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Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War. By Mark E. Neely Jr. Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. [viii], 408. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3518-0.)
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the historian Mark E. Neely Jr. almost always seems to write with the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. For more than three decades now, Neely has been producing monographs that specialize in puncturing myths about the political and legal history of the Civil War era. Neely usually manages this startling revisionism by the simple act of reading primary sources. He appears to read almost everything whenever he tackles a subject, with a close, discerning eye that invariably makes his analysis stand out. Neely's latest effort, Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War, only confirms the value of this type of professional devotion. Yet this particular monograph is also easier to admire than to love, because of its peculiar organization. Neely seems aware of this limitation and goes out of his way to assert that he wants only to "stimulat[e] interest in the constitutional history" of the Civil War, and not to "kill the subject with claims of 'definitive' treatment" (p. 17). But that odd...