Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America by Fergus M. Bordewich, and: Ending the Civil War and Consequences for Congress ed. by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (review)

The books under review speak to two interrelated fields in Civil War– era scholarship that have been particularly active in recent years: political history¹ and the history of the postwar years.² Those two themes come together in studies of the United States Congress, and particularly of the postwar constitutional amendments. Fergus M. Bordewich’s Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America and Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon’s edited collection, Ending the Civil War and Consequences for Congress, illustrate this explosion of new work. They are wildly different but do overlap in instructive ways.

Congress at War answers the question that perhaps no Civil War historian has ever asked: What would it look like if someone were to write a history of the American Civil War where members of Congress were the central actors while Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet played more incidental roles? That is not precisely what Fergus M. Bordewich has attempted, but it is not far off. Bordewich tells the story of the Civil War from a political perspective (but with sufficient military detail to cover the basics), with an emphasis on “Republican reformers.” He has selected three Republicans for particular attention: Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania’s radical congressman and his party’s powerful floor leader in the House; William Pitt Fessenden, the moderate-minded senator from Maine, who guided Congress through a morass of financial legislation; and Ohio’s radical senator Benjamin Wade, the chair of the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. To this accomplished trio, Bordewich adds Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham. It is not entirely clear why Vallandigham, a strong-minded Peace Democrat, rounds out this quartet. Vallandigham certainly does not fit Bordewich’s subtitle, and he left Washington in January 1863 after a failed reelection bid. As a notorious Copperhead, Vallandigham also had little to do with the legislative events that are at the core of the story.

Specialists will discover little new in Congress at War, and that which appears to be “new” is not always correct. But it is a story well told. Bordewich has an eye for fine details and illuminating anecdotes. Sometimes his characters are a bit breathless, and poor Fessenden always seems to be near death’s door, but Bordewich has a knack for building suspense even when communicating dry material. Relying entirely on the Congressional Globe, Bordewich regales the reader with a lively account of the debates surrounding the First Confiscation Act, in which Fessenden “exploded” at Wade, who “thundered back” at his colleague, to which Fessenden “snapped” a reply before adding a few “sarcastic” words, prompting Wade to “grumble” at the Mainer’s “‘dictatorial tone,’” and so on (140–41). When John Sherman introduced the National Banking Act, he “eloquently interwove idealism and pragmatism, cold reason and menace” (211). In mid-1864, Michigan Republican Zachariah Chandler—no small fellow—got into a tussle with Indiana Copperhead Daniel Voorhees (“The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash”) in the dining room of Washington’s National Hotel. The fight stopped when Voorhees’s buddy smashed a pitcher of milk on Chandler’s head. Great stuff.

There are enough minor errors to note, but really not so many as to set off alarms. George Pendleton, who ran as George McClellan’s running mate in 1864, was from Ohio, not Indiana. Stonewall Jackson’s role at Antietam seems a bit garbled, as do various minor facts surrounding the Battle of Gettysburg. The details of Lincoln’s famed “blind memo” and Vallandigham’s...