In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

70CIVIL WAR HISTORY gives us the "Bluff Ben" of hoary legend, but there is too much, for my taste, of his well-known jousts with Lincoln and McClellan, to say nothing of other figures, and too little of Wade. (Strangely, there is no reference to the biography of Wade by Hans Trefousse published five years ago.) Was Vallandigham the personification of the Old Northwest copperhead? Many have thought so. But Frank Klement informs us that he was more moderate than Samuel Medary, editor of the Columbus Crisis; and despite the notoriety earned from his spectacular arrest, trial, and exüe to the South, what he really favored was a cease-fire and a restoration of the old Union, quixotic but hardly treasonable. All of which teUs us how bereft of real leaders the wartime Democratic party was, and what it might otherwise have been had Douglas lived. For Ohio Democrats to have nominated Vallandigham for governor in 1863, and for national Democrats to have nominated McClellan for President in 1864, were either blunders of the first magnitude or indications of such a vacuum. The politican-general is represented by James A. Garfield whom AUan Peskin presents initially as a Christian pacifist but whom the war soon converted into an admirer of Frederick the Great, critic of West Point generals, and advocate of the idea that massive bloodletting alone could destroy the rebellion. Of the two newsmen included (Murat Halstead and Whitelaw Reid), the treatment by Robert H. Jones of Reid is much superior. Even so, I would have preferred more of Reid's observations on wartime politics and fewer on battles and strategy. There are useful assessments of the contributions of a Cincinnati manufacturer, Mües Greenwood, and the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, Charles P. McIlvaine , by Carl M. Becker and James B. Bell respectively. A droll piece is the concluding essay on two weU-known humorists, Artemus Ward and Petroleum Nasby, by Harvey Wish. Kenneth B. Shovf.r University of Texas at El Paso The Second. Rebellion: The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. By James McCague. (New York: Dial Press, 1968. Pp. xii, 210. $5.95.) Ignored by practicaUy everybody for one hundred years, the July, 1863 New York City draft riots have gained a new significance in the riot-torn 1960's. We find some solace today in learning that things were not exactly peachy back then neither. However, as the tragedy of July, 1863 is told and retold it generally comes out about the same. The principal sources are the contemporary newspapers, so it is doubtful that we wül ever learn much more than we now know about the riots, the leaders, the strategy, or some of the shadowy figures who flit on and off the stage. In this latest account, James McCague, a novelist and historian, has gone through the newspapers and scattered primary and secondary materials. He has written a good narrative of the riots, probably as good as any extant, with several chapters of background on the gangs of New York and an epüogue on post-riot developments . Still there is not much terribly new here, although use of the Charles Loring Chapín memoir does supply some depth missing in other versions. But this is hardly a scholarly work. There is no documentation, and the bibliography omits a number of volumes which bear on the riots. One also finds a disturbing looseness of language. For example, it is unlikely that the Enrolment Act of 1863 was "rammed through a complaisant Congress on the pretext of wartime urgency and handed to the public as a fait accompli." ( 17 ) Nor is it accurate to say that "the draft was not destined to be much of a success from any sensible point of view." (165) Over one million men volunteered under the stimulus of the draft, which makes some sense. McCague also teUs us that the War Department "asked no help from the local authorities" on the eve of the draft, suggesting that had it done BOOK REVIEWS71 so the trouble might have been averted. ActuaUy the Provost Marshal General, James B. Fry, went out of his way...

pdf

Share