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Reviewed by:
  • Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security by Dennis K. Boman, and: Lincoln on Trial: Southern Civilians and the Law of War by Burrus M. Carnahan
  • Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security. Dennis K. Boman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8071-3693-5, 328 pp., cloth, $45.00;
Lincoln on Trial: Southern Civilians and the Law of War. Burrus M. Carnahan. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8131-2596-5, 168 pp., cloth, $30.00.

Historiographic shifts are often easier to see in hindsight. It may have been inevitable that historians who matured during the nightmare of World War I would come to see the U.S. Civil War as a needless war brought on by a blundering generation, but the contours of that interpretation took decades to emerge. Not so for 9/11, the effects of which are already visible on the historiographical landscape. Although it may be too soon to see clear interpretive shifts, historians of the Civil War have already begun to ask and answer questions that reflect post-9/11 concerns: What is the best way to fight an insurgency? What rights do noncombatants have? To what extent is the [End Page 489] president bound by international law and standards when conducting war against a savage foe? What responsibility does a democratic citizenry have for the atrocities its own forces commit in war?

Both the studies under review address these questions. Burrus Carnahan’s study focuses on northern policy and practice as it applied in some of the most violent settings of the war—Atlanta, the Shenandoah Valley, and Missouri. Dennis Boman also considers Union practice, but he concentrates on Missouri, offering a detailed narrative of the contest there between civilian and military authority. Taken together, these studies considerably advance our understanding of how the conflict was shaped by international law and what that meant on a daily basis to the war’s participants. Both authors exonerate Lincoln from the hysterical criticisms levied against him by current partisans who see the Civil War as an exercise in expanding the federal government at the expense of both states and people. Both critically assess a number of Lincoln’s decisions, but they also find that his famed pragmatism ensured that Lincoln rarely sanctioned egregious actions by commanders in the field and never developed a comprehensive punitive policy.

Although Lincoln was loathe to admit that the Confederacy constituted an independent nation, the problem of handling prisoners of war and of ensuring fair treatment of Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy forced his administration to develop the prisoner exchange cartel, which effectively applied the law of war to the conflict. As Carnahan notes, this improved the lot of captured soldiers but may have subjected civilians to worse conditions (21). The Constitution offered more protection for civilians and their property than did the law of war, which sanctioned seizure and destruction. The key criterion, as Carnahan shows, was “military necessity.” Francis Lieber made this principle the cornerstone of his rules of war for the Union army released in 1863, but it did not cover acts that civilized nations would consider “barbarous or cruel.” Again, the devil was in the definition. Under Lincoln’s sanction, northern forces arrested, imprisoned, and banished disloyal persons and taxed, seized, and destroyed their property. No doubt many southern civilians considered these acts barbarous and cruel. But Carnahan knows international law well—his study includes graceful short asides that telescope beyond the war to reveal the historical influence and context of various policies—and most of what Lincoln authorized fell within it. In considering how to categorize Philip Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, Carnahan labels it “wasting” an enemy’s resources as opposed to “ravaging” them, a far worse crime, according to Emmerich de Vattel, whose 1758 The Law of Nations set the standards against which northerners and southerners compared their own and their enemy’s conduct (87–88). What may surprise readers is just how much international law sanctioned. The bombing of towns, for instance, was permissible, and both Confederates (at...

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