of Democrats much in common with how their partisan Republican foes painted them during and after the war. What Furniss offers is much more nuanced, an acknowledgement of the party's strategic missteps and racist appeals balanced by a more respectful appreciation of the spectrum of views contained in party leaders and voters as well as their high-minded stands (ex. for freedom of speech and the press and against arbitrary arrest and other aspects of martial law) that rose well above mere partisan convenience.

It's probably not far from the mark to say that the popular understanding of Civil War period fusion parties generally begins with the National Union Party's success in the 1864 election that propelled its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to a second term in office and decisively rejected the minority peace movement in the North. Between Extremes, however, properly frames that late-war triumph as a culmination of years of build up. In eye-opening fashion, Furniss freshly traces the origins of the National Union Party to its state-level forebears, which were created as early as 1861. Important elections occurred on a yearly basis during the Civil War, so the author's outlining of the evolution of political trends, primarily in gubernatorial politics, in six states (Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and California) offers an informative picture of popular will at regular intervals. Each state's unique geographical situation and political representation shines through, as do the personalities, ideological disposition, and strategic political acumen of the governors themselves.

As referenced earlier, Furniss's study clearly demonstrates that the two-party system was already in flux by the time 1861 elections came around. Even at that early stage, with the war only months old, candidates were already identifying themselves with formally organized Union parties. Those early-war coalitions between Republicans, Democrats, and independent Whigs fostered centrist pro-war cooperation that would be maintained through war's end. Indeed, by the elections of 1863 and 1864, over 80% of congressional contests matched Union (not Republican) Party candidates against Democratic opponents. As Furniss clearly shows, in particular for California, the emergence of Union parties could be immediately and powerfully transformative on the state level.

In analyzing Democratic Party gains achieved during the 1862 midterm elections, Furniss challenges those who base their understanding of that shift just on popular backlash against seemingly stalled progress toward victory and widespread anger against expanding war aims to include emancipation. He adds that Democratic success should also be seen as their convincing the political center that the war could and should still be fought vigorously but on conservative principles using conventional means different from the radical-sponsored war measures passed through Congress. In Furniss's view, the two Confiscation Acts, among other things championed by the radicals, upset the centrist consensus without producing any dramatic corresponding progress toward victory. Again using state-level election results as an indication of shifts in national direction, that midterm disaffection propelled a Democrat into the governor's seat in New York and a coalition Union party of conservative Republicans and Democrats greatly reduced the radical Republican gubernatorial vote majority in Massachusetts.

1862 Democratic gains proved only transitory, however, as the party disastrously stubbed its toe in 1863. A common theme in Furniss's analysis is that electoral success predictably went to the party that  most persuasively appealed to the centrist majority but also was able to strategically contain the most electorally threatening ambitions of their own most extreme political faction (the immediatist abolitionists of the Republican Party and the peace wing of the Democrats). In 1863, mainstream northern Democrats failed to adequately check their vocal peace movement minority, irreparably harming their party's hard-worn position as loyal opposition. On the other side, Union parties, which were always majority Republican, consistently outmaneuvered their most radical allies while still keeping them within the fold. Union parties won by repeatedly messaging military restoration of the Union at the expense of all other concerns while at the same time publicly downplaying (or even omitting mention altogether) slavery and emancipation. Even in Kentucky, where many of Lincoln's war policies were condemned by the majority of the population, Union Party gubernatorial candidate Thomas Bramlette won through single-minded campaign focus on restoration of the Union. Factors most obnoxious to Kentuckians were referred by Bramlette to the future ballot box once victory in the war was secured. In his discussion of this period, the author also cites the troubling beginnings of a "militarization of politics" in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, though he does minimize the scale and significance of army interference in free elections. While he deems such events "rare occurrences," Furniss does appropriately call for more in-depth study of the topic. Ever since the publication of Jonathan White's extensive analysis of the soldier vote in 1864, this reviewer has hoped someone would take up that baton.

Implementation of emancipation and other controversial wartime measures such as black enlistment is often presented as a triumph of radical influence and persuasion, but Furniss sees the war itself as the primary instigator. Through the war's unforeseen length and level of destructiveness, revolutionary measures such as emancipation organically shifted into the centrist sphere as being among those means deemed necessary for reaching the common overarching goal of restoring the Union. While fully acknowledging Democratic blunders leading into the 1864 election, Furniss persuasively interprets Lincoln's smashing electoral victory at the head of the National Union Party as being significantly based on winning political strategies that were initially developed by state Union parties and effectively honed by their gubernatorial leaders over the previous three years of war. The study also addresses the question of how long the coalition of Republicans and Democrats would outlast the achievement of its central goal, that of restoring the Union. The answer was not long, as the debates and clashing views over the character and goals of Reconstruction that started to fester in 1864 renewed the forces of political change and realignment during the postwar period.

In exploring the indispensable nature of centrist political strategy in sustaining a war effort with the non-partisan aim of defeating the Confederacy and restoring the federal union (much of which can be explained through the success of Union parties designed to broaden that base of support as much as possible), Jack Furniss's Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North offers its readers a fresh and highly insightful new way of characterizing and understanding the political alignment and party system of the United States during the Civil War years. The volume also profoundly reinforces recent scholarship detailing the critical importance of the political partnership, fraught as it may have been in many instances, between state governors and the Lincoln administration. Highly recommended.

Review - "Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates" by Mark Neels

[Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates by Mark A. Neels (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024). Softcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xi,194/266. ISBN:978-0-8093-3949-5. $27.95]

Born and raised in Virginia, Edward Bates (1793-1869) moved to Missouri as a young man and quickly became intimately associated with the political establishment and early growth of that western state. Bates's older brother, Frederick, was a prominent figure in St. Louis, and the younger Bates parlayed that advantageous association, along with a thriving legal practice, to gain social and political prominence in the city. His public offices included one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and election to both houses of the state legislature. When Missouri became a state in 1820, Bates was involved in creating its constitution. He was also the state's first attorney general.

Edward Bates was, like Lincoln, a Whig and strong admirer of Henry Clay, and he established himself as a leading figure of the party in Missouri. Bates consistently supported federal funding for internal improvements, was deeply skeptical of national territorial expansionism, and he positioned himself in opposition to Democratic Party giants such as President Andrew Jackson and, closer to home, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Of course, he's best known as Lincoln's choice for the cabinet post of attorney general of the United States. Largely overshadowed by other Civil War-period cabinet figures such as William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Salmon Chase, and Gideon Welles, six decades have passed since the publication of the most recent full biography, Marvin R. Cain's Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (1965). Providing a much-needed updated perspective on Bates's life and public career is Mark Neels's Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates.

