Political Civil War Research Articles

The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union

In The Abolitionist Civil War, Frank J. Cirillo offers a much-needed study of abolitionist activity during the Civil War. In twelve tightly chronological chapters, he highlights the ideas, interventions, and arguments of abolitionists from Secession Winter through May 1865. Cirillo focuses on ten abolitionists ranging from well-known figures William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to lesser-known folks such as George Cheever and Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster to the Virginia outlier Moncure Conway, and he sorts them into several fluctuating camps based on how they chose to engage with Civil War politics. Ultimately, he argues that in the majority’s wartime shift from moral reformers to political interest interventionists, their radicalism tempered.

Three Conceptions of Civil War Politics

Three Conceptions of Civil War Politics

Identity, networks, and learning in the study of rebel governance

ABSTRACT The contributors to this special issue have put forth a research agenda that centers the politics of civil war, in contrast to what the introduction presents as the dominant rationalist paradigm. This paper anchors the special issue by first synthesizing the works contained therein. In particular, the articles in this issue focus on how individual and collective identity, networks and orders, and learning or socialization from previous experiences shape behaviors during and after conflict. Next, the conclusion to this special issue aims to move forward a perspective of civil wars that takes seriously the political in civil war by building upon the works contained in this collection and presenting a number of avenues for future research. In particular, this article advocates for taking seriously how individual experiences, identities, and relationships embedded within broader social processes shape and co-constitute civil war dynamics.

¿Borrón sin cuenta nueva? La injusticia transicional en guerras civiles económicas

Ante la persistencia de la violencia criminal organizada en México, se ha discutido la posibilidad de superarla usando medidas de justicia transicional. ¿Qué tan viable sería su aplicación? Tratamos de responder a esta pregunta en dos pasos. Primero, trazamos un mapa conceptual de la violencia societal organizada que nos permite identificar la llamada narcoviolencia como una guerra civil económica y distinguirla de las guerras civiles políticas. Después, discutimos la aplicabilidad de la justicia transicional al contexto mexicano. Aunque identificamos analogías importantes, terminamos resaltando un obstáculo infranqueable: la justicia transicional solo puede servir como vía pacificadora si el Estado que recurre a ella para desarmar a las bandas criminales tuviera la capacidad de garantizar que ese desarme sea permanente.

Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Civil War and Reconstruction by James Fuller

Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Civil War and Reconstruction by James Fuller

Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Civil War and Reconstruction by A. James Fuller

Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Civil War and Reconstruction by A. James Fuller

„Wir sind nie säkular gewesen“: Politische Theologie und die Geographien des Religiösen

Abstract. In these afterthoughts to a themed issue on the „Geographies of Post-Secularity“, I critically interrogate the analytical purchase of the terminology of post-secularism. I suggest that the concept of the post-secular is ill-suited to provide a vocabulary for multi-religious societies in the West as much as elsewhere. Instead, I suggest that the vocabulary of a descriptive political theology (Assmann) better helps us grasp the continuing negotiation of the dialectic relations between the secular and the religious. I illustrate this conceptual vocabulary for the study of religion and politics in the postcolonial world, first, in the political-normative debates on Indian secularism, and second, in the everyday struggles of religious actors in the violent politics of Sri Lanka's civil war, to then return to debates on (post-) secularity. I conclude that, indeed, we have never been secular – that the dialectic relations between the secular and the religious are bound to remain, and to become further complicated in increasingly multi-religious societies.

Knowing One’s Place

Between April and July 1413, a large group of Parisians led the violent Cabochien Uprising. This revolt has been positioned primarily as an extension of civil war politics between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. I argue that it was far more than that; it was a meaningful example of political resistance and an extraordinary event that nonetheless borrowed from everyday practices of civil autonomy and agency. In drawing from but moving beyond the civil war narrative, I examine the importance of urban spatial tactics, voice and violence in this rebellion. This approach enables us to discern what opportunities were available to early fifteenth-century Parisians to directly challenge their exclusion from politics, and to carve out a place of importance for their voices. Moreover, the same source material for the rebellion also illuminates the established systems, the spaces and the habits that empowered Parisians in the day-to-day. It was these conditions that provided the scaffolding for their rebellion, and they reveal strong tension between the king’s sovereign authority and his subjects’ autonomy. These complicated dynamics limited the king’s actual power in the streets, and suggest that Parisians could lay claim to more independence than we have previous considered.

