Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS83 Quakers and the antislavery community protested vehemently against the racist prohibition, arguing that the Black Code denied African Americans due process because it prohibited them from giving testimony against whites in a civil proceeding, these racial egalitarians clashed with a formidable group of Democrats. Indeed, these "militant racists," as Dykstra labels them, ultimately triumphed, despite the later defeat of a black exclusionary law. Dykstra is particularly effective in tracing the changes in racial and political attitudes over time and in demonstrating that political expediency, party affiliation, and the "removal ofthe Democratic party's control ofpublic policy" (239) played important roles in the elimination of racial barriers in Iowa. The Hawkeye state, which Dykstra believes had almost no reason to be proud of its record on racial issues before i860, emerges during the postbellum era as a supporter of African American political and civil rights. Although this turn of events did not necessarily involve a change in racial attitudes among white Iowans, it does reveal the complex interaction of factors that was necessary to bring about racial progress in one nineteenthcentury Midwestern community. Bright Radical Star is an impressive book in its breadth, research, and use of quantitative analysis, particularly a multiple ecological regression. Dykstra 's conclusions are based on a solid core of local and county records, election returns, newspapers, manuscript census returns, and social scientific literature on race relations. This important study also breaks new ground on the antislavery movement in Iowa and the role that white abolitionists played to support the civil and political liberties of free blacks, a role in which most historians have found good reason to be critical. Dykstra, however, tells us little about black Iowans themselves, how they felt about these issues or how they mobilized their meager resources as free blacks did in other states in the face of white supremacy and political restrictions. African Americans are essentially treated as issues and passive entities in these acrimonious debates and struggles over their destiny. Bright Radical Star, nonetheless, is a significant addition to the literature and will serve as a model for both political historians and students of nineteenth-century race relations. Albert S. Broussard Texas A&M University Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War. By Theodore J. Karamanski . (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1993. Pp. xiv, 292. $24.95.) In her 1980 assessment of the status of local and community history in the United States, published in The Past Before Us, Kathleen Neils Conzen deplored the fact that much of the local history published by previous generations was little more than "boosterism." Theodore Karamanski, author of Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War, is certainly not guilty of old-fashioned boosterism. He does argue that the major role Chicago 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY played in that war is generally unrecognized. His book intends to show that Chicago was important to the war and that the war changed Chicago in significant ways. Karamanski's story begins with the i860 Republican National Convention in Chicago and ends with Chicagoans mourning the assassinated President Lincoln in a spontaneous "people's parade." In between the author describes political battles between Democrats and Republicans; racial tensions between the Irish and blacks (whose consequences he traces down to the present); the city's functions as supply center, troop depot, recruiting ground and transportation hub; the famous Sanitary Fairs; and the activities of prominent Chicago citizens at the state and national level. Along the way he makes pointed comments about the neglected activities of women (the female organizers of the Sanitary Fair were required by law to get their husbands' permissions to sign the necessary contracts) and the oftentimes lukewarm support for the war displayed by the city's inhabitants. Karamanski's colorful, even purple, prose is based largely on secondary sources, and there is no bibliography, although there are extensive notes. He succumbs to the current fashion for "fly on the wall" descriptions of some events. Scholars may ponder three of the author's assertions. First, he states that Lincoln would not have received the Republican nomination in 1 860 had the convention not been held in Chicago. Since this is a non-falsifiable statement it...