As a leading citizen of St. Louis, one present to witness (and even help shape) that place's growth from frontier post to great city, Bates was a strong believer in the idea that the emerging West, symbolized by St. Louis, would act as a mediating force in resolving the increasingly troubling sectional conflict between North and South. However, the local unity he deemed necessary to that grand project's success did not emerge as anticipated, with the massive mid-century influx of immigrants (primarily Germans) into the city and state commonly resisting cultural assimilation and widely espousing political views more radical than those held by the majority of native-born Missourians.

During the nationwide search for a Republican presidential candidate capable of winning in 1860, Bates's position as an antislavery conservative who had defended slaves in freedom courts on multiple occasions and fully supported congressional oversight over territorial slave policy made him an attractive alternative to divisive frontrunner William Seward. An interesting historical question surrounding Bates's political career is why his 1860 candidacy, which was deemed strong before the convention, foundered so quickly (he ranked last among serious contenders during the first balloting and his support level plunged even further with each one that followed). In seeking to answer why Bates failed to gain traction, Neels offers two suggestions. First, German-American Republicans, strong in Bates's Missouri and a powerful bloc in other places, denounced him as a nativist, citing his support of American Party candidate Millard Fillmore in 1856. To German leaders, that dalliance with nativist figures, however brief, made Bates persona non grata regardless of his own expressed views opposed to nativism. The second factor was strategic in nature. Bates, although he had several influential supporters at the Chicago convention, failed to employ a dedicated campaign manager (someone who could, like David Davis did for Lincoln, creatively promote his boss and hustle votes). It is up to the reader to decide whether those factors offer sufficient explanation, but the analysis is sound.

Throughout his public life, Bates's conservative disposition left him deeply skeptical of the breadth and strength of executive power. As the author reminds us, both Bates and Lincoln condemned what they saw as President Polk conducting the Mexican War without proper congressional approval and oversight, but Bates, though troubled by the prospect, seemed to generally agree with Lincoln that the Civil War was an extraordinary event that required extraordinary measures. The reader gets the impression that that reluctant philosophical concession, combined with Bates's ironclad loyalty to the administration, led the attorney general to support executive action in imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus during the opening months of the war (at least until Congress could convene). Congress later approved Lincoln's course of action, but the matter was not settled until passage of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863. Still, Bates, who witnessed widespread reliance upon military tribunals from the more radical factions of the government along with Lincoln's own willingness to exceed the powers granted him by the act, remained disturbed for the rest of the war by the federal government's continued application of what he saw as arbitrary powers

Unfortunately for historians, Bates's capitol hill entanglements with early-war habeas corpus legal matters left him little opportunity to document his own private thoughts and official views on what was going on in St. Louis and the rest of Missouri in 1861, a critical time that saw the initiation of general hostilities and the state's governor deposed and replaced with Bates's own son-in-law, Hamilton Gamble. Bates was predictably pleased with Gamble's appointment, and both conservatives, according to Neels, envisioned a strong state-led partnership with the federal government.

Although Bates as attorney general was uniquely positioned to offer Lincoln legal advice, it remains unclear the degree to which Lincoln was influenced by the Missourian's opinions, especially where they differed with the president's own. Indeed, many readers of the book will likely find themselves hungering for more details about the personal interactions between the two and the nature/extent of their friendship. Perhaps the source material on the topic is scarce. On matters related to the Confiscation Acts and other controversial war policies and legislation, Lincoln bypassed Bates's concerns (for example, his desire to have civilian courts adjudicate property seizures) and aligned himself fully with the more amenable legal philosophy of respected international law expert Francis Lieber. In regard to the Emancipation Proclamation, the cabinet conservatives—Bates, who had freed his own slaves a decade before, Blair, and Welles—each held doubts about some aspect of it on matters of expediency or practicality. For his part, Bates, who did not believe whites and blacks could peacefully coexist as equal citizens, urged that mandatory colonization be attached to it and treaties forged with foreign countries that agreed to accept freedpeople and respect their fundamental freedoms. Regardless of his personal views, Bates accepted the inevitable but, like he did earlier when opposing certain parts of the Confiscation Acts, still urged Lincoln to task civilian courts, not military officers acting on War Department orders, with oversight over ground-level emancipation. He failed in that after Lincoln repeatedly refused to force the issue with Stanton. According to Neels, what bothered Bates most was that Lincoln's proclamation went forward while still leaving completely unresolved matters of compensation, colonization, and citizenship. Regardless of the lack of wider resolution, the author maintains that Bates made an important incremental contribution to defining citizenship during the postwar period. As outlined in his opinion on the 1862 David Selsey case, Bates's official position was that people of color who were born free in the U.S. were citizens, though he did not believe that that designation should be automatically extended to recently emancipated slaves.

According to Neels, Bates considered his role as attorney general to be distinctly advisory rather than proactive, and, to his credit, he studiously avoided taking part in the types of personal schemes and intrigues that other cabinet secretaries engaged in during Lincoln's presidency. The one departure that Neels cites was Bates's direct correspondence with a newly appointed department commander in Missouri (Major General Edwin Sumner). Bypassing proper channels, Bates offered the general, who gratefully accepted it, personal advice in regard to navigating military-civilian cooperation in the strife-torn state. As those things go, that was a pretty benign intervention.

In the book, Neels frequently mentions how physically and mentally exhausted Bates was by his post's work requirements, and interested readers might wish that the author provided a bit more detailed information about the day to day duties and activities of the attorney general that led to such overwork. For example, Bates's involvement and legal opinion in regard to the Prize Cases (a momentous early-1863 Supreme Court decision assessing the constitutionality of Lincoln's blockade declaration and the blockade's compliance with international law) is summarized in only a few short paragraphs. On the other hand, there are a number of weighty occasions upon which Bates himself provides only limited assistance to future historians. As the author notes, Bates's diary is silent on several events of key historical importance, including the day of the Emancipation Proclamation's signing, leaving posterity to largely speculate on his personal views and motivations.

In early 1864, Bates suffered a stroke and his family urged him to resign and devote himself to recovery, but Bates, loyal to Lincoln to the end, was determined to hang on until the president's reelection. After that was achieved, Bates resigned and returned to Missouri, where, instead of enjoying quiet retirement, he felt compelled by his conservative principles to oppose the increasingly radical late-war political movement in the state. In a series of public letters, Bates earnestly campaigned against the radical legislative convention that, instead of amending the existing state constitution (which Bates played a major part in drafting), sought, in extralegal (even, as critics contended, revolutionary) fashion to discard the document completely and replace it with their own ideologically aligned one. Bates vehemently opposed the proposed constitution's most extreme and punitive articles, especially those related to voting rights and wholesale unseating of public and private offices. The moderate campaign failed and the radical constitution narrowly passed, but Bates, though he would not live to see its full fruits, would have been happy to see the most obnoxious parts of the constitution successfully challenged in the 1870s by a fresh conservative reform alliance (the Liberal Republicans).

