Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854-1864 (review)

?8?CIVIL WAR HISTORY invading army. Linden and Pressly masterfully juxtapose Rachel Cormany's description of Early's burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, with journal entries by several members of the Jones family written as Sherman's army marched through Georgia. Both Mary S. Mallard and Mary Jones wrote vivid and detailed accounts of their personal terror as enemy soldiers repeatedly entered their isolated homes and left with precious stores of food. The Linden-Pressly sampler will satisfy few. Like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, when you begin a chapter, you are never entirely certain what you might get. But there are some very tasty morsels in the assortment All of the documents were taken from previously published materials. Linden and Pressly thoroughly cite all of their sources. Hopefully, this will allow interested readers to continue a more thorough examination of one or another of the "Cast of Characters ." This short volume should stimulate the appetite of any hungry reader. Thomas D. Matijasic Prestonsburg Community College Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854-1864. By William Gillette. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Pp. 389. $48.00.) New Jersey has suffered the charge of being pro-Southern before the war and a Copperhead antiwar state during the hostilities. This odium of appeasement has most often been accompanied by a depiction of New Jersey as a border state in the earlier works ofjournalists and historians. Proximity to the slave states on its border, Southern markets for New Jersey's manufactured goods, continual contactbetween Copperheads concentrated in New York City and those residing in northern New Jersey, as well as the influx of Southerners attending Princeton and vacationing at the Jersey shore, have all been put forth as explanations for New Jersey's rejection of Abraham Lincoln in both elections and its vigorous opposition to emancipation. William Gillette has rejected these essentially geographic and economic explanations of the state's conservatism while describing a political millieu that was far more complex and shifting than the old portraitofCopperhead political domination and aborder state mentality. Gillette has done Civil War studies in the North a service by exploring in great depth the interrelated political issues of slavery, expansion, unionism, and dissent. For New Jersey, like other Northern states, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the mini-civil war in Kansas provided the impetus for the formation of a branch of the newly formed Republican party. The events of 1 860 revealed the moderation of New Jersey politics. Democrat Stephen A. Douglas received more of the popular vote than Lincoln in the 1 860 election. Gillette notes that New Jersey supported Douglas not because of pro-Southern leanings but rather because he was believed to have the greater ability to keep the Union together. New Jersey did not exhibit the typical pattern of border state support of National Union party candidate John Bell or Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge. BOOK REVIEWSl8l Northern defeats and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, resulted in the election of a significant number of antiwar Democrats to the state legislature and Congress. Democratic Copperheads will proceed over the next two years to exert pressure within their own party, introducing into the legislature a series of "Peace Resolutions," a bill to prohibit free blacks from entering the state, a bill to deport black nonresidents of the state to other countries, a bill to ban intermarriage, and a bill to impose school segregation in Trenton. These Copperheads and those sympathetic newspapers kept up a withering criticism of President Lincoln for Union battlefield defeats, the draft, suspension of habeas corpus, and especially for emancipation. It is these activities of the Democratic party that have earned New Jersey its reputation as a Copperhead state. Gillette is at his best in exploring these well-known positions of the state's antiadministration critics and demonstrating the manner in which Democratic governor Joel Parker and other prowar Democrats acted to resist and moderate the extreme positions taken by the Copperhead wing of their party. Unlike Connecticut Democrats, the Democrat-controlled New Jersey legislature did not oppose the war, nor did it demand a ceasefire. New Jersey's criticism of Lincoln's...