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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.

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 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 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.

It has been less than a hundred days into the Obama presidency, and already some of those who were his strongest supporters are showing early signs of disillusionment. Yet even his detractors acknowledge that he is a politician of unusual intellectual depth and exceptional powers of expression.

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