Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War by Burrus M. Carnahan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS in partnership with brother Charles. As Fisher points out, " fi, ur households,united by business interests, blood ties, and marriage vows, remained neighbors for many years"29092 ). The distinctly appealing aspect of Mersman' s diary is the glimpse it offers into the lives, the camaraderie, and the strategies for success of ambitious single young men in the antebellum era. Diary entries include details of his daily routine . He sometimes discussed work affairs, but mostly he recounted stories that sugtested the comfortable, almost carefree pace of life he enjoyed with his friends: Socializing with them and with family, attending the theater and concerts, drinking ale in saloons, smoking cigars, flirting with women, and improving himself with his studies of French, the flute, and tlie guitar. We also see his anxiety as he made plans to move to St. Louis to begin his own business, his worry as cholera struck iii 1849 and periodically thereafter, his unhappy frustr·ation and struggle with syphilis,and his hopes for marriage. Sensitive to characteristic tr· aits ofantebellum American culture, Fisher places this m: iterial in . 1 useful framework. We learn something of the family' s history preceding and following Mersman' s diary,including the curious detail that his sister Agnes worked with circus companies and eventually married William " Wild Bill"Hickok 5). As a bic, grapher might,she divides the diary into chapters that reflect the most cliaracteristic activities and notable events of each stage in Mersman' s life. She begins each chapter with a briefintroduction placing the entries in context and ends with notes identifying people and obscure references . Maps of Cincinnati and St. Louis oKer a sense of the geography ofMersman' s world, and an annotated list of persons, places,and businesses adds further depth to the diary' s context. 1[ his is a useful source that is in itself interesting to read. Matthew N. Vosiiieier Hanover College Burrus M. Carnahan.Act « justice: Lincolnk Emancipation Proclamation and tbe Law ofWar, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,2007. 217 pp. ISBN 8790813124636 ( cloth), $ 40.00. The Emancipation Proelamation, as Richard Hofstadter famously observed,had all the moral grandeur of a bill oflading. Yet, as Burrus Carn: ihan makes clear in his wonderfully concise new book, . i complex legal tradition directed Lincoln' s pen. In the quest to preserve the Union and liberate almost four inillion slaves, the president sacrificed poetry for victory. Lincoln reluctantly invoked the " law of war," which had the unfortunate effect of legitimizing the Confederates'status as foreign combatants rather than domestic insurrectionists. On the other hand, the Union' s objectives could be dealt with more effectively by applying the law of war rather than trying to maintain the tattered fiction" of peacetime civil law. ( 60) Military necessity was Lincoln' s justification for emancipation; it also explains the less than compelling prose of the Proclamation. Act ofJustice is & valuable resource for scholars wanting to understand better the historjcal precedent for military emancipation and its legality linder the laws of war. General readers may tussle ever so slightly with the structure ofthe book,more a collection ot ten thematictilly related essays than a pageturning n·arrative, but the writing is as pleasant as it is clean Ofparticular interest are the early chapters where Carnahan examines the longstanding tradition of OHIO VALLEY HISTORY 74 BOOK REVIEWS military emancipation ( the extensive precedent will surprise most twentyfirst century observers) and the manner in which the Supreme Court reacted to two such instances ( once treating slaves as confiscatable enemy property,in United States v. Brown after the War of 1812, and later viewing emancipation as an unlawful t·aking of private property,in the 1851 case of Mitchell v.Harmony). At the time of southern secession, Lincoln had no guarantee as to which way ChiefJustice Roger Taney's bench would lean. According to Carnahan, the president had but two models to guide his thinking : George Washington' s mobilization against the Whiskey Rebellion and Andrew Jackson' s threats against nullification. lhe time for threats had clearly passed. Since Lincoln repeatedly maintained that the South could not legally secede and establish its own government,his inclination was to follow in Washington' s steps and treat Confederates as...