In Lincoln's Conservative Advisor, Mark Neels submits a convincing examination of the conservative Whig political beliefs and standards that consistently guided the public career of Edward Bates. Indeed, Neels's study of Bates's Civil War-era public life serves as an excellent lens through which to gain insights into ideological tensions within the nascent Republican Party between its radical and more conservative elements. As outlined in the book, Bates's relationship with slavery was complicated and life-long, and Neels handles his subject's personal and political evolution from slaveholder to antislavery advocate with judicious humanity. Though Bates, when acting as attorney general, did not envision a near future with black equality, he is credited with defining citizenship in a way that smoothed the path toward it. Though it will likely not raise the public profile of Bates to rank alongside the more popular giants of Lincoln's war cabinet, Neels's study nevertheless restores Bates's historical stature as a founding father of sorts for both the state of Missouri itself and its branch of the Whig party. In the end, what emerges as Edward Bates's most enduring public legacy was his relentless championing of due process, one of American society's most cherished civil rights. While the relatively concise nature of Neels's full biography does not offer the kind of monumental reappraisal found in other recent tome-length biographies of Lincoln's cabinet secretaries, it is more than thorough enough to convincingly convey a renewed appreciation of Edward Bates and his own just due as a major nineteenth-century historical and political figure.

Review - "Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War" by Kenneth Burchett

[Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,256/334. ISBN:978-1-4766-9465-8. $49.95]

Kenneth Burchett's The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict was published back in 2012. While it is unstated whether the author has any current plans in place to go forward from that point in time and address the Battle of Wilson's Creek and beyond, his current research and writing project goes back to the very beginning and addresses in two volumes the historical events that led up to that July 5 running battle around Carthage fought between Union volunteer forces and the Missouri State Guard. The first of the pair is the recently released Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War. The second book, Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, is scheduled to follow sometime next year.

The military aspects of Union general Nathaniel Lyon's 1861 campaign in Missouri are well established in the literature, as are the social and political contexts that inform them. The early chapters of Burchett's book follow in those footsteps by (a) considering Missouri's complicated part in the antebellum period's growing sectional schism between North and South, (b) recalling the ways in which 1850s "Bleeding Kansas" radicalized regional and national politics, (c) reminding readers how the heavy and sustained influx of German immigrants into Missouri during the decades immediately leading up to the war transformed the social and political structure of the state, and (d) tracing the development of the desire on the part of many Missourians to counter extremism by crafting a unique Western identity distinct from purely sectional entanglements. Even though political moderation was still the order of the day after the contentious 1860 election put the first Republican president in the White House, polarizing elements on both ends of the spectrum sought to influence and guide Missouri's course of action in response to southern secession. Burchett covers all of that and more over the first third of the book, expanding his reach further afield than most in also exploring more generally the impact of slavery on the continent since Colonial times.

As is the case with essentially every book covering this period, secession-sympathizing Governor Claiborne Jackson and the politico-military alliance between Lyon and the unconditional Unionist Blair family form the principal antagonistic structure of the narrative. Burchett's descriptions of the character and motivations of each of those agents will be broadly recognizable to those already steeped in the relevant literature, though one might have wished the author had made more explicit exactly where the Jackson-related "(p)reviously unpublished materials," as touted in the publisher's description, were incorporated into the narrative. Perhaps it is made clearer somewhere in the notes.

Biographers and popular observers alike tend to explain Nathaniel Lyon's rash employment of military solutions to every problem by emphasizing his almost messianic fanaticism in defense of the perpetuation of the Union and constitutional self-government as he saw it, the principal enemies of those things in Lyon's mind being slavery and secession. Burchett's impression of Lyon is much like those that came before him, although he does rate the spiritual practice of mesmerism as having a stronger place in the officer's outlook on life (the source being Ashbel Woodward's 1862 biography of Lyon). If memory serves, Lyon's most recent biographer, Christopher Phillips, does not make much of that.

Of course, the physical location that drew the most attention from opposing sides in Missouri was the U.S. arsenal at St. Louis. Estimates of the number of shoulder arms collected there at the time are wildly variable, somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 muskets and rifles. Assessing the many different claims made during that time and ever since, Burchett (in step with most modern research) favors the lower end of the spectrum.

It was tradition for some of the older state militia companies to hold a muster at St. Louis, but the greatly larger 1861 affair was unusual for its size and time of year. All political persuasions on the issue of secession were present in the militia ranks (and a large number of Unionist officers and men defected early on, leaving around 700 men at Lindell's Grove when Lyon advanced upon it). Most ominous to those who might have supposed it an innocuous gathering, the Southwest Battalion and its component artillery battery were summoned to the encampment to join a core of five companies of pro-southern Minute Men. Burchett properly infers, one thinks, that the common knowledge of the immense strength of Lyon's command in combination with the much improved defenses of the arsenal rationally precluded further thought of either direct assault or siege. It seems reasonable to suggest that the encampment was maintained as a means of counterbalancing federal control and influence in the city.

One factor that is suggestive of Jackson and militia commanding general Daniel Frost abandoning hope of capturing the arsenal was the detachment of the militia's best trained and armed unit, Joseph Kelly's Washington Blues company. Kelly's company left the encampment with a large store of powder and munitions to distribute among newly formed caches dispersed throughout the state's interior. Lyon, of course, could only guess their underlying motives. Burchett holds Lincoln administration dithering (primarily the very odd and disruptive decision to relieve then reappoint loyal U.S. general and political moderate William S. Harney, whom Lyon and the Blairs viewed as an untrustworthy ideological enemy, as head of the Department of the West) to have played a major role in creating unnecessary confusion and fostering tragedy. As the author suggests, Harney's impending return likely played a key part in expediting Lyon's determination to march upon the militia encampment at Lindell's Grove.

State provocations also played an instigating role. As Burchett explains, the aid that the Confederacy sent to the Missouri Militia did more harm than good. The donated war material itself was practically useless yet its mere presence in the encampment only bolstered politico-legal cover for Lyon's proposed actions. As explained in the text, Lyon's legal advisors pointed out that the impulsive officer could act against the state's lawfully assembled state militia body by serving camp authorities with a writ of replevin for the return of munitions illegally seized earlier from the Baton Rouge arsenal.

