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This article explores when and why conservative became a keyword in America politics. In a quantitative study of the press, Smith shows the importance of American engagement with European politics when French radicalism in the 1790s and then British reform in the 1830s shaped American understanding of conservatism as a signifier of stability and progress that complemented Enlightenment liberalism’s emphasis on freedom and equality. During the 1850s, conservatism became an attractive bulwark for Northerners of all political stripes seeking to navigate the storm of sectional conflict.

In this engaging and nuanced political history of Northern communities in the Civil War era, Adam I. P. Smith offers a new interpretation of the familiar story of the path to war and ultimate victory. Smith looks beyond the political divisions between abolitionist Republicans and Copperhead Democrats to consider the everyday conservatism that characterized the majority of Northern voters. A sense of ongoing crisis in these Northern states created anxiety and instability, which manifested in a range of social and political tensions in individual communities. In the face of such realities, Smith argues that a conservative impulse was more than just a historical or nostalgic tendency; it was fundamental to charting a path to the future. At stake for Northerners was their conception of the Union as the vanguard in a global struggle between democracy and despotism, and their ability to navigate their freedoms through the stormy waters of modernity. As a result, the language of conservatism was peculiarly, and revealingly, prominent in Northern politics during these years. The story this book tells is of conservative people coming, in the end, to accept radical change.

The book opens with the claim that the great majority of Americans living in the free states in the Civil War era thought of themselves as “conservative”, even as they embraced change. Conservatism in the sense in which it was used in this period was not a political ideology but a disposition, a way of signalling a mature, measured approach to the problems of the nineteenth century. This self-defined “conservative” political culture embraced both an underlying antislavery consensus and a powerful devotion to the Union. The interplay of these two impulses—antislavery and nationalism—shaped Northerners’ political choices. In the face of each successive moment of crisis, most Northerners—whether Republicans or Democrats—sought the “conservative” solution that would reconcile the survival of the nation with their dislike of slavery.

This chapter shows how the doctrine of popular sovereignty retained political appeal even after the Kansas Nebraska Act. It provided the basis for a possible resolution of the national crisis by offering a path to a free soil West which the South would be compelled to accept. The enduring appeal of popular sovereignty helps explain the survival of the Democrats in the North, notwithstanding the underlying antislavery presumptions of most Northern voters.

This chapter describes the impact of the Kansas Nebraska Act on Northerner’s political assumptions. The violence in the Kansas Territory that resulted from the imposition of popular sovereignty drove Northerners to make difficult choices about the best path to securing political stability. The 1856 presidential election was therefore essentially a contest among candidates each of whom posed as a conservative.

This chapter uses the Astor Place theatre riot of 1849 to illuminate the tensions within American political culture over majoritarianism, political legitimacy and citizenship. It argues that the lethal confrontation between the militia and the mob was a crisis moment that formed the imagined enemies and the alliances that frame political choices. Those who supported the New York City mayor’s decision to call in the militia believed that violence was sometimes necessary to ensure that democracy was compatible with order. Their emphasis on the need for restraints on unfettered freedom provided the intellectual underpinning of the case against the Slave Power and secession.

This chapter explains how the firing on Fort Sumter resolved Northerners’ dilemma about how to respond to secession. Many in the North felt a profound sense of betrayal, having tried until the last moment to believe in the good faith of the South. Nonetheless the war quickly generated a new set of tensions within the North about whether the Republican administration was abusing its power to force through revolutionary change that went far beyond what was needed to suppress the rebellion.

The book concludes by emphasising the underlying theme of continuity and preservation in Northerners’ celebration of the defeat of the rebellion. Even so, fears of national instability continued for at least a decade after Appomattox. To some Northerners, the war had resolved one source of instability, slavery, only for another—the problem of mobs, ignorance and recklessness—to assume an even greater significance. The fight of conservatism against fanaticism continued.

