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Freedom Under Lincoln (review)
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 15, Number 2, June 1969
- pp. 181-183
- 10.1353/cwh.1969.0004
- Review
- Additional Information
book reviews181 thizers from those who merely wanted to end the war with a negotiated peace, but his satire was an effective bludgeon for the Union cause. It was widely credited with helping to win the war. The Union more or less restored, Locke moved to Toledo to edit the Blade. As "a man who could do anything around a newspaper", he was in general charge of the operation, but made the Weekly his special care. Under his editorship it became nationally known, counting 200,000 readers. By culling skillfully from the Blade's editorials, Harrison has made his chapters on Reconstruction a case study of shifting opinion in the late 1860's. Originally a supporter of President Johnson and a foe of the Republican Radicals, Locke ended by supporting the Radicals and calling for Johnson's ouster. He agreed that the basic structure of the government should not be "distorted" merely to punish the Confederates, but he was not prepared—as he came to realize Johnson was^to withdraw protection from the freed slaves and leave their fate to the southern states. We thus find him praising the Congress as heartily for passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto as he had previously praised the President for vetoing it. With war and Reconstruction receding, the author focuses on Locke's career with the Bhde and the New York Evening Mail. Here the keen interest of the first half of the book is not quite sustained. This is not because of any fault in style, which is pleasantly readable throughout, but rather that Locke's activities become less absorbing. His editorial campaigns were perhaps just as good as those of the Nasby period, but they do not move us as much and they were certainly less successful. It is good to know that he was a more complex personality than we had supposed and that he was a "persistent and often eloquent advocate of the rights of man", but it is likely that he will continue to be remembered , if at all, for Nasby. Factual errors, not numerous in the aggregate, are concentrated in the opening pages, obliging the author to bridge a quite unnecessary credibility gap in the remainder of the book. James B. Gidney Kent State University Freedom Under Lincoln. By Dean Sprague. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. Pp. viii, 340. $5.95.) Freedom Under Lincoln sails under false colors. Its publisher claims that the problem of "Federal Power and Personal Liberty Under the Strain of Civil War" constitutes "a little-known chapter of history," that Freedom Under Lincoln is "a lively, authoritative and important book," and that Dr. Sprague's treatment of the centralization of power and resistance thereto during the American Civil War "implies much about contemporary political problems." In fact, Sprague, who received his 182CIVIL WAR history doctorate in Political Science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and serves as a civilian with the Department of Defense, has written a pedestrian narrative of the first year of the Civil War which sheds precious little light on important issues of that conflict, let alone "contemporary political problems." Sprague's account is episodic. He devotes four chapters to events in Baltimore and Maryland; four to St. Louis and Missouri; two to Kentucky; and five to Washington, D.C. and the North. He then returns to the same scenes for three, four, two and three chapters, respectively . His disjointed narrative begins with the clash between Massachusetts troops and a local mob in Baltimore, in April, 1861, and concludes with the release of political prisoners and transfer of the power to make "extraordinary arrests" from the State Department to the War Department in February, 1862. Sprague writes at length on minor, as well as major incidents during these ten months. He scarcely attempts to analyze the changing political and military situation in which these episodes occurred and offers no insights into the political and constitutional questions raised by the Lincoln administration's course of action during 1861-1862. By narrowly defining the chronological scope of his study, Sprague simply neglects the troubled history of the last three years of the Civil War. Inadequate research...