When Lyon did finally act, he displayed uncommon organizational skills. At this earliest of moments when all of the volunteers were green recruits with only rudimentary training, Lyon's multi-column march from the arsenal to Lindell's Grove (as meticulously retraced in the book) proved to be a marvel of coordinated precision. Burchett even goes on to suggest that the planning and execution of the march revealed a mind capable of considerable tactical genius. While there is no detailed map provided of the area between the arsenal and Lindell's Grove, the author makes the complicated movement more comprehensible by superimposing marching routes and unit positions over 1870s street maps of the city. Burchett's highly positive assessment of Lyon's initial plan and its execution, however, is quickly downgraded during the post-surrender pause. In a decision that the author deems to have been a "callous military blunder" (page 231), Lyon, who had clearly witnessed the growing crowds of angry and fearful civilians pressing against his men, opted to march the prisoners directly through the gathering unrest. In the author's view, one of Lyon's biggest mistakes was not planning ahead for contingency. By Burchett's understanding, the self-assured Lyon simply assumed the captured militiamen would accept paroles and disperse, so when they didn't he was forced to improvise. That led to lengthy delays, the most unforeseeable one being Lyon getting kicked in the chest by an aide's horse. That alone stopped proceedings for a period of time some estimates placed at nearly two hours. As a result, the civilian crowds got larger and more volatile.

The entire truth can never be known for certain, but Burchett does what he can to determine where, when, and by whom initial and subsequent bursts of violence occurred. Gamely attempting to bring some narrative order to what was erupting chaos that produced a mass of conflicting eyewitness accounts, Burchett vividly breaks down the sequence of events as best and as fully as he can. Shooting clashes broke out at the front, middle, and rear of the column (in that order), with the federal troops (nervous and angry at the constant stream of taunts and insults hurled from the crowd) firing warning shots first at the front. It was at the rear where the greatest tragedy unfolded. There, Lyon's men responded with deadly force to a flurry of pistol shots. According to Burchett's interpretation of the sources, the largest concentration of pistol fire came from a group of men situated around a construction site. The reply, principally from the Second and Third regiments, was to fire indiscriminately into swirling, panic-stricken crowds of predominantly unarmed men, women, and children. Claims that officers ordered their men to fire volleys into the crowd were hotly disputed by eyewitnesses. It appears that many of the volunteers intentionally aimed high. Though the author opines that that might help account for the high proportion of head shots inflicted, those isolated acts also spared the citizenry from an even greater casualty list. Order was quickly restored by Lyon and his chief subordinate John Schofield, and it was all over in minutes. However, the damage was done.

Later chroniclers along with contemporary partisans offered a range of different casualty figures, many of which are sampled in the text. When it comes to the death count, the best official figures from county coroner records are twenty-five civilians (including three women and at least five individuals under sixteen years of age), three of Lyon's volunteers, and three of the captured militiamen. Noting that the coroner report only counted the dead discovered on or just after the day of the event, Burchett's research strongly suggests that at least twenty more fatal gunshot victims emerged later. These persons were either discovered deceased in public spaces days later or passed away from their wounds at home over the ensuing days and weeks. Thus, Burchett suggests a grand total of at least fifty dead and many more wounded. Though the word is provocatively placed in the title, the book itself avoids entering the quagmire of what constitutes a "massacre" and whether the tragedy in St. Louis should be properly considered one.

In stark contrast to the arguably overlong prologue sections of the book, the weighty consequences of the bloody Camp Jackson Affair are relegated to a comparatively brief epilogue. Some of the lingering violence across the city is mentioned, but one might wish for a more thorough examination of events there along with detailed assessment of the popular mood in St. Louis during the days and weeks following the May 10 clash between soldiers and civilians. In an important turn of events, previously successful legislative opposition to Governor Jackson's desire to expand, reorganize, and arm a new state army (what would become the Missouri State Guard) under his own personal control melted away once news of the mass civilian deaths in St. Louis spread. Additionally, Lyon's rash application of military force drove a great many pro-Union men into the opposing camp. In the author's view, Lyon's actions in charge of Union forces in Missouri compared unfavorably with how fellow pro-Union civilian and military leaders in charge of Kentucky handled that key Border State's difficult governor and large pro-secession minority during the same period. It's a brief consideration worthy of further development, though it's derailed by the incredible summary statement on page 256 that "(n)ot a single Civil War battle took place on Kentucky soil" (a mistake so out of character that one might charitably assume it to have been a mental block of some sort that escaped correction in final editing).

Massacre at St. Louis's background chapters arguably drag a bit, but the narrative picks up handsomely over the final two-thirds, where fresh pieces of information abound in regard to the arsenal itself, the dramatic capture of the Missouri Militia at Lindell's Grove, and the tragic mass shooting of civilians that followed it. Indeed, while it may be the case that the Civil War context of those places and events will be broadly familiar to readers, the historical geography and details associated with them are presented in Burchett's book at unprecedented clarity and depth.

The volume ends with the pending return of General Harney to a city in turmoil. Presumably, Burchett's next volume, Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, will pick up directly from there.

Review - "Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization" by Allen Christopher York

[Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization by Allen Christopher York (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). Hardcover, map, photos, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xii,162/211. ISBN:978-1-62190-825-8. $50]

Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization begins with an informative overview of the nineteenth-century growth and development of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania into a major industrial and population center. By 1860, its nearly 50,000 inhabitants (37% of which were foreign-born) ranked it in the top twenty of U.S. cities. If the entire metro area were to be included, that population rises to nearly 80,000. Located in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers forms the head of the great Ohio River, Pittsburgh was ideally situated at the crossroads of east and west and additionally held commercial ties to the South. Rather than recount the Civil War-era story of the city in typical chronological fashion, author Allen Christopher York instead thematically organizes and presents Pittsburgh's myriad of political, military, industrial, and social contributions to Union victory as a series of interlocking mobilizations.

Though his city study does not meticulously trace the evolution of the political history of Pittsburgh in terms of party affiliation, York claims that during the November 1860 general election "no major city gave a greater majority to Lincoln than Pittsburgh" (pg. 29). While a more thorough explanation of the reasons behind that would have made for interesting reading, the author seems to argue that widespread antislavery activism, including opposition to fugitive slave laws, in the city during the late-antebellum period made it a fertile ground for Republican dominance and later a broad acceptance of emancipation. After the firing on Fort Sumter there was an outpouring of support in Pittsburgh for Lincoln's call to arms, and York's examination of the Democratic response in the city suggests that opposition to war was comparatively muted. Prewar southern ties were enthusiastically severed during this atmosphere of war fever, although one suspects that the prospects of replacing that lost manufacturing business with the new business of war made that change more readily palatable. York does not provide a detailed rundown of wartime election results in the text, but he does suggest that, unlike other northern urban centers that experienced Democratic resurgence in 1862-63, Pittsburgh remained a steady Republican stronghold.