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition Richard Newman (bio) Corey M. Brooks. Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 336 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Padraig Riley. Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 328 pp, Notes and index. $45.00. With some critics worrying about the future of political history—which lags behind social and cultural history—it is rather ironic that the best recent work in antebellum politics comes from scholars studying slavery and freedom. Building on terrific (and variegated) studies by Eric Foner, James Oakes, John Stauffer, Sean Wilentz, and others, many historians now view antislavery struggles as a powerful vehicle for understanding the possibilities and limits of pre–Civil War politics. New books by Padraig Riley and Corey Brooks continue the trend, offering perceptive readings of both the politics of abolition and abolitionist politics in the early republic. These are exemplary books: well written, thoroughly researched, and historiographically ramifying. They are also timely, illuminating antislavery battles in high politics at a time when a new round of contemporary critics (notably Andrew Delbanco) question abolitionists’ aims and accomplishments. Just what did abolitionists really do? Riley shows the formidable hurdles antislavery advocates faced in the Jeffersonian political arena; Brooks studies how political abolitionists overcame such daunting obstacles in antebellum society. Together, they show that it is more critical than ever to reintegrate politics into our understanding of social reform, lest we forget how political power may be mobilized for good as well as ill. Read in tandem, Riley and Brooks chart the creation, and then destruction, of the nineteenth-century political consensus that enshrined slaveholders’ political power. The Constitution may have established certain proslavery provisions, but not until the 1800s would a discernible slave power take hold in federal politics. As Paul Finkelman constantly reminds us, historians should never underestimate slaveholders’ constitutional power. The three-fifths clause alone [End Page 57] gave masters and their allies enough extra voting strength to secure slavery’s expansion into Missouri, Texas, and the Kansas-Nebraska Territories, as well as to pass a stronger Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Yet as Riley’s book expertly shows, slaveholders’ power came not merely as a result of a hellish constitutional compromise. Rather it flowed from a longstanding cross-sectional alliance of Democratic Republicans that privileged white democracy over antislavery. As Riley sees it, Jefferson’s election was truly a “victory for slaveholders” (pp. 8–9). Before 1800, Federalists mitigated masters’ reach; after 1800, a Jeffersonian coalition “promoted democracy in the North but also protected the prerogatives of slaveholders in the South” (p. 9). This coalition created, in effect, a second grand bargain on bondage. Though building on studies by Matt Mason, David Waldstreicher, Craig Hammond, and others who have traced slavery’s contested role in the early Republic, Riley explains the muscular development of the Jeffersonian coalition perhaps better than anyone else. He demonstrates that the origins of the Jeffersonian coalition were diverse, with both Northerners and Southerners defining its key ideological as well as political dimensions. In New England, Republicans like Elbridge Gerry and Abraham Bishop backed the Jeffersonian cause because it “championed political freedom for ordinary white men” (p. 16). Indeed, hoping to form a national alliance that would vanquish aristocratic Federalists, they and other Northern politicians agreed to “provide American slaveholders with what they needed most: tacit majority consent” (p. 49). Slave power consensus wasn’t a machine that would go of itself; it needed constant lubrication from Northerners. This became clear in Pennsylvania, the nation’s keystone state, for its consistent support of the Jeffersonian cause. Yet it was also gradual abolition’s organizational base. Riley points out that Republican political supporters like William Duane and Thomas Branagan explained away any seeming contradictions by labeling Jefferson both a champion of white liberty and an “antislavery stalwart” (p. 90). Given time, Jefferson’s America would shed its slaveholding skin, providing an emancipatory pathway to “the benumbed minds of the enslaved, the wretched, the degraded sons of Europe, Asia, and Africa” (p. 90). For Virginians and other Southern Republicans who became increasingly...

