Two against Lincoln: Reverdy Johnson and Horatio Seymour, Champions of the Loyal Opposition by William C. Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Two against Lincoln: Reverdy Johnson and Horatio Seymour, Champions of the Loyal Opposition by William C. Harris Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai Two against Lincoln: Reverdy Johnson and Horatio Seymour, Champions of the Loyal Opposition. William C. Harris. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. ISBN 978-0-7006-2412-6, 264 pp., cloth, $34.95. In Two against Lincoln: Reverdy Johnson and Horatio Seymour, Champions of the Loyal Opposition, William C. Harris illustrates the ways a US senator and a wartime governor challenged Republican policies during and after the Civil War. Harris's double political biography focuses on these men's public lives and is a welcome addition to recent works that have highlighted the roles of those who opposed the most extreme positions on both sides of the Civil War. The first section of the book focuses on Johnson's lengthy public service career, and the second concentrates on Seymour's wartime and Reconstruction era experiences. Reverdy Johnson, a former Whig from Maryland, initially supported Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and helped keep his state in the Union. Siding with Democrats on many issues, he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, the recruitment of black troops, and the use of military forces on the home front. However, he surprised many when he supported the Thirteenth Amendment. He believed that "the amendment—not the arbitrary action of the president or Congress … met the test of constitutionality for abolishing slavery" (5). Johnson comes off as a leading intellectual voice in legal arguments of the day. During the Dred Scott case, he advanced that Congress had no authority to limit slavery in the territories, an argument that the Supreme Court later infamously adopted. During Reconstruction, he claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to individual acts, reasoning that the Supreme Court eventually concurred with. If people are familiar with Horatio Seymour at all, they know him as the Democratic candidate for president in 1868. Harris argues, however, that Seymour's "loyal [End Page 308] opposition to questionable Lincoln and Republican policies and actions should not be overlooked" (3). The New York governor made a reputation for himself as a champion of Union home front issues, lambasting the Lincoln administration for violating the civil liberties of citizens, becoming "the Democratic Party's leading spokesman" (144). He proved "to be a thorn in Lincoln and the War Department's side in their efforts to administer military conscription in the Northeast," vehemently opposing the federal draft (155). Despite his opposition, Seymour administered the laws and provided troops from his state to the war effort. Writing double biographies can be challenging, but this volume effectively conveys the ideological position from which these men advocated their moderate to conservative wartime positions. Harris makes the case that these men had "remarkable consistency" in their views and both "came to the conclusion that the Republicans represented a serious threat to civil liberties (for whites) and to the federal system of government created by the Founders" (2). He treats the development of the two men's ideologies somewhat inconsistently, however: he explains Johnson's ideological growth through the antebellum era but provides less than a page of background about Seymour's intellectual development. Harris could have strengthened his work by adding more comparison between the subjects of his work and other moderate conservatives. Neither Johnson nor Seymour seems to have realized that their ideological beliefs led them to an impasse that would have destroyed the Union. During the secession crisis, both men shared James Buchanan's paralyzing beliefs about what the federal government could and could not do to halt secession. Although Johnson declared that federal property "must at all hazards be defended, [and] the power of the National Standard preserved," he "rejected the use of force to maintain the Union" (27). Seymour, too, "expressed the view that the federal government had no constitutional authority to force a state to remain in the Union" (121). Comparing Johnson to men like John Bell and Edward Everett would also have greatly enhanced the analytical component of this volume. Read alongside recent works by A. James Fuller and Matthew Mason, Two against Lincoln should provide readers interested in nineteenth-century political...