Manpower mobilization was another key part of Pittsburgh's response to Lincoln's call for volunteers. As was the case in many parts of the North, the early wave of volunteers from Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County well exceeded assigned quotas, and local leaders struggled to determine what to do with the excess numbers. Forward thinkers feared that the rejected volunteers might not make themselves available again when the government inevitably asked for future levies, and York details local initiatives aimed toward pressing state and federal authorities to establish a permanent military camp in the city to house the excess volunteers. The author also recounts the municipal law and order problems that ensued when those volunteers, confined indefinitely and forced to witness the parading about of far better uniformed and equipped home guards, became unruly. Surprisingly, York does not enter into formal discussion of the formation of the Pennsylvania Reserves and which units in that division had the strongest Pittsburgh imprint.

Pittsburgh would later become famous as the Steel City, but before that it was a major producer of iron and iron products, that heavy industry itself supported by coal imports from the surrounding region. The Fort Pitt foundry will already be familiar to many Civil War readers, and York discusses its significance to the Union war effort through the facility's production of heavy cannon. Perhaps lesser recognized by readers is the importance of Pittsburgh's shipyards, which converted or constructed numerous gunboats for the war on the western waterways. While the Ellet ram fleet and its Mississippi Marine Brigade successor became famous for their Mississippi River Valley exploits, mastermind Charles Ellet himself was based in Pittsburgh and most of the converted vessels were fitted out and crewed there.

Another aspect of Pittsburgh's mobilization was the city's all-hands-on-deck response to the threat of the first major federal draft in 1863. This coincided with the recent Emancipation Proclamation and increased concerns over the government suppression of free speech and civil rights on the home front. As was the case in most northern industrial centers, Pittsburgh's laboring classes feared the wage and job competition that would take place if emancipation flooded their city with a new source of cheap labor. While other cities (New York being the most egregious example) experienced significant popular unrest in response to conscription and the shifting goals of the Union war effort, the reaction in Pittsburgh was different. Instead of riots, York finds the primary public concern to have been one of outside perception. Up to that point Pittsburgh had always met its quotas, but city leaders worried that mid-war slackening in volunteerism would foster an outside impression that Pittsburgh was not among the most patriotic of the nation's first cities. What was behind the stagnation in volunteerism is not fully explained, though one strongly suspects that the city's robust job market had much to do with it. Regardless of the whys involved, York shows that draft fears mobilized a broad-based civic response that raised the money necessary to fund enlistment bounties generous enough for Pittsburgh to quickly fill its quotas and prevent embarrassment.

Another major mobilization was what York terms "benevolent" mobilization. All evidence points to the Pittsburgh branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission being very generously sustained, but the aid organization and its supporters also keenly felt the conflict between helping their own local boys and having their many contributions delivered facelessly across the entire Union war effort. Even closer to home, was the Pittsburgh Subsistence Committee, which provided meals, lodging, and medical services to soldiers passing through the city. As York reveals, this was a high-profile civilian mobilization given Pittsburgh's status as a heavily trafficked waypoint used by men moving back and forth from the front and between theaters. By 1863, the Pittsburgh branch of the U.S. Christian Commission had, in addition to its spiritual mission, largely assumed responsibility for medical supplies. In Pittsburgh, there was also significant overlap in both leadership and participation in these three aid organizations. In June 1864 Pittsburgh hosted its own sanitary fair, which was successful by all accounts. Incredibly, in terms of cash and material totals raised during the war, Pittsburgh's Sanitary Commission was responsible for an estimated quarter of all USSC donations.

The communal response to tragedy was yet another form of home front mobilization detailed in the book. From the battlefield dead to the civilian worker victims of the infamous Allegheny Arsenal explosion, Pittsburghers mobilized themselves to provide proper funerals (including respectful public processions) and take care of survivors, especially orphans, in need. York draws insightful parallels between how Pittsburgh citizens and press editors alike chose to recognize and memorialize the arsenal victims and the battlefield dead, those expressions inextricably linking fighting front sacrifices to home front sacrifices.  Additionally, the predominant attitude expressed in both cases was one of appreciation of the victims' patriotic selflessness rather than blame-seeking indignation at the losses.

Allen York's theme-based Our People Are Warlike stands well on its own, but its exploration of Civil War Pittsburgh's home and fighting front connections also very usefully complements other recent works such as Arthur Fox's Pittsburgh During the American Civil War 1860-1865 (2002, 2009-R) [review] and Our Honored Dead: Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in the American Civil War (2008) [review]. In York's view, Pittsburgh escaped the riots and labor unrest that plagued other northern cities through its strong record of sustained wartime economic growth and its small base of potentially violent opposition to the war. York ends his thoughtful study by issuing a call for fellow scholars to investigate the mobilizations of other great northern Civil War-era cities in order to determine if similar patterns existed (or if, as the author strongly suggests, Pittsburgh was in many ways truly exceptional).

Review - " The Political Transformation of David Tod: Governing Ohio during the Height of the Civil War " by Joseph Lambert

[The Political Transformation of David Tod: Governing Ohio during the Height of the Civil War by Joseph Lambert, Jr. (Kent State University Press, 2023). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxii,235/319. ISBN:978-1-60635-466-7. $39.95]

Though his widely respected but financially straitened jurist father was a deeply committed Whig, Ohio lawyer, industrialist, diplomat, and politician David Tod (1805-1868) bucked family tradition and from early adulthood onward became an equally faithful Democrat, maintaining that political allegiance throughout the antebellum period. For Tod, however, the outbreak of the American Civil War sparked a sharp and instantaneous rejection of his previous political partisanship. For him it was not a Republican war. Like many other prominent War Democrats, Tod felt that saving the federal Union and the country's experiment in self-government was paramount and could only be achieved through military means. To that end, he offered fulsome support for President Abraham Lincoln's Republican-led war effort. This conversion from partisan Douglas Democrat to (mostly) bipartisan Union Party leader is meticulously documented in Joseph Lambert's The Political Transformation of David Tod: Governing Ohio during the Height of the Civil War. Though a pair of recent studies, William Harris's Lincoln and the Union Governors (2013) and more notably Stephen Engle's Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors (2016)¹, explore the political actions, relationships, and significance of Lincoln's gubernatorial partners, Lambert's study is the first modern full-length biography of Tod, a single-term war governor often overshadowed by neighboring state executives such as Indiana's Oliver Morton and Richard Yates of Illinois.