The Uses of Scribal Publication in the Making of a Royalist: Henry Townshend of Worcestershire, his ‘diary’ and Parliament, 1640-3

The ‘diary’ of Henry Townshend, which has recently been re-edited for publication, is a key source for the civil war politics of Worcestershire. This article explores the composition of what is a complex text, and sets it in the context of reading and writing when transmission of news and other information content both by scribal publication and by the medium of print were effective and authoritative. It examines in particular Henry Townshend’s use of accounts of events in parliament, and suggests that he showed a greater interest in understanding the failure of the first parliament of 1640 (the Short Parliament) than in the reforming achievements of the second (the Long Parliament). It is argued that Townshend was likely to have been embedded in a scribal community focused on his home territory, which is likely to have included the Worcestershire gentry and the higher clergy of the see of Worcester.

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston

Reviewed by: The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston Adam W. Dean The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 345. $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-5918-7.) James L. Huston’s most recent work is an excellent study that addresses a similar topic as my own book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery [End Page 933] Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2015). Together, both works evidence a historiographical turn emphasizing the importance of the northern family farm in shaping Civil War politics. Huston’s witty and iconoclastic writing style, earlier on display in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003) and in a political biography of Stephen A. Douglas, is engaging and refreshing. The argument is convincing, rigorously documented, and overdue in Civil War historiography. In the last decade, both Huston and I put our fingers on a problem in the study of nineteenth-century America. The explosion of industry and corporate America after the American Civil War had seduced historians to look at the past with this future in mind. Ever since Charles A. and Mary R. Beard advanced the notion, scholars have wanted to believe that the war pitted an agrarian South against an emerging industrial juggernaut. Even the main philosophy associated with the Republican Party of the 1850s—free labor—has been interpreted as an urban ideology. Yet such claims run into some intractable problems. As Huston pointedly notes, “What connection did [Abraham] Lincoln have with urban industrialization? Answer: none” (p. 188). A bigger problem with the Beard thesis and its derivatives is “that some 70 percent of the northern population” was engaged in small farming (p. 77). The reality of northern landownership suggests a much different picture of Civil War politics than has been told. The Union that went to war in 1861 was a nation of small farmers, owning or seeking to acquire 80 to 120 acres of land. These landownership patterns created an egalitarian ethos that prized manual labor and the ability of the poor to rise in material prosperity. The Confederacy represented large plantations where a “slaveholding elite presid[ed] over an impoverished mass of slaves and whites” (p. 223). These landownership regimes came into conflict during westward territorial expansion, instigating the war. The origins of Huston’s story begin in Great Britain and the English Civil War. New England Puritans, supporters of the parliamentary side, identified land distribution patterns as the key flaw in English society during the seventeenth century. Concentrated landholdings created a leisure class that mocked manual labor and ran roughshod over those deemed inferior in social standing. The English yeomanry struggled to gain freedom from wealthy landlords and from tenancy. Thus, in the colonies, New Englanders enacted land policies that promoted smallholders. In the American South, however, the landed gentry proved victorious. Huston theorizes that large plantations derived economic advantages over smaller enterprises from “specialization of labor, economies of scale, and [the] ability to allocate labor as needed” (p. 168). Yet he ultimately maintains that planters decided to engage in slave agriculture because they wanted the lifestyle of the British gentry. By contrast, Huston marvels at the small towns and regional cities of the rural North. Smaller farms required hard work and mutual dependence. Free men and women engaged in “bending, lifting, hoeing, shoveling, mending, and stitching . . . all done by hand and with primitive tools” (p. 116). In return for this labor, as Huston shows, farmworkers were able to save their wages [End Page 934] and purchase their own land, acquiring economic independence and prosperity. They also lived where they could trade with others for goods not produced on the farm. Thus, unlike An Agrarian Republic, Huston places the origins of landownership differences squarely on human choice and British customs, not soil or climate. This is an important and needed revision of my work. While Huston would not be so crass...