This chapter describes the impact of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It argues that the legal and moral demands being made by the Slave Power severed the relationship between law, on the one hand, and order on the other. Before 1850 it was antiabolitionists who were prone to use violence in Northern cities to break up antislavery meetings; afterwards the militancy was on the side of those, as in the notorious Anthony Burns case in Boston, who opposed slave catchers, even though the latter had the law on their side. Even Northerners who disdained antislavery agitation were driven to see slavery as an active threat to order and stability.

Had Richmond fallen in the spring of 1862, the Union might have been secured without emancipation and a majority of Northerners would have been entirely satisfied with that outcome, including Lincoln and most Republicans. But that did not happen, and this chapter describes how political positions that previously had been regarded by most Northerners as dangerously radical became normalised in wartime. As a conservative movement, driven above all by a desire to vindicate and preserve the Union, the Republican Party drove forward revolutionary change.

This chapter discusses the campaign strategies of the two main presidential candidates in the free states in the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Both appealed to voters’ desire to contain the Slave Power and assure access to the West for free white settlers. The core difference between Douglasites and Lincolnites was over the role of the Federal government in resolving the crisis: Republicans wanted to take control in Washington to prevent the nationalisation of slavery; Democrats continued to believe that the most effective solution was decentralisation.

This article explores the significance of what George Bernard Shaw called the 'cult' of Abraham Lincoln in England in the aftermath of the First World War. It argues that the effort to 'Anglicize' Lincoln by rooting him in English traditions, values and genealogy, was a way of 'domesticating' the larger meaning of 'America', reflecting a search for reassurance that the rising power of the United States was an extension, not a threat, to British cultural and political power. The article also suggests that the imagined Lincoln offered a way of understanding and validating the sacrifice of the 'One Million Dead' of the British Empire and that liberalism as a framework through which to understand the world had popular currency even into the inter-war period. Lincoln was important in large measure because he was represented as having pursued liberal and moral ends through the means of war. As such he provided an inspiration for Lloyd George and, later, for Churchill.

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.

MARK E. NEELY, JR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 Pp. 277, $27.95 (hbk), ISBN 978 0 674 02658 2 In 1991, Mark E. Neely, Jr., published a well‐received article in which he challenged ...

One of the first deaths of the American Civil War, on 24 May 1861, was that of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a personal friend of President Lincoln. Ellsworth had climbed to the roof of an inn on the Virginia side of the Potomac River to haul down a Confederate flag that had allegedly been visible from the White House. The outraged innkeeper shot him. The combination of Ellsworth’s handsome features and the symbolism of the flag proved irresistible. Ellsworth was immediately apotheosized in mass-produced images and in hundreds of breathless accounts of his courage. Selfless, meeting his foe with steely heroism, adopting the pose of a slain Christian martyr as his life passed away, Ellsworth’s death became an idealized template for heroic sacrifice.

During their upstream migration through the lower reaches of the Aberdeenshire Dee, Scotland, radio-tagged adult Atlantic salmon passed a Crump weir-based fish counter without substantial delay over a range of river flows and water temperatures. Tagged salmon were detected sequentially by automatic listening stations placed along the river and were detected at the counter site for a median time of 18 min, compared with a median time of 5 min before the weir was built. One fish out of 16 spent 6·7 h in the vicinity of the weir, but such migratory pauses also occurred before the weir existed. The results suggest that the number of salmon crossing the counter per unit time is a function of the number of fish present downstream and their tendency to migrate upstream, without being limited by their ability to surmount the weir. The apparent slight delay at the weir is probably insignificant in terms of the overall progress of riverine migration and in the context of using counter records to relate salmon movements to environmental Variables.

