Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime by Thomas C. Mackey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime by Thomas C. Mackey Joshua A. Lynn Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime By Thomas C. Mackey (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. Pp. ix, 188. Bibliographical essay, index. Clothbound, $55.00; paperbound, $24.95.) Recent scholarship has blurred the sharp distinctions that Americans have traditionally relied on to make sense of their civil war. The differences between North and South, home front and battlefield, and combatant and non-combatant have become muddied. Studies of women's and enslaved Americans' wartime roles, along with the recognition of the war as a humanitarian and environmental crisis, have recast the conflict as an all-encompassing experience shaping daily life far beyond the battlefield. Diverse Americans unexpectedly found themselves combatants, and diverse locales became sites of conflict. Legal and constitutional history has reinforced these insights, as wartime legal developments underscored how the statuses of enslaved and free, combatant and non-combatant, and Unionist and traitor oscillated with the tides of war. Thomas C. Mackey's Opposing Lincoln: Clement L. Vallandigham, Presidential Power, and the Legal Battle over Dissent in Wartime adds to this discussion by situating legal history amid the Civil War's shifting landscape. Mackey recounts the legal saga of Ohio politician Clement L. Vallandigham. In 1863, the United States military arrested Vallandigham for a speech criticizing the war effort. After Vallandigham's conviction by a military commission, Abraham Lincoln banished the rabble-rouser to the Confederacy. His ordeal raised questions about the suspension of habeas corpus and whether military commissions could try civilians in wartime. Mackey explains how Vallandigham, a midwestern Copperhead Democrat, became an outspoken opponent of the Lincoln administration. From the war's beginning, Lincoln worried about potentially treasonous citizens like Vallandigham. Mackey relates important developments prior to Vallandigham's arrest, such as Lincoln's 1861 suspension of habeas corpus, as the president wrestled with how to use his war powers to tamp down disloyalty and dissent. Mackey finds coherence in Lincoln's policies, especially through analyzing his "Corning letter" and "Birchard letter," texts in which the president defended his actions after Vallandigham's arrest. Given genuine fears over disloyal citizens on the home front, Lincoln articulated a policy that protected the Union while also showing restraint. Mackey applauds Lincoln for operating