American political culture and military necessity were at odds during the War for American Independence, as demonstrated this interpretation of Continental army administration. E. Wayne Carp shows that at every level of authority -- congressional, state, and county -- a localistic world-view, a deferential political order, and adherence to republican ideology impeded the task of supplying the army, even though independence demanded military strength. Placing military history within the context of colonial and revolutionary historiography, Carp finds that the colonial American belief that authority and political power should be decentralized deeply influenced Congress's approach to the task of supplying the army. Furthermore, most Congressmen had neither military experience nor any idea of how to administer an army, while local governments constantly thwarted the army's efforts to obtain supplies -- they blocked impressment and interfered with the movement of food and clothing. Carp shows that political leaders eventually adjusted their ideals to the imperatives of winning the war. He offers a revisionist analysis of the origins of the Nationalist movement of 1780-83 that was begun by army officers and state legislators fearing the imminent failure of the Revolution. Lacking unity and blinded by republican ideology, the Nationalists did not markedly improve the administration of the army. Instead, it was largely through the efforts of Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, the cooperation of the French, and sheer luck that the British were ultimately defeated. Carp concludes that the Americans won the Revolution in spite of, rather than because of, their political beliefs.
Democratic and Republican efforts at party renewal have differed in approach, but both can be recognized as intergovernmental phenomena having significant implications for American federalism. The Democratic Party's national charter and delegate selection rules, for instance, have federalized the governing structure of the party. The national Republican Party organization has developed such a large base of financial resources andcampaign services that state Republican parties and candidate committees have begun to accept national party authority along with its money. Moreover, as national, state, and local parties and candidates increasingly coordinate their delegate selection, finance, and other campaigh activities, they may transform the decentralized party system that has been a protector of state and local influence within the federal government. National ideological constituencies within both party organizations may rival territorial and functional constituencies for the attention of federal elected officials.
The apologetic tone taken by James G. Randall and other writers on the problem of arbitrary arrests in the North during the Civil War has always seemed to me to be curiously at odds with the tone Abraham Lincoln himself took. He did not apologize. In his public letter of June 12, 1863, to Erastus Corning and others, Lincoln said with characteristic toughness: '... the time [is] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.' He argued that the Confederate States, when they seceded, had been counting on being able to keep 'on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors of their cause' under 'cover of 'Liberty of speech' 'Liberty of the press' and 'Habeas corpus.'' Nicolay and Hay, who were not given to overstatement, noted that 'few of the President's state papers ... produced a stronger impression upon the public mind than this.'1Little wonder. Elsewhere in the letter, the president used even stronger language, saying that he could never: appreciate the danger ... that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trail by jury, and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future ... any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.2Stressing the image conjured up by Lincoln's use of the word 'emetics,' one could almost say that all the complaining about arbitrary arrests made him want to vomit.As most students of the Lincoln administration's racial policies agree, a historian must pay careful attention not only to what Lincoln said but also to what he actually did. The administration's statistical record on arbitrary arrests is persuasive testimony that Lincoln was not particularly embarrassed by the policy. No careful work on the numbers of civilians arrested by military authorities or for reasons of state has ever been done by a historian, and those historians who have attempted an estimate previously have been writing with the goal of defending Lincoln in mind. Even so, the lowest estimate is 13,535 arrests from February 15, 1862, to the end of the war.3 At least 866 others occurred from the beginning of the war until February 15, 1862. Therefore, at least 14,401 civilians were arrested by the Lincoln administration. If one takes the population of the North during the Civil War as 22.5 million (using the 1860 census and counting West Virginia but not Nevada), then one person out of every 1,563 in the North was arrested during the Civil War.4The February 15, 1862, date is significant because that is the date when authority for the arrests was switched from the State Department to the War Department. Evidence is sketchy, but this appears to have been strictly a matter of administrative convenience or logic. President Lincoln never made any high-level personnel or organizational move aimed at abating