The timing of salmon migration from the estuary of the Aberdeenshire Dee into the river in relation to tidal phase and time of day was studied by combined acoustic and radio-tracking of individual fish and by analysing records of untagged fish from a resistivity fish counter 0.8 km upstream from the tidal limit. Up-estuary movements that led to river entry were predominantly nocturnal and tended to occur during the ebb tide. Penetration into the non-tidal reaches of the river also tended to occur at night, but the timing of salmon movements was no longer significantly associated with tidal phase. The tracking data suggested that the reduction in the strength of the association between salmon migration and tidal phase resulted from variability in rates of progress from the estuary to the river. This variability may have been random, or related to changes in migratory behaviour during entry to fresh water. A simulation of upstream progress by groups of salmon illustrated the decay of the relationship between salmon movements and tidal phase and the advance of the average tidal phase of observed salmon movements with increasing distance of the observation point from where movements were initiated. The magnitude of these effects depended on the average rate of upstream progress and variability in the rate of progress, being greatest when upstream progress was slow and variable. These results highlight a limitation of point observations of migration with regard to identifying environmental stimuli for migration and quantifying their effects.

By the mid-nineteenth century, inhabitants of the United States generally agreed that they lived in a democratic state and society. But uses of the term were complicated by the fact that it also had partisan associations: one group of politicians claimed to be par excellence leaders of ‘the Democracy’. This party had no single or unchanging political identity: it was strongly backed in slave states, but also had white working-class supporters who pushed egalitarian notions hard. Their Whig opponents were not prepared to surrender the language of democracy to them, yet they were more ambivalent about endorsing it, and sometimes distinguished restrained and principled forms of democracy, which they favoured, from vulgar populist forms. The effect of the European revolutions of 1848 in the United States was to encourage the drawing of such distinctions.

In 1863, a young Pennsylvanian soldier named Caldwell worried that fighting for mere political unity would appear selfish, and would not be understood by the world at large. The addition of “the magic word freedom,” he thought, would raise the cause to an altogether different and higher level. 1 For Caldwell, it was the Emancipation Proclamation that transformed what would have been a mere nationalist struggle to a crusade with meaning for what Abraham Lincoln called “the whole family of man.” Caldwell’s words are immediately intelligible to us because his conception of the Civil War as having been ennobled by a struggle for the very tangible freedom of enslaved African Americans matches our dominant narrative of the war as one in which the American nation passed through a “fiery trial” and emerged a better place.

This article reviews three studies of agonistic interactions in pairs of swimming crabs (Liocarcinus depurator and Necora puber) in which behavioural and physiological approaches were combined. In both species most fights were won by the larger crab. Smaller crabs were able to win fights when the size differential was small, in which case encounters tended to be long and fierce. In N. puber both the larger and the smaller crab were more likely to win fights that they initiated, suggesting that motivational differences (perhaps related to resource value) as well as relative size determine what crabs do during a fight. When fighting during the breeding season in water in which receptive females had been housed, small crabs were as likely as large ones to win fights, by persisting much longer than they did in the absence of such stimuli. In L. depurator an absolute size effect was found, with larger crabs fighting for longer regardless of relative size. This suggested that costs fall more heavily on smaller crabs, and prompted a study of the respiratory costs of fighting. Using scaphognathite beat as an index of oxygen consumption, aerobic respiration was found to be greatly elevated during fights and to remain high for some time after the fight had ended. Long and/or intense fights involved a greater increase in respiration rate. Winners and losers had similar average respiration rates during fights but, in losers, long fights were associated with significantly elevated respiration rates during the recovery period. Analysis of tissue metabolites gave little evidence of anaerobic respiration during fights, although some local mobilisation of glucose in the walking legs was observed. No significant effects of participation in a fight were found on initiation or outcome of a second fight staged immediately afterwards. Sequential associations between agonistic acts indicate a short-term escalatory process that was more marked in winners than losers, which tended to de-escalate especially during high intensity phases. The insights gained by combining behavioural and physiological techniques are discussed.

The idea of America as a place where men and women might find not only freedom but also the opportunity for a prosperous life is as old as the European discovery of the New World. It transposed secular aspirations for material success onto a millennialist template that conceived of America as a providentially blessed place. Images of material abundance, freely available land, and an absence of artificial restraints on human endeavor fused to generate an idea of the United States as a new order in which the poor could actually inherit the earth. Yet counterimages of exploitation and hierarchy were present throughout, inflecting the positive vision of American opportunity with notes of ambiguity. Any reckoning with the image of the United States in Latin America and Europe during the late nineteenth century must account for the powerful appeal of the “land of opportunity” motif, and explain its limits.