Of course, if one wants to develop a primary thesis of "political transformation," a biographer must first construct a clearly understood foundation upon which to build the narrative. In examining at length Tod's social and political upbringing (particularly his discussion of Tod's ideas for state bank reform and his opposition to a national bank) through several chapters, Lambert succeeds in firmly establishing Tod as a loyal Jacksonian Democrat and constitutional constructionist. Tod's actions as U.S. Minister to Brazil (1847-1851) are lauded for improving soured relations between the two countries. It was also where northerner Tod witnessed slavery up close, and the book notes that the extended time spent in Brazil contributed to Tod's evolving views on the subject of human chattel. Evidence shows that Tod, in a shared trait with Lincoln, was clearly antislavery in his general stance toward the institution but not an abolitionist. During the Kansas troubles of the 1850s and the momentous political campaign of 1860, Tod emerged as a solid Douglas Democrat. That would change.

During the secession crisis and opening months of the war, Tod unequivocally trumpeted the cause of Union. Though he had suffered a stroke while stumping for Douglas during the 1860 presidential election, Tod nevertheless vigorously campaigned in favor of Lincoln's militant stance toward the rebellious South. He became an active force in the Ohio branch of the Union Party, a fusion of Republicans and War Democrats. While many fellow Democrats, and even some later historians, interpreted this emergent partnership to be political opportunism on the part of Tod, Lambert could find no evidence that Tod sought the Union Party nomination for governor of Ohio in 1861. Regardless, it was an election he easily won.

Going back to the Union Party nomination process, one might wonder why sitting Republican governor William Dennison, who by all accounts more than ably managed the state's mobilization for war and strongly supported the President, was unseated. Lambert points out that Dennison was hurt by his staid personality, which did not inspire public confidence when matched against Tod's fiery campaign speeches promoting the war and his overall genial enthusiasm. Perhaps even more important, Tod was a moderate on the slavery issue, and it was calculated that that aspect of his political portfolio, in contrast to Dennison's more radical approach, made him more appealing to the broad base of Ohio voters who were antislavery but still wary of abolitionists.

Lambert admits that Tod was a bit overwhelmed by his state commander-in-chief responsibilities at the beginning of his term, and he generously commends Dennison for bequeathing to his successor a well-organized recruitment system and military bureaucratic apparatus. But, as the author also justly maintains, Tod deserves credit for recognizing what and who made it all work, and the new governor commendably resisted the temptation of cleaning house in favor of installing his own leadership/patronage appointments and implementing change for the sake of putting his own stamp on running all aspects of state government. Upon receiving horrifying news of mass casualties incurred during first great battles in the West, one particularly effective state-level leadership response was Tod's distribution of state resources (in the form of money, supplies, medical staff, etc.) to western battlefields through chartered steamships, a proactive and timely approach that cut through red tape, eased the suffering of the wounded, and saved many lives. Through that initiative and others, Tod quickly gained a widespread and justly earned reputation as a devoted friend of the fighting man.

In more ways than one, the book shows how Tod quickly proved to be an able war governor. One of Tod's earliest proposals, though rejected at the time by the state legislature, was the creation of a large standing militia force for internal security and border defense. The author perhaps underestimates the political and fiscal feasibility of a force as large as the one Tod proposed, which would have dwarfed similar state armies such as the neighboring Indiana Legion, but Lambert correctly notes that standing garrisons would have significantly eased security concerns (and public panic) during the 1862 Kentucky Campaign and the mounted raids led by John Hunt Morgan. Even so, when discussing Ohio's response to the approach of Confederate troops during General Bragg's Kentucky incursion, Lambert credits Tod with creating and coordinating an emergency response that was more than up to the demands of the occasion.

In Lambert's view, a key component of Tod's strength as a war governor was his willingness to subordinate state prerogatives for federal ones, principally in the area of recruitment². In a move that did not sit well with many Democrats, Tod did not directly oppose in theory a proposed federal draft to supplement presumed future shortfalls in state volunteer recruitment, and he also was in line with the administration when it came to jailing opposition newspaper editors and others who publicly sought to discourage enlistment. The book shows that Tod was single-minded in the drive to save the Union and was prepared to temporarily abandoned his previously strict constructionism in order to support nearly any Lincoln administration measure aimed toward achieving that overarching end. According to Lambert, the depth of Tod's political transformation was most profoundly expressed through the speed and strength of Tod's support for the Emancipation Proclamation. This emerged during the northern governors meeting assembled in Pennsylvania around that time. No press were allowed and no minutes were taken, so how individual governors responded during the meeting to the key issues of the war (and how well or badly the administration was handling them) remains open to speculation. Indeed, when it comes to interpreting Tod's commitment to emancipation, the opinions of historians have been mixed. However, in his own research Lambert discovered a revealing interview with one of the attendees following the conference, a governor who had no obvious personal or political motivation to buff up Tod, in which it is unequivocally stated that Tod expressed one of the earliest and strongest affirmations of Lincoln's proclamation.

While Tod remained a popular public figure during his term of office, critics were sharpening their knives, and, as Lambert demonstrates, they would close in from all directions. The fall 1862 elections went badly for Tod's political allies, the inroads made by more conservative Ohio Democrats demonstrating growing discontent with Lincoln's home front policies and his overall management of the war effort. Linked with Tod, that tide contributed to what would be a fatal compromising of the governor's political future. He also made things worse for himself through his own actions. By notably failing to mention emancipation in his January 1863 State of the State address, Tod again opened himself up to old charges stemming from his antebellum political career that he was a two-faced, unprincipled politician. Ohio conservatives attacked him for his support of free speech suppression, arbitrary arrest, and emancipation while Republican allies (always the Union Party majority) increasingly accused Tod of not being radical enough and, perhaps just as important, excessively stingy in rewarding Republicans with vacated government and military appointments. Overall, Lambert's study does an excellent job of tracing what was behind both Tod's meteoric rise and his just as meteoric fall from political grace. Later in his term of office, Tod did finally succeed getting the legislature to pass a law creating a state militia army, but there was not enough time to implement it before Morgan's Great Raid passed through southern Ohio during the summer of 1863.