the severities of his internal security measures. The program was always in the hands of persons who were firm believers in its necessity as a means of saving the Union.William H. Seward became notorious for his alleged ability to exceed the king of England in his power to have any citizen arrested simply by ringing a little bell on his desk. The bell story appears apocryphal, but Seward's staunch belief that disloyalty in the North was a serious problem was not. When the president polled his cabinet about the Sumter crisis on March 15, 1861, the secretary of state warned that coercing the seceded states would make 'reunion ... hopeless, at least under this administration, or in any other way than by popular disavowal, both of the [resulting] war and of the administration which commenced it.' War, he feared, would arouse an opposition party that would offer peace and would profit politically from reunion. In other words, Seward's initial assessment of the possibility of civil war was that it would arouse so many people opposed to the war that the administration could never win it.5Seward was too busy to administer the arrest program and foreign policy at the same time, and as soon as Lincoln replaced the erratic Simon Cameron with Edwin M. Stanton in the War Department, Seward happily surrendered his authority over internal security. No one describes Stanton as anything but stern, and he in turn relied heavily on an even sterner man, Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general, to handle internal security. Holt's belief that the North was teeming with hundreds of thousands of traitors well organized in the Knights of the Golden Circle apparently exceeded the president's fears on this score, but Lincoln was content to allow a man haunted by such fears to exercise vast authority in internal security matters.6Given the Lincoln administration's generally consistent support of the arrest policy and given the remarkable extent of the arrests — nearly one person in every 1,500 — I have been struck by two question which never seem to have been asked about the arbitrary arrests: (1) why did the policy not cause the administration more political trouble than it did? and (2) how efficient was the policy?If the arrests had been aimed primarily at quashing dissent, so large a number would probably have threatened the fabric of what was left of the Union and would certainly have caused the administration serious political trouble. Yet the fact of the matter is that arbitrary arrests caused a minimum of social unrest. The three most famous and violent riots of the Civil War North — those in New York City in July 1863, in Baltimore in April 1861, and in Charleston, Illinois, in 1864 — had nothing to do with arbitrary arrests and the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The Baltimore riot occurred before the privilege of the writ was suspended anywhere. The Charleston riot, too, was a brawl between soldiers and civilians (with no indication that the question of civil liberties was at issue). And the New York riots were sparked by the issue which had real ability to cause socially explosive, violent, even murderous behavior — the draft.Arbitrary arrests caused few remarkable disorders, no matter how sensational the case or how famous the victim. Clement Vallandigham was the most famous politician in Dayton, Ohio, but his arrest in the night — despite a mysterious shrill whistled signal and three shots the victim fired into the air to alert friends — brought few people even curious to see what was happening. True, a mob the next night set fire to the offices of the local Republican newspaper, and one rioter was shot by a soldier while trying to cut a water hose in use to douse the fire, but the riot was quickly put down without loss of life. There were indignation meetings in most of the major cities of the North following Valiant Val's arrest, but this was orderly protest organized by politicians with some stake in preserving the system.7Other arrested persons upon their release had friendly crowds to greet them, but the nature of the protest was decidedly political, that is, orderly and organized by a political party, the Democrats. The arrests produced a great amount of heated rhetoric from that party which, by and large, changed no one's mind about the Lincoln administration. According to Joel Silbey, the premier student of Democratic voting behavior in this period, the voting totals for the party were largely stable after the 1850s. Why did the policy not unseat the Lincoln administration?8Since much of the writing on the subject, from Civil War times on, has focused on discussions of the constitutional justification for the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, no one seems to have been tempted to assess the efficiency of the arbitrary arrests. In fact, both those who assert their rightness and those who assert their wrongness have a tendency to assume that the arrests were inefficient and abusive, the victims chosen by affiliation with the Democratic party or press, and hordes of innocent persons incarcerated in a largely useless witch hunt. Lincoln himself encouraged that view a little by arguing, '... if, as has happened, the executive should suspend the writ ..., instances of arresting innocent persons might occur, as are always likely to occur in such cases; and then a clamor could be raised in regard to this, which might be, at least, of some service to the insurgent cause.' How likely were such