An end to “Civil War politics”? The radically reshaped political landscape of post-crash Ireland

The European debt crisis has impacted on electoral politics in most European states, but particularly in the Republic of Ireland. The severe nature of the economic crash and the subsequent application of austerity policies have brought large fluctuations in political support levels, with the three parties that have dominated the state since its foundation – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour – all being adversely effected. The extent of these changes is highly controlled both by geography and by class, with political allegiances proving to be highly fluid in certain parts of the state. Growing support levels for left wing parties and groupings, but most notably Sinn Fein, appear to be moving Irish politics away from the old “Civil War” style of politics and bringing it more into line with the traditional class cleavage politics of continental Europe.

Gender and Civil War Politics in Margaret Cavendish’s “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”

Contemporary scholars generally assume that Cavendish was a loyal supporter of royalist politics, for her writings often contain statements that overtly endorse absolute monarchy. For example, in her autobiography, found in Natures Pictures, Cavendish evokes divine-right imagery as she declares that the parliamentarians “would have pulled God out of Heaven, had they had power, as they did Royaltie out of his Throne.” This statement strongly condemns the execution of Charles I, yet her writings elsewhere nevertheless portray various political viewpoints that are not always consistent with royalist ideologies. In Natures Pictures, for example, Cavendish contends that “the Monarchical Government of the Bees is as

Civil War Politics and the Texts of Archbishop William Laud's Execution Sermon and Prayers

Before his execution in 1645, Archbishop William Laud composed a sermon and prayer to be delivered on Tower Hill. What started as a single text—the manuscript from which he spoke—soon became multiple texts composed of a transcribed record which differed from the written text in hundreds of places. The Oxford and London printed versions of Laud's execution sermon and prayers presented contrasting portraits of the Archbishop, neither corresponding to readers' expectations. As these texts reversed assumptions about how political allegiances might affect the transmission of a prominent figure's dying words, they also refused to present a single voice captured in one stable document, offering instead contrasting representations and tones, each authoritative in its context and for its purpose. This essay explains how Civil War politics shaped those texts and discusses some contemporaries' awareness of these textual and political issues. (P. J. K.)

Intervention as Indirect Rule: The politics of civil war and state-building in Ituri

Intervention as Indirect Rule: The politics of civil war and state-building in Ituri

Mercurius Britanicus on Charles I: an exercise in civil war journalism and high politics, August 1643 to May 1646

This article examines in detail the sustained campaign of character assassination run by Mercurius Britanicus against Charles I. It illustrates the substance, style and provenance of Britanicus's arguments; it then assesses the newsbook's attacks in their chronological context. The article argues that Britanicus worked closely with the parliamentary war party grandees to discredit Charles publicly, to divide royalist opinion by revealing his weaknesses and mistakes, and to pressurize him into making peace on the radicals' terms. Although Britanicus stopped short of calling outright for Charles's deposition, this was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the newsbook's comments.

Measures for a "Speedy Conclusion": A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism

