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"Gentleman George" Hunt Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Thomas S. Mach. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2007. x, 307 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-87338-913-6.)
The nineteenth-century Ohio politician George H. Pendleton is probably best known to historians as the principal author of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. He was also, however, a substantial figure in Democratic party politics between the 1850s and the 1880s, who ended his career by becoming a senator and finally a political appointee as American minister to Germany. He had an especially high profile during the Civil War when his leadership of the peace wing of the party made his name synonymous-at least to readers of pro-administration newspapers-with the direst Copperheadism. Yet, while Pendleton crops up in many studies of nineteenth-century politics, he...