arrests to occur under Lincoln's administration? Were they more likely to occur than under other wartime administrations?9To answer these questions which lie to some degree outside the usual question of the legality or constitutional validity of the arrests, I have begun compiling a list of all the civilian arrests in the North during the Civil War. From the State Department's record of 'Suspicious and Disloyal Persons,' from dozens of lists of inmates in federal prisons (the notorious 'Bastilles of the North'), from William H. Seward's unpublished correspondence, and from the narratives of political prisoners published in book form, I have compiled a list of 866 'prisoners of state' or 'political prisoners' (as they were very frankly termed by the Lincoln administration) arrested while Seward was in charge of the program. A close look at them suggests some rather surprising answers to the questions.The most notable feature of the arrests is their geographic distribution. Of the 866 persons on the list, place of residence is noted for 582. One hundred and seventy-one were Marylanders. Thus a state with a little over 3 percent of the North's population produced 29.4 percent of the persons arrested by the Lincoln administration in the first year of the war. Kentuckians (about 5 percent of the North's population) accounted for 8.4 percent of the arrests. Because of a quirk of record-keeping, figures are not readily available for Missouri in this period (the prison-keepers in St. Louis and Alton, probably assuming that Seward would know that most of their inmates came from strife-torn Missouri, failed to report the place of residence of their civilian inmates), but records for other periods of the war indicate a percentage of arrests about as high as Maryland's. Even ignoring Missouri's obviously gross underrepresentation in these figures, the Border States alone accounted for 40.5 percent of the arbitrary arrests.Another substantial percentage of persons arrested were not Northerners at all. Seventy-nine of the 582, or 13.6 percent were Virginia residents, and another 12.7 percent were of other seceded Thus a percent of the people arrested were of Confederate persons arrested for trouble in the few of the by Union in the first year of the war or in the North when the war and arrested for trying to to the one the of as a Border on the that throughout the period of Seward's as of the administration's internal security another percent of the arrests are accounted Thus states accounted for percent or nearly of the arbitrary arrests in the first year of the war. The administration was not at war with but the suggests a for the arrests: people from were not likely to be very on the Civil War. No one would that was a serious problem in and Missouri, all of which were at one time or another to the and two of which and were of from this period one of the of arrests in this a way why civilian arrests did not cause the Lincoln administration serious political and percent of the people arrested had as their president and never in political of the Lincoln administration. well over 40.5 percent were of states Lincoln's political were never very the Border and of did not for is that Lincoln did not suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas in in the period when Seward the on the from to on April on the on military between and New York on July and on that to on law arrests in Missouri, Illinois, and other and many to the privilege of the writ had been Thus the in New the of New on writ of habeas has been ... And even when the was — — the of the arrests did not percent of the arrests were politically because they another of of these were percent of all persons after a period of time — not because they were not of serious the States but because the after its had the prisons in of and put on Seward to them No one more than Seward did the necessity of out of the war — the of many a of the One in noted in his when a ... as he is a he be as soon as the of his to have been in or any outside the of the and of the at least percent of the arrests little political to the Lincoln administration and persons from to the States at the very least, a should to make how the nature of the persons arrested put the policy of arbitrary arrests from any serious issue of quashing the of Confederate States who on the of civilian inmates in the were James M. and and their no was much about the civil liberties of these Confederate to taken from the and incarcerated without of habeas of always civil in other and some of the persons arrested were an who the Confederate States to see a and through the apparently that he had a such He was arrested on of being a and in with the because he had no from Union He to the only to be quickly when the nature of his case was the reasons for the arrests cause to appreciate their of on Lincoln's political and some of their the 866 arrests to have occurred under have some of cause of the of them have nothing to do with political — or any other which takes place on One hundred and were up in or upon from a of the persons arrested on the high were or through the to a Confederate the great in many of the over arbitrary arrests were not aimed at public In some they had no Lincoln himself to of them as being not so much for what has been as for what probably would be In fact, arrests were most made for what had been on evidence, and were not so much at as available as a for no one would and for which seemed to be no other is a case in