After losing the nomination for a second term, Tod selflessly campaigned for his replacement, and during Morgan's Great Raid he effectively micromanaged the state's military response. Later that summer, Tod, who had opposed black recruitment earlier in his tenure, finally offered the War Department a regiment drawn from the state's relatively large free black population. Having earlier asked for a postponement of the federal draft in his state, Tod was informed that black soldiers would count toward the state's requested enlistment total. Though it has been suggested that Tod came around to black enlistment only to help forestall draft implementation, Lambert offers a strong counterpoint to the most cynical claims, citing Tod's earnest efforts in equipping and supplying the men, strident requests for equal pay, and affectionate speeches made in their support. As a lame duck governor, Tod continued to work tirelessly toward getting Ohio volunteers into the ranks of the army, and near the end of his term he responded to Confederate threats from Canada by coordinating a strong security screen along the state's Great Lakes border.

An exhausted ex-governor Tod returned home in 1864 to his lucrative coal, iron, and railroad pursuits, but he wasn't entirely done with politics. Campaigning for Lincoln and against the Peace Democrat movement in his home state that year, the still popular Tod was tagged by an appreciative Lincoln for the Secretary of the Treasury cabinet post vacated by Salmon Chase's resignation. Citing continued poor health, Tod graciously declined the honor. Lambert agrees with critics at the time that Tod was a very curious pick given his life-long public opposition to the kinds of financial policies and strategies that Secretary Chase employed so effectively in sustaining the northern economy and war machine. The author agrees that it was best for the country that someone better qualified fill the position, which ultimately went to William Fessenden of Maine, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. This is just one example of how Lambert judiciously weighs the strengths and weaknesses associated with his subject's political life.

For many, the war's end also signaled the end of the Union Party's usefulness, but David Tod felt that he could not in good conscience return to the Democratic Party. Indeed, he felt that it would take at least one additional election cycle before the Democrats could hope to regain their moral standing in the country. Until then, Tod would support the Grant presidency. He came around to supporting black suffrage as well, though he died of a stroke before ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. In the areas of equality, citizenship, and civil rights for freedmen, Lambert deems Lincoln's own transformation on those matters a "spiritual" one in contrast to Tod's more constitution-based, pragmatic, and legalistic one (though some who knew Tod personally believed it more heartfelt than that). What is beyond dispute is that the political transformation of David Tod was weighty, real, and deserving of being remembered as much more than mere shifting with the prevailing political winds.

In the end, Lambert's biography delivers a strong endorsement of the idea that David Tod's historical significance in deftly guiding the war effort of one of the Union's most vitally important states and his earnest support for emancipation transcended his relatively brief time spent in elected office. Bookended by the governorships of William Dennison and John Brough, it was Tod, Lambert argues, who successfully navigated the state through its most challenging trials. A highly recommended study, Joseph Lambert's The Political Transformation of David Tod ably addresses a significant gap in the modern biography of northern war governors, many of whom played critical roles in assisting the Lincoln administration's path to Union victory.

Additional Notes:
1 - Both titles come well recommended. Given the significance of the federal-state partnership to the outcome of the war, it is surprising that Engle was the first historian in seven decades to comprehensively examine the subject of Lincoln's relationships with the state governors. For those who might find the scale of Engle's Gathering to Save a Nation daunting, Harris's more introductory-level study, part of SIU Press's prolific Concise Lincoln Library series, is a fine alternative.
2 - While Lambert's study traces the Civil War career of a western governor, it tends to track the overall progress and state of the Union war effort in a rather eastern-centric manner. In discussing manpower and recruitment issues more generally as background to Tod's influence in Ohio, some arguably misplaced emphasis emerges in the book. For example, the author on more than one occasion assigns to General George McClellan's handling of the Peninsula Campaign primary blame for the mid-1862 manpower crisis that sparked another massive call for volunteers from the states. Administration gaffes, even extraordinary ones such as Secretary Stanton's Spring 1862 suspension of military recruitment all across the North, are minimized as secondary factors or overlooked entirely.

Review - " Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War " by George Rable

[Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War by George C. Rable (Louisiana State University Press, 2023). Hardcover, 4 maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibligraphy, index. Pages main/total:xii,336/488. ISBN:978-0-8071-7977-2. $49.95]

As revealed through every passing year's crop of Civil War books, the troubled relationship between President Abraham Lincoln and Army of the Potomac commanding general George B. McClellan continues to be a source of never-ending controversy and vigorous finger pointing. In seeking to explain McClellan's inability to capture Richmond in 1862 and later on in that year destroy Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in Maryland, a dominant narrative quickly emerged that was subsequently adopted in the historiography with only fringe deviations ever since. Through popular and highly influential modern works authored by the likes of James McPherson and Stephen Sears to more specialized studies such as those from John Waugh [Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership between a President and His General (2010)] and Chester Hearn [Lincoln and McClellan at War (2012)], the man dubbed at the time the "Young Napoleon" is largely presented as an exasperating and ineffectual foil to the president's genius. In contrast, George Rable's Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War promises a more equitable consideration of why the Union Army's eastern fortunes in 1861-62 fell so far short of expectations. Indeed, Rable's new study, to borrow a phrase from another Civil War title, finds plenty of blame to go around in its predominant focus on damaging political influences.

Exposure to the traditional Lincoln-McClellan narrative is pervasive, but, just in case, the following should suffice as a brief summary of some relevant parts of it. In this understanding of events, Lincoln presents McClellan's army with all the men and resources needed to defeat anything the Confederates might possibly throw against it on the way to capturing Richmond. At the risk of creating powerful enemies within his own party, the president also generously shielded McClellan from political attacks by Republican radicals. Developing over time, through both careful book study and his own considerable intellect, into a competent military strategist in addition to being a political genius, Lincoln doled out sound advice that McClellan consistently refused to follow. Employing both carrot and stick, Lincoln could not get an increasingly paranoid McClellan, who constantly inflated enemy numbers as an excuse for further delay, to move aggressively forward as circumstances demanded. When he did finally advance, McClellan's maddeningly cautious, scientific approach to operations led to unsatisfactory results in Virginia and Maryland. Finally, Lincoln had enough of the general's "slows" and relieved McClellan from command on November 5, 1862.

Of course, the most obdurate McClellan supporters, then and now, would beg to differ. In their view, Lincoln and most of his cabinet quickly came to operate at cross-purposes with their man. By withholding critical reinforcements at critical moments, constantly undermining McClellan's authority and position within the army (ex. by removing him from his general in chief duties, allowing dissident officers to bypass the chain of command, appointing as corps commanders senior officers who opposed his plans, etc.), and even repeatedly questioning his loyalty, McClellan's government critics fostered crippling disunity around and within the army and left the general without the tools necessary to ensure success on the Peninsula. In the minds of the general and his supporters, McClellan also never received the accolades due him for his achievements in Maryland, where he quickly restored the fighting capabilities of the eastern army after the Second Manassas debacle and expelled Confederate forces from state after defeating them at South Mountain and Antietam. McClellan's removal soon after the victory at Antietam was only the final blow of a long partisan political persecution.

