Justice Daniel Dissenting: A Biography of Peter V. Daniel, 1784-1860 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS415 perhaps even to the charge that he had been a secret abolitionist aD the while." Bishop Verot was much less hesitant about trying to help the freedmen after the war, but Father Gannon shows that he failed signally to win significant support from priests and laymen in his diocese. The Church's traditional insistence on reverence for the established government was of limited relevance in the turbulent Civil War era. Priests and bishops had to make nicely timed and nicely graded political judgments about which government was in fact established. Most southern bishops kept silent during the secession crisis; a few demanded disunion; one or two spoke out against it. Once secession was voted, Bishop Elder instructed his priests to revise prayers for the Ruling Powers so as no longer to refer to the United States. Later, when Union troops were occupying Natchez, Elder accepted house arrest rather than instruct his priests to reinstirute the old prayer. In the course of the controversy, Elder assumed the high ground that to dictate to church officials what they should pray for would violate the separation of Church and State; and on this ground he was ultimately victorious. What animated him, however, was nothing more than an unreconstructed "southern patriotism," along with the desire not to be alienated from his people. Though not required to take an oath of allegiance, Elder wrote sturdily in his diary: "Personally I was willing to bear true allegiance to any govt. Russian or Kanschatkan—but I did not wish to do anything wh. wd. injure my usefulness among my flock—as taking the oath of allegiance wd. do." Pillar's account is a carefully organized recital of priests and parishes, gifts and losses; if written with little detachment, it nevertheless records the acta and dicta of an infant diocese. Father Gannon, like his subject, indulges in apostolic candor about the opportunities missed as well as the successes achieved. He has an excellent sense for the multiple ironies of history. If Verot won State approval for aligning the Church with a lost cause, and received little credit from either Church or State for his recognition of the needs and desserts of the freedmen, Gannon is in no doubt which was Verot's greater deed. Gannon is also persuaded that no one at the Council at Rome in 1869-1870 spoke with more prescience, if with less effect, than Verot. On the issue of ecumenicism as of the Negro, Verot was a "rebel" who spoke for the future. Robert D. Cross Columbia University Justice Daniel Dissenting: A Biography of Peter V. Daniel, 1784-1860. By John P. Frank. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Pp. xiv, 336. $7.95.) Anyone who reads this book is better able to understand why there was the Civil War. Justice Peter V. Daniel of the Supreme Court had one of the minds which made some such conflict inevitable. He could not understand the changing conditions of the nineteenth century; intellectu- 416CIVIL WAR HISTORY ally he was permanently a dweller in the eighteenth. He was a pure republican who did not believe in corporations, in government having more than the minimum of functions, and believed that virtue could hardly be found in any place where many people dwelt. A simple rural society was his ideal. He was born in Virginia on a bluff overlooking the Potomac in 1784; he came to a stage of comprehension during the administration of George Washington, and to man's estate when Thomas Jefferson was in the new executive mansion. He started the practice of law in Richmond and married the daughter of Edmund Randolph, onetime Secretary of State. He was of the bluest Virginia blood. As he was a Republican in a Federalist city, his law practice was not too engrossing and he turned to politics. Because the state was Republican and ruled largely by a council which sat frequently in Richmond, it was convenient to have Richmond Republicans as its members. Daniel served year after year and spent interminable hours in Virginia's service. He had a mind that was attracted by detail and a philosophy which did not encourage him to avoid hard work, so...