In 1864 a by not of is, by the of to for his were in and of and and loss of were the only by the law of for of it was an the law of the state or it was and a States could not a were such The could be until brought to and to in but that was all the the States which had much and these simply them — for the they were into In this the problem was not even but a in the the arrests were some of the most of the the arrests, as they might be has made us that was a of power for and the Civil War a in the States who to be at when the war of them had been at for as as three came to to an of to the States, to their and other and their — and were arrested and in a A at a of these it appears one of the most and of this to who have made it a of to their into and their when they might have with taken them into and on their them as prisoners to the his President ever the and the war was he had made more of these of arrests: Joseph William Simon and the in the war were all the power of the the and were nearly as well to be traitors then as had and them, the insurgent cause would be much no one of them had then any in the one of them arrested would have been on Habeas Corpus, were the writ to so, most of the were on in the some of them to Confederate on the and should be too that many of the arrests not of the political but of serious and and for the Confederate was the case in Missouri, and and times of of the The of is that the percentage of serious after as the Union more and more as it is likely that the percentage of the civilians arrested who were Confederate and not for or Lincoln other words, the population of persons arrested and being as the war Even under a substantial of those arrested were and were and or or the asked to be were The Lincoln administration the view that to be for a in Confederate hands was of on the arrests is to come but a minimum of percent of the persons arrested were by the to these the and the who were into under the of for the West and other and it could well be argued that at least percent of the arrests the state of Lincoln's in a and efficient internal security Even the percent record that of the security of arrests during War I of under the and and by the American notorious not one or was by the administration. from the West in War but was not one of or by any on the West in War Of I am arrests of persons with in the War I but given the in and nature of between Lincoln's and the it is to some to the state of Lincoln's only of the famous who were in the Lincoln administration's hands at one time or another to be with the efficiency of their internal the who for the first to on 1861, for or the of the Confederate in and the man who to Virginia on 1861, and over the protest of military arrested was as as and of but even the for which only arbitrary arrest seemed to and William for arrested at were were of two Confederate were but to the of because they to be able to to North One should not only the innocent victims of the arbitrary arrests but also the of the program who for this by obviously of the prisoners are who were to the and them two are and two all have at and the has set in they have and to a few to the State Department the and to them to them on their that of to the the were but the first a when the was to him I no such a the next was a who to know had taken and on being in the no arrests, for that of Clement throughout the Civil War a local problem at first to the Border States and then more and more to the Confederate States or a problem and persons on the high is always them arbitrary arrests the is almost a few place the the or the of this in three in on in the of the only of some had been of their liberty by military was a Republican which well have but a Democratic on in the was able to only civilians arrested about from the beginning of the war until of them were arrested as a of a riot in City which in the of the from which the was to the first for the There was no of even in one of the was because was no on the him of a when the Habeas of March 1863, the War Department to lists of political prisoners to the and Stanton the to Holt, who — and — to the were to be all the civilian prisoners in but that the had been and he all persons arrested as or or being with or as well as those who came under the of War. The fact of the matter is that most such could occur only in Missouri out the St. Louis and prisons as being of the of prisoners or the so that the list was Even so, percent of the persons on the list were of percent of them percent and percent from or There were New three one man from Ohio, and one from to its substantial of civilian prisoners percent of those in in June percent of those in in July and percent of those in in 1864 were And the The of prisoners noted that from 1862, through the end of the war at least civilian prisoners were If that as an of then at the very least percent of those arrested fact of the matter is that the Lincoln administration's internal security so well from its that the administration was to it for the of the Civil War. — by all — was in the Union by of its state in and by arresting other authorities to be in who the Department of in it and it his for in and ever The — the of the people — were replaced and to ... their made a ... occur in North in in in and If ... those States shall be by that are ... shall then have and William H. Seward it too, as this by a of state but despite in Stanton of this was a at his an of a of from New and as I an and of to him to to