There are elements of truth in both perspectives, a powerful common thread being the role politics played in driving the Lincoln-McClellan high command alliance toward failure. Indeed, this is Conflict of Command's primary theme. Using an admirable mix of sources, including a fairly prodigious amount of manuscript research, Rable's study, by way of combining judicious synthesis with the author's own original research, explores how partisan politics seeped into every aspect of the Lincoln-McClellan relationship as well as every other important facet of the conduct of the war in the East over the roughly year and a half period during which McClellan was the nation's towering military figure. At least at the level of seriousness each deserves, all of the issues and charges referenced above (and more) are critically addressed by Rable. Along the way, the author consistently declines to come down hard on one side of the blame game or the other. Instead, Rable exposes readers to a diverse host of key perspectives (from politicians, military officers, soldiers, common citizens, elites of society, and newspaper editors), assessing their observations through multiple angles. The strengths and weaknesses of charges and claims directed by those individuals for and against McClellan and the president are presented dispassionately. In a welcome break from the norm, Rable's narrative distinctly lacks the type of heavy-handed analytical guidance common to works discussing this topic.

In the beginning, it could be reasonably assumed that ideological and political differences between moderate Republican Lincoln and War Democrat McClellan were not wide enough to preclude a successful working relationship. However, as we all know, the partnership soured over a period of months under intense political pressure for the army to advance and McClellan's resistance toward doing so until campaign preparations met his entire approval. As one example of the range of political subjects addressed by Rable, divisive fallout from the relentlessly partisan newspaper war (bitterly fought both independently and through proxies) conducted by political factions in support of "hard war" policies versus more conservative approaches is traced in illuminating fashion. Cabinet machinations and their effects on both the Lincoln-McClellan relationship and the overall progress of the war in the East comprise another theme integral to the author's political analysis. At the center of much of the intrigue, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is easily the most striking individual of the cabinet bunch. As a bit of shorthand regarding what to expect as the reader, it's likely being fair to all involved to say that Rable's Stanton is closer to William Marvel's Stanton than he is to Walter Stahr's Stanton. In what was often a three-way war of wills, forceful Radical Republican attempts (through individual efforts as well as through more collective means such as the infamous Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War) to shape national war policy, promote military leaders of their choice, and remove leaders that did not fit their ideology (like McClellan) are another common theme. In contrast to how well Lincoln played the political game, McClellan proved largely tone-deaf to the necessity, especially in democracies at war, of maintaining a working relationship with the political leadership. He was similarly naive in believing that army affairs could and should be left to the professionals without political input or interference. At critical intervals in the book, Rable also follows the evolution of the eastern army's standpoint on the government and commanding general's linked management of military affairs. Of course, there were no scientific polls available at the time to gauge with any quantitative precision how the soldiers felt about the feuding between the general and the administration, but Rable effectively mined the sources to at the very least come up with a good representation of the range of convictions and opinions held by the fighting men.

In attempting to determine whose shoulders should bear the greatest burden of responsibility for the failed Peninsula Campaign and presumed incomplete victory at Antietam, many might be tempted to judge General McClellan's prodigiously documented and endlessly debated weaknesses as an army commander sufficient alone to outweigh the effects of political interference. However, Rable isn't terribly interested in attempting to apportion blame for what happened in the field as a result of military decisions. In the book, Rable does not revisit at any great depth the well-worn debates over strategic, operational, and tactical matters related to the relevant campaigns in Virginia and Maryland. Clearly, it's partly motivated by recognition that those topics (at least at the high command level) have already been exhaustively thrashed out in the literature, and perhaps one might speculate that Rable also did not feel his own views sufficiently fresh and different enough to merit adding another contributing data point to an already long list of them. Regardless, the conscious tactic effectively serves to remove a reader's temptation to fall back on old military-dominant explanations and arguments. By placing the "politics of war" front and center and pushing more nuts and bolts military matters into the background (though always keeping the latter under consideration in light of their important political consequences), Rable succeeds in forcing readers to fully confront and consider the reality that fractious political attitudes and actions impacted the eastern campaigns of 1862 in fundamental, and all too often detrimental, ways. It's very well done.

McClellan's final relief from command in November 1862 did nothing to stop the ceaseless political and press attacks on his character and war record, so much was its feared in those circles that McClellan might reappear in an important military command. Rable does a fine job of describing that relentless partisan atmosphere. Even so, as many scholars have conceded and Rable reaffirms, McClellan maintained significant popular appeal among Army of the Potomac officers and soldiers. The author seems to agree with those who argue that much of that support level was based on the widespread perception that McClellan prioritized the conservation of soldier lives much more than his rivals did. Arguably, the twin disasters at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville that followed McClellan's relief seemed to vindicate some of the claims made by the general's champions inside and outside the army. On the other hand, searching critics would cite the failure to completely root out "McClellanism" (whatever they might have defined that to mean) as being the principal factor behind the defeats endured by the nation's premier army after Little Mac's departure.

Rable's study offers insightful commentary on the presidential election of 1864, too. Especially after the sharp upturn in Union military fortunes by the time the 1864 election season rolled around, the peace platform that was already an albatross around presidential candidate McClellan's neck figured to doom the Democratic ticket beyond remedy. As Rable ably relates in the book, the Republican press and political machine (aided by their allies on the other side of the aisle) very effectively maintained in the minds of voters an assured equivalency between a McClellan victory and a dishonorable peace without reunion. Nothing McClellan did or said could alter that damning perception. In addition to decrying the fact that McClellan allowed his name and reputation to be attached to the widely despised peace platform, it also seems that many of the soldiers who still loved him could not, on a basic level, forgive him for becoming a politician himself, that detested class of corruptible citizen that many of those same Democrat soldier-voters held chiefly responsible for McClellan's own defeats and final removal.

By any estimation, the Lincoln-McClellan high command partnership that quickly turned adversarial was an abject failure. Obviously, George Rable's Conflict of Command is not the first book to explore and appreciate the role partisan politics played in souring the relationship and harming the nation's war effort in its principal theater during the first eighteen months of the war, but a strong argument can be made that Rable's expansive approach to the topic has resulted in the best articulated and most complete treatment to date. As an explanatory force, it creates a strong political interpretation of the period worthy of standing alongside the more traditional military one. Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that Rable joins the majority in favoring Lincoln's path over McClellan's, but one never gets the sense that he's being distinctly unfair to either man when it comes to characterizing their actions in a political context. That more open-minded approach to an area of study dominated by critically one-sided analysis is refreshing.