James L. Orr and the Sectional Conflict (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS89 indictment around the court-martial proceedings which convicted and sentenced to death a Pennsylvania volunteer, William H. Howe, who had deserted from his unit and who had killed one of three men attempting to apprehend him. That the military authorities executed die sentence in spite of evidence which Alotta claims challenged the guilty verdict leads him to conclude that Howe's "court-martial was a travesty" (p. 170). Howe's execution occurred, according to Alotta, because die Army needed a scapegoat, an example to intimidate others contemplating desertion. Moreover, Alotta asserts, the execution had to be conducted quickly because Howe's court-martial contained so many irregularities that disclosure might have threatened Lincoln's prospects in the forthcoming election. Notwithstanding Alotta's argument that Howe suffered unjustly, he fails to substantiate his charges that the government and military authorities used executions maliciously. Nor does he link successfully Howe's execution to the questions he raises aboutpolitics, ambition, and class. Instead, Alotta's reconstruction of the events actually suggests that Howe received significant due process. The judge advocate general's office dismissed his first court-martial conviction because of procedural violations, and Howe did have the benefit of a second court and professional legal counsel. Abraham Lincoln, moreover, had the opportunity to review the case after his February, 1864 order staying all executions because of desertion, and still the President endorsed die sentence. This is not to imply that Howe should have been executed, for the very description Alotta provides of the hanging accentuates the barbarism of capital punishment. Alotta, of course, emphasizes this point intentionally . That he became preoccupied with trying to show the extenuating circumstances which contributed to Howe's desertion and the subsequent killing of a government agent, however, suggests that Alotta himself lost sight of his basic argument. Philip J. Avillo, Jr. York College of Pennsylvania James L. Orr and the Sectional Conflict. By Roger P. Leemhuis. (Washington: University Press of America, 1979. Pp. v, 218. $9.00.) Following the deadi of John C. Calhoun in 1850, no South Carolinian played a more significant role in the politics of the Middle Period than James L. Orr. Something of a maverick during his relatively brief but varied political career, Orr served five terms as a Democrat in the House and was elected Speaker of the Thirty-fifth Congress. He helped draft South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession in 1860. As a Confederate Senator, he stridendy opposed Jefferson Davis on most issues. He became a vocal advocate of Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies 90CIVIL WAR HISTORY after the war, and in 1866 he was elected Governor of South Carolina. Two years later the black majority in South Carolina's Reconstruction legislature elected him to the bench of the Eighth Circuit Court. Orr subsequently became a Republican and in late 1872 President Grant appointed him Minister to Russia. He died in St. Petersburg the following May at the age of 51. Though he enthusiastically supported the institution of slavery and was himself a slaveowner, Orr was no Southern fire-eater. He sharply criticized the planter-aristocrats who dominated South Carolina's antebellum political life. During the mid 1850's he urged Carolinians to support the Union and to embrace the national Democratic party. He was a consistentproponent ofpublic education beforeand after the war, and he persistendy called for greater economic diversity in the South and less dependence on cotton. Orr hoped to see a Southern landscape crisscrossed with railroads and dotted with textile mills and other industrial facilities. Yet when South Carolina careened toward secession after John Brown's raid, Orr chose not to support the state's Unionists like Benjamin F. Perry and James L. Petigru. Instead, and with no lingering doubts, hestood with those who were convinced that secession represented the means to perpetuate Southern society and its peculiar institution. However, in 1868, and to the utter astonishment of most of his fellow white Carolinians, Orr insisted that the most pragmatic manner of preserving white supremacy was for native whites to join and thereby control the nascent Republican party. Thereafter he was regarded as a pariah among Democrats. Professor Leemhuis's 173 page biography contains many...