were at by a of The three on being by M. their by that they had to see him in to the He that those prisoners would not be are the Seward are no him on and that the of his him too much to or One it was his to keep no charge was He a they are or I by arrests, and so I to this it was that the and public of were to such arrests. a for the of he that what he was to in the and make for and then on of the are not at of their release is the of the as to me by M. and William M. out that the of the and left a that all by to internal are and to a The internal security of the Lincoln administration were those and be only by the of the in which they are of the war left on the of the Lincoln administration, and on more so than on William H. When he The of the the Seward that was to that as great feature of the first suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas occurred in the next after that much more than those as Seward know or appreciate the of and state of of the of the in those of peace had us for any but the most of all a civil was upon and it had to be had without any for the it was at and soon to upon the A with and in the was to and
140Franciscan Studies The moral obUgation of voting, expounded principally in the Ught of certain papal and episcopal documents, is the subject of Fr. Cranny's doctoral dissertation. After a brief discussion of the concept and nature of voting, the author devotes the bulk of his material to the principles governing the obUgation of voting; the dissertation ends with a chapter on particular duties that foUow the duty of voting. In the opinion of the reviewer, the nature of the right to vote has received a far too meager and inadequate discussion. Moreover the title is somewhat misleading: its connotation is wider than the intent of the proofs contained in the mass of material assembled together. The papal and episcopal pronouncements cited by the author deal with the obligation of Catholic to vote, particularly in circumstances where the CathoUc religion, the Church and its institutions are at stake. In the main the work is a restatement of opinions current among theologians; nevertheless it is a timely topic designed to awaken the CathoUc to his civic responsibilities. The other volume under consideration is a collection of seven compact lectures deUvered by specialists in the field of American and reUgious thought at the Twelfth Annual Round Table Conferences sponsored by the School of Law at the CathoUc University of America. They present a dispassionate appeal to the lawyers and law students to follow the tradition of our former great statesmen who, because they nourished themselves with daily reading of the Scriptures, adhered to commonly held reUgious and moral convictions beyond the scope of positive civil law. In view of the muddled and false concepts on the part of a great many jurists of our generation, regarding Church-State relationship as envisioned in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, these essays provide a concise and interesting appUcation of basic truths to the problems of today, especially for lawyers and law students, both CathoUc and nonCatholic . At the same time they point out the task incumbent upon them : to uphold and defend the reUgious inheritance of our nation's statesmen and jurists of past days. There can be no doubt that only in proportion as the lawyer looks beyond the Law, as he participates in Christ's thinking wiU he fuUy grasp the significance of the basic principles set forth in the American Magna Charta of independence. The book is a remarkable symposium, one that should occupy a prominent place on the law student's shelf. It is indeed a noble chaUengeto thejurists of today to look beyond the Law. Addresses and Sermons (1942—1951). By the Most Reverend Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, ApostoUc Delegate to the Unites States. (St. Anthony Guild Press: Paterson, N. J., 1952. Pp. XIII—482. $ 3,50.) There are few Uving persons who have as thorough understanding and deep knowledge of the CathoUc Church in the United States — its history, traditions, institutions and social enviroments which affect the growth and expansion of Catholic life in this country — as His ExceUency the Most Book Reviews141 Reverend Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, ApostoUc Delegate to the United States. Serving in this capacity for the past two decades he has the unequaled opportunity to witness at first hand the reUgious, social, cultural and economic position of the CathoUc Church at all its levels. He has played a prominent role in the inauguration of new dioceses, in the formation of new ecclesiastical provinces, in the consecration and installation of new bishops, in the dedication of new churches, schools and institutions of higher learning. At these and other similar events and gatherings of bishops, priests and laity he has been caUed upon to speak in his official capacity as a representative of our Holy Father. Speaking with the authority invested in him. His ExceUency has avaüed himself of these multiple occasions not only to convey greetings and feUcitations of the Holy Father, and bestow apostoUc blessing on various Catholic enterprises, but chiefly to inculcate, expound and apply CathoUc teaching to significant events and problems of our day. The distinguished prelate's Adresses and Sermons serve as a vehicle to present the CathoUc mind on such varied subjects as racial equaUty, social justice, miUtary service, reUgious...