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Canadian Review of American Studies Volume23, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 195-201 195 The Illiberal Lincoln MichaelFellman MarkE. Neely, Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and CivilLiberties. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991. Without much doubt, the grossest misrepresentation of the history of war by traditional military historians is expressed in their maps. There, one sees neat ranks of opposing bars, representing battlefield positioning of troop units, and a series of arrows, representing troop movements. Such is calm and detached armchair "post hoc-erism" -while the reality of all battles is haze, confusion, and extreme fear punctuated by almost random moments of bravery (or perhaps foolishness). During the mid-nineteenth century, wars like the American Civil War, after two minutes of firing rifles loaded with black gunpowder, the battlefield became so clouded that few knewwith much certainty what was happening. Ever since John Keegan published The Face of Battle in 1976, historians have begun a serious reevaluation of the nature of battle, taking chaos, not order, as the first principle. More recently, other historians have begun to look at the concomitant confusions of the home front, stressing uncertainties, dissent, and corruption rather than clarity of purpose and uniformity of support for the war effort. In this Pulitzer Prize winning study, Mark Neely makes a major contribution to this revision of the analysis of the nature of war behind the lines by analysing the fundamental confusions of the Union administration, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular, as they 196 Canadian Review of American Studies dealt with the vexingissues of those civilians in the North, the border states, and the recaptured South, whom they feared as potential traitors and aiders and comforters of the Confederacy. It has alwaysbeen well known that the Lincoln administration suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the early stages of the war, and subsequently threw thousands of civilians into prison without the benefit of normal legal due process. The usual number given of such prisoners is 13,535,a figure obtained in 1897,by the historian James Ford Rhodes from Colonel F. C. Ainsworth, chief of the Record and Pension Office of the War Department. Rhodes sought these numbers out of his astonishment at the claim of the distinguished English commentator, James Bryce, in his influential book, The American Commonwealth (1888), that Lincoln had thrown 38,000 civilians into prison during the war, making him the greatest tyrant on this score since Cromwell. During the Reconstruction era, Democrats liked to make such claims as Bryce's, adding that most of the arrests were made for partisan purposes, when numerous members of the Democratic loyal opposition were falsely jailed as traitors. None of these claims were made, however, with the benefit of research , a fundamental failure which Neely does a great deal to correct. He is the first historian to make systematic use of the archival records of federal governmental arrests and courts martial. He also has a sceptical mind. What emerges from his research and analysis, "writing constitutional history from the bottom up," he terms his method (xi), is not a flashy journalistic expose, but a historian's book, one which debunks all grand and sweeping conclusions about any supposedly systematic assault undertaken by the Lincoln administration against civil liberties during the war. On the other hand, Neely does not whitewash the record either-far from exonerating Lincoln and his administration, he demonstrates that, as a group, they were confused , opportunistic, and often insensitive, and that they were led not by Abraham the Christ-figure (all too common to Civil War historiography), but by Lincoln, the sharp politician, who was often opportunistic and indifferent both to principle and to the behaviour of his officials, in Washington and in the field. At the very start of the war, Lincoln first suspended habeas corpus in the state of Maryland, not to arrest Democrats, as some earlier historians MichaelFellmanI 197 have claimed but, Neely argues, to keep open the route for military reinforcements to nearly isolated Washington, D.C. Lincoln's suspension for Marylandwas not political, "and it would never become primarily political" (9).Subsequently, with the notable exception of Missouri, a subject to which Iwillreturn, Neely argues that...

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