One hundred and nine returning adult salmon were radio-tagged in the estuary of the Aberdeenshire Dee, Scotland between February and August 1985 to 1989 and the times when 62 fish entered the river were recorded. Elapsed times between tagging and river entry were significantly greater during periods of lower than average river flows in all months where there were sufficient data to allow statistical comparison. The degree of association between river entry and particular levels of river discharge rate varied seasonally. The proportion of days associated with river entry declined at the lower end of the range of flows available to tagged fish in the summer months. Absolute levels of river discharge played a significant role in modifying the response of salmon to changing flows. During periods of lower than average seasonal flow, river entry was closely associated with days when flow had increased since the previous day. During periods of higher than average flow, river entry was not significantly associated with such periods of increased flow. The results suggest that models which relate river entry by salmon to absolute discharge rates alone are unlikely to be generally reliable.

Male velvet swimming crabs [Necora puber (L.)] were observed to engage in long and vigorous agonistic interactions to gain possession of a sexually receptive female. The role of agonistic behaviour in male mate competition in this species was examined by investigating the effect of the perceived presence of sexually receptive females on interactions between males. Exposing male crabs to water conditioned by sexually receptive females resulted in prolonged interactions, with a greater incidence of potentially injurious behaviour than interactions between control crabs, exposed only to sea water. Maleconditioned water also resulted in more offensive behaviour, but these interactions were of shorter duration and not significantly different from sea water controls. Agonistic superiority was strongly correlated with contestant relative size when males were exposed to male-conditioned water or sea water, but not when exposed to female-conditioned water. Overall, the results conformed with the general predictions of game theoretic models in relation to the influence of resource value on agonistic behaviour. Crabs were more persistent and probably incurred greater fitness costs in the perceived presence of a sexually receptive female, when interactions may have been resolved on the basis of factors more closely related to actual fighting ability than the relative body sizes of contestants.

In this paper infinite plane Couette flow in a viscous incompressible fluid is considered subject to general three-dimensional perturbations and the equations of motion are linearized. Furthermore, initial-value problems are posed and a set of closed-form solutions are obtained for a variety of conditions, such as the system under the influence of: (i) a mass source; (ii) an external force; or (iii) initial vorticity. The result is a knowledge of both the early transient dynamics and the near spatial field behavior, as well as the state after a long time and the far field behavior. It is shown that the solutions can be considered as fundamental (in the sense that source-sink solutions are regarded fundamental for irrotational motion) and therefore are useful in analyzing other boundary-value, initial-value problems where the basic flow can be synthesized from piece-wise linear (constant shear) variations. To this end a generalized Green's function for the system is determined.

The genus Pseudocollinella Duda, 1924, treated by recent authors as part of the genus Opacifrons Duda, 1918, is redefined and revised for the Nearctic region. Pseudocollinella flavilabris (Hackman) and P. abhorrens (Roháček) are recorded from the Nearctic region for the first time. All of the above species, plus the North American species P. caelobata (Spuler), P. pellucida (Spuler), and P. sciaspidis (Spuler) and the European species P. septentrionalis (Stenhammar), P. humida (Haliday), P. jorlii (Carles-Tolrá), P. tunisica (Papp), and P. ochrea (Papp), are given as new combinations. Pseudocollinella aquilifrons Marshall, P. attractans Marshall, P. arctopellucida Marshall, P. boreosciaspidis Marshall, P. charlottensis Marshall, P. hirsutipellucida Marshall, P. parapellucida Marshall, P. parasciaspidis Marshall, and P. utapellucida Marshall are described as new. A key to all species is given and their phylogenetic relationships are discussed.

List of Maps Abbreviations Key Dates in the Civil War Preface Slavery and the American Republic Political Crisis and the Resort to War The Failure of Limited War Emancipation and Hard War Citizen Soldiers The Ordeal of the Confederate Republic The Last Best Hope of Earth The Magic Word, 'Freedom' Notes Guide to Further Reading Index