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68 CIVIL WAR HISTORY given us a competent and important study of one of the antebellum period's most colorful politicians. Hans L. Trefousse Brooklyn College, City University of New York The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigliam and the Civil War. By Frank L. Klement. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. Pp. xii, 351. $10.50.) Over the years Professor Klement and I have disagreed amiably, sharply, and usefully, I trust, about Civil War men and measures. We will do so again with respect to his new book, The Limits of Dissent. His 1960 Copperheads of the Middle West properly has become a mainstay of the professional literature. It developed the Wisconsin tradition that socioeconomic causes underlay midwestem opposition to the Civil War, that Union and emancipation were distant if not irrelevant drums to black-shy Democrats of the old Northwest, and that antiwar activists were hangover Jeffersonians whose primary goals were the preservation of individuals' and states' rights. Similar assumptions mark The Limits of Dissent. It is by far the best life of Vallandigliam to appear. The Ohioan emerges no more attractive a personality than before, but he is now a more understandable political person. This improvement is a factor of Professor Klement's assiduous research and careful evaluation of the actual party configurations in which Vallandigham functioned. Unfortunately for the promise of the book's title, Professor Klement does not test by similar standards the national government's actual, on-hand instruments and alternatives with which it bore the Civil War's weights. If Vallandigham's explorations of the permissible limits of dissent in the Civil War situation are to be evaluated profitably, some notion is necessary of how he and his contemporaries viewed that frontier. It is essential to realize that before the Civil War, with the exception of the tiny number of abolitionists and Indian-centered reformers, white Americans did not know that limits existed on dissent. Governments imposed so few restraints that Carlyle described the American way as "anarchy plus a street constable." Little wonder that the sudden appearance after Sumter of national power in the form of what today is called internal security procedures, shocked a generation that was familiar only with national weakness. In our time, august professors, prestigious foundations, concerned courts, and watchdog libertarian associations attend systematically to internal security-civil liberties questions. Nevertheless, the limits of dissent still elude us, for they are a dynamic, not a fixed factor of complex situations. No equivalent accumulation of data, expertness, or concern existed in 1861. What was known was incorrect, as Taney proved with his inaccurate employments in the Merryman hearing of habeas corpus history, BOOK REVIEWS69 that Professor Klement apparently accepts. Taney proliferated the notion that the habeas corpus writ had always been an effective libertarian bulwark in America. Not so. Stanley Kutler's and William Wiecek's work, ignored in The Limits of Dissent, confirm the contrary fact. Until Republican ( including Radical) congressmen, with Lincoln's cordial assent in 1863 and subsequently, expanded removal procedures from state courts to national courts and increased—it had never been wholly absent —civilian control over the military establishment, including martial tribunals of the sort Vallandigham faced, libertarian protections remained rudimentary. The upshot of the Civil War and Reconstruction was an actual increase in all Americans' civil and political liberties. In the 1970's employment continues of relevant statutes produced in the 1860"s and 70's. Vallandigham was sensitive to none of these augmentations in the techniques of freedom. A successful inquiry into their actualities requires attention to legal-political institutional interaction not present in The Limits of Dissent. However critical, reference by Professor Klement was in order to the work of BeIz, Donald, and Trefousse among others, on the Lincoln-Radical relationships. This scholarly corpus calls forth in response to Klement's adversión to "Lincoln's feud with the radical Republicans," (p. 295), the query, what feud? Professor Klement describes Vallandigham's trial competently, without analyzing the complex civil-military, nation-state, jurisprudentialpolitical mixtures involved. It reflected vividly the perils and strengths possible in a political democracy structured in a state-centered federal system, biracially peopled, at a time of agonizingly...

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