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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 stretched-out crisis. The Union's survival techniques included popular elections being carried on in the midst of a great war. This was a risk which Great Britain felt unable to run in World War II. In this sense, as Klement concludes, (p. 324) ". . . time vindicated Lincoln, not Vallandigham." Harold M. Hyman Rice University Irish: Charles G. Halpine in Civil War America. By William Hanchett. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970. Pp. xv, 208. $8.00.) Private Miles O'Reilly was a northern redneck, a "good old boy" from Ireland who served loyally if erratically in the Union army during the Civil War; he was also the literary creation of Charles G. Halpine, another Irishman. Halpine's real life was almost as colorful as his O'Reilly's fictional one. Bom the son of a Protestant minister in Catholic Ireland, Halpine was unique from the very beginning. After completing his education and marrying in England, he joined the Irish masses who were pouring into America early in the 1850 s. Driven by insecurity and ambition , he developed rapidly as a free-lance writer, poet, and journalist and also rose in New York city politics. He was a staunch Democrat 70CIVIL WAR HISTORY with a special admiration for Stephen A. Douglas and a passionate champion of Irish independence, but he wrote on a bewildering variety of subjects, usually with wit and sometimes with wisdom. Unfortunately he was seriously handicapped by an excessive devotion to whiskey. When the Civil War began, Halpine quickly joined New York's Irish Sixty-Ninth Regiment, and through much of the conflict he served on the staff of General David Hunter, whom he greatly admired. He took part in Hunter's offensive through the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 and some other military operations, but his most important wartime duty was to stimulate the patriotism of Irish Americans and simultaneously to enhance the Irish image among many skeptical and even hostile Yankees. In this effort he enlisted the services of Private O'Reilly, whose earthly eloquence was often quite effective. A poem entitled "Sambo's Right To Be Kilt" was an especially influential Irish appeal to the racist North to allow Negro troops in the Union army—as cannon fodder. As Halpine-O'Reilly bluntly indicated, every rebel shot or shell which killed a black was one less rebel missile capable of killing a more valuable white. After the war Halpine championed President Johnson and his lenient Reconstruction program, but in 1868, prominent, prosperous and still not cjuite forty years old, this gifted writer died, a sudden end to a fascinating, erratic career. William Hanchett, professor of history at San Diego State...

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