Measures for a "Speedy Conclusion":A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism Rachel A. Shelden (bio) The traditional story of northern conscription during the Civil War is a familiar one to scholars and casual readers alike. In this narrative, the states, and particularly governors, maintained control of military recruitment early in the war. Significant Republican losses in both governors' mansions and state legislatures in the November 1862 elections, however, made Republican leaders in Washington wary of leaving the responsibility of raising armies to their political opponents.1 These federal politicians had already begun to implement legislation that strengthened the federal government at the expense of the states in the areas of banking and property rights.2 The 37th [End Page 469] Congress extended these nationalizing tendencies to the military arena through a national conscription act—officially called the Enrollment Act of March 1863.3 By the summer of 1863, the federal government imposed the draft on weakened state and local governments without their help or consent. Yet, the northern public met Congress's conscription act with widespread disapproval, culminating in the weeklong New York City draft riots of July 1863. In effect, the riots symbolized a last public stand against a centralized government.4 After Appomattox, as a result of conscription and other wartime policies, the United States finally became a modern, centralized country.5 This story is now outdated. A reexamination of the path toward national conscription on the national and state levels demonstrates that scholars have [End Page 470] tended to overstate the extent to which the federal government exerted its will over allegedly feeble state governments. Ultimately, not only was the draft enacted with the general compliance of the states, the policy was often proposed, encouraged, and sanctioned by state and local leaders. Using New York as a window into the Civil War relationship between state and national governments, this essay will demonstrate that Lincoln and Congress pursued a conscription policy that state and local representatives had long been considering and promoting.6 To these New York officials, a rigorous prosecution of the war in 1862 and 1863 demanded a draft, whether it should originate from state governments or from the U.S. Congress. This new understanding of conscription contributes to what appears to be a significant paradigm shift in the study of federalism and the Civil War era. While older histories have argued that the war provided the federal government with an opportunity to permanently seize power from the states, recent work on party politics, confiscation, and recruitment by scholars such as Mark Neely, Adam I. P. Smith, Silvana Siddali, and William Blair illustrate a more nuanced relationship among local, state, and federal officials as well as the northern public.7 As these historians show, the federal government [End Page 471] relied on cooperation, conversation, and even advice from party members closer to the ground. A new analysis of northern conscription will further emphasize the complex nature of Civil War federalism. This essay revises the traditional story of Civil War conscription in three ways. First, while most scholars have focused either on federal policymaking or the state response, I examine both levels of government and how they interact.8 The number of letters, directed editorials, telegrams, and visits [End Page 472] among federal, state, and local officials illustrates just how important vertical political relationships were to determining war policy and conscription in particular. These state and local leaders were often able to influence or alter legislation and executive department orders.9 Some even provided advice that would prove essential to Union strategy.10 Furthermore, in the tense atmosphere of Civil War politics, state and local officials often looked to the federal government to propose and enforce somewhat unpopular and politically dangerous measures, like conscription. The relationship between state and federal officials is more complex in the context of divided government. After the 1862 elections, many states found themselves with one branch controlled by Democrats and the other in the hands of Republicans. In the case of New York, Democrat Horatio Seymour—the new governor in the spring of 1863—strongly opposed conscription and has often been historians' focus in portraying a reluctant or resistant state...

The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War Walter L. Buenger The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War. By Wallace Hettle. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. 240. Cloth $50.00.) Wallace Hettle offers a useful corrective to the tendency to break analysis of Southern politics in 1861, to focus on explaining secession to the neglect of understanding Civil War politics. Combining social and cultural history with a sure understanding of state level politics, Hettle focuses on the region's dominant Democratic party. He argues that the Democrats, especially their leaders, were torn between the egalitarian roots of the party and the reality that it functioned in a hierarchical slave society. For Hettle, "equal participation in a system characterized by inequalities is not possible" (4). During a war that demanded an enormous sacrifice from common people, from nonslaveholding whites, the gulf between the ordinary citizen and the slaveholding leadership widened. As a result, "the South increasingly lacked a popular foundation for the struggle" (10). Hettle stops short of insisting that the South lost the Civil War because of politics but argues that the increasingly high desertion rates and the lack of will to continue the fighting in 1865 derived in part from a political system that could no longer balance defending slavery and individual rights. Every chapter deals in one way or another with "the complexity of the interaction between planters and yeoman in the Civil War era" (39). Hettle begins with an extended discussion of the ongoing role of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson in the antebellum Democratic party. Jackson gave the party a highly gendered base—the image of an iron willed and independent man who dominated all others. Jefferson famously elevated yeoman farmers and the egalitarian society in which they lived to an ideal type. Few who came after Jackson, however, possessed his adroit balance of a defense of the yeoman with a display of manly strength and independence. Instead as secession approached and the Civil War unfolded leaders of the Democratic party often sought manly control and dominance at the expense of equal rights and equal participation by [End Page 325] the yeoman. Hettle uses case studies of John C. Rutherford of Virginia, Joseph Brown of Georgia, Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to illustrate his point and to explain the variations and similarities between the Southern states. In each of these case studies, Hettle deftly explains both high politics and low politics: the overarching tension between elite control and democracy and the particular feuds, divisions, and issues that divided the public in individual states. For example, Hettle attributes the creation of a dictatorial Executive Council in wartime South Carolina to prewar schisms caused by such issues as conflict over legislative apportionment and the connection of South Carolinians to the national Democratic party. Yet even in South Carolina, devotion to Jacksonian principles and the need to ensure up-country support of the war caused the state's political leaders to retreat from aristocratic control symbolized by the Executive Council. In the end, however, Hettle's major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and of Southern politics is to remind us of the role of slavery in all aspects of Southern life. The tension between elite control and manly dominance on one side and democracy and egalitarianism on the other grew from this. As Hettle puts it, "The peculiar institution produced a peculiar democracy, distorted by a culture of mastery and social inequality" (171). This democracy as well as the Democratic party that expressed it disintegrated during the war, weakening the political will and the ideological foundation of Southern citizens and the Southern government. By connecting wartime politics with prewar politics, by illuminating the distinctive features of each state, and most importantly by focusing on the political stress created by slavery, Hettle adds to our understanding of southern politics and to the debate over why the South lost the war. Walter L. Buenger Texas A&M University Copyright © 2006 The Kent State University Press

