The Honorable Powell Clayton (review)

BOOK REVIEWSICI eluding finally the Civil War. The nonresistants explicitly distinguished themselves (bound by an ethic of love) from the rest of the citizenry for whom, they believed, human liberty enjoined coercion, including finally Civil War. Tragically, and with few exceptions, peace advocates lost any ethical vantage point from which to critique the conduct or outcome of that war. A synopsis of the argument is no substitute for the book. Ziegler writes a rich, clear narrative. She casts ideas in the context of personal and organizational struggles. She captures them in appropriate anecdotes and apt quotations and restates them in relation to her developing line of argument. She gives force to her underlying assumption—that ideas mattered a great deal in that age—by the story she tells. She relates the ethical struggle of peace advocates to the broad currents of the period. Her account is grounded in a close reading of primary published sources and in archive materials, and it is fully informed by the secondary literature on the period. The scholarship is sound, but is not imposed on the narrative (interesting nuggets are relegated to the thirty-four pages of citations and endnotes). The clarity and thrust of her interpretation distinguish Ziegler's book from Merle Curti's ground-breaking The American Peace Crusade: 1815-1860 (1929) and Peter Brock's comprehensive Pacifism in the United States (1968). A history of ideas is itself an intellectual construct, of course, and so it only enhances the importance and soundness of this work to suggest that it can be extended. A few leaders refused to condone the civil war, notably Elihu Burrit and Adin Ballou, as Ziegler acknowledges. A fuller exploration of their position would perhaps clarify the vantage point that was the lost in the polarization of the radical and conservative wings of the movement. The APS campaigns for stipulated arbitration and international organization are also noted. A fuller development of them might yield a third, perhaps just, war ethic which, eclipsed by love and coercion in the first half of the century, may have grounded the movement in the second. Thus Ziegler has contributed , besides her argument and the story she tells so well, a valuable analytical approach to the study of peace movements in their political cultures. Charles Chatfield Wittenberg University The Honorable Powell Clayton. By William H. Burnside. (Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1991. Pp. 132. $16.95.) No Reconstruction figure has been more in need of a biography than Powell Clayton ofArkansas. A Union brigadier general at 31 , victorious in saving his small command at Pine Bluff when attacked by overwhelming odds, Clayton entered into Reconstruction with a will, serving three contentious years as governor before moving on to the United States Senate. At just that point when most Reconstruction Republicans faded from view, Clayton continued 192CIVIL WAR HISTORY his onslaught on life: town developer at Eureka Springs, railroad promoter, and until 19 12 the man who controlled Republican party patronage in Arkansas . His was as extraordinary career. What Clayton has needed is an extraordinary biographer. However, Clayton himself preempted the field by publishing his own memoirs. In spite of a few human touches, they are modeled on Caesar's Commentaries. His personal papers disappeared, and only his years as ambassador to Mexico and his correspondence relating to patronage affairs in Arkansas left a significant paper trail. Given these limitations, William H. Burnside has produced a balanced biography exploring Clayton's various roles. He is at his best in the chapters treating Clayton's diplomatic and patronage roles. By contrast, the Reconstruction chapter is very disappointing and fails to come to grips with the embattled governor or his milieu. In the end, Burnside fails to explain (or even discuss) why Clayton became the most hated man in Arkansas, a man whose very name was invoked in elections into the twentieth century and whose portrait alone among all the governors of Arkansas was banned from the state capítol until 1976. This toosanitized account leaves out too much of the color and tells few of the anecdotes . Burnside places Clayton as a figure from the age of robber barons; but while Clayton's character as...