The Politics of the Irish Civil War

The Politics of the Irish Civil War

Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War Mark E. Neely Jr. Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War. By Michael S. Green. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Pp. 398. $65.00.) The advent a generation ago of the New Political History, which aimed to take the focus off the opinions of party elites and emphasize the behavior of voters, dealt a stunning blow to the study of Civil War politics. The essential insights of that new interpretive framework for American political history—party "systems," "critical" elections with their subsequent voter "realignments," and the "ethnocultural thesis" on voting behavior in the nineteenth century—left Civil War politics begging. The Civil War party "system," pitting Republicans against Democrats, was established before the war and persisted long afterward. The "critical" election that realigned the voters occurred before the war, in 1856. And the "ethnocultural thesis," stressing religion and ethnicity as determinants of voting behavior, proved not plausibly applicable to the issues that arose in wartime elections. Strangely, the greatest political upheaval of the whole century became a subject of only minor interest to political historians. The collapse of the New Political History in recent times has helped bring new life to the political history of the Civil War, and Michael S. Green's book stands as proof of the renewed interest in the subject. He set as his ambitious task, filling in the great gap in the history of the Republican party left by Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970), which ended in 1860, and Foner's Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988), which resumed the party's history only with Reconstruction issues and mostly after war's end. "What follows," Green says in his preface, "may strike some as fitting the mold [End Page 207] of traditional history, and some may believe that mold is an appropriate word to describe traditional history" (xii). Perhaps, but most readers of Civil War History are more likely to think of political history as a perennial interest that can be approached by different methods, some of them traditional. Green's method is quite traditional. He has surveyed manuscript collections of the correspondence of major political leaders of the era, read newspapers, and consulted published secondary sources for the period. He weaves the information gleaned from these together, relying on frequent quotations of a sentence or two (the appearance of a lengthy bloc quotation near the end comes as a most surprising change of rhythm in the book's seamless prose). The Republican party depicted in the book, therefore, is the leaders, and the major ones at that. The great masses of people who voted Republican, many of whom likely called themselves Republicans, go substantially without examination, as though the New Political History had never existed. This approach seems symptomatic of the nature of the recovery of Civil War political history: it is marked by emphasis on ideology, not elections. Freedom, Union, and Power lacks an index entry for elections, and though Chapter 8 deals with the presidential election of 1864, popular voting totals are not dealt with. Only the electoral college total for 1864 and a handful of congressional votes on key measures put in appearances for the book. Therefore, one recovers little sense of calculation on the part of the politicians whose ideas are described in the book, and political history without calculation lacks a sense of suspense, contingency, and reality. To be sure, the ideology of the Republican party is an important subject, but even a study limited to ideology must put some emphasis on method. For one thing, it is difficult to recover the sharp outlines of a party's ideology without contrasting it with the beliefs of the opposition. And serious consideration must be given always to calculation, that is, to the context in which the politicians made the statements that historians assemble and label as ideologies. Without such systematic approach, historians can run into problems. Green argues that the ideology of the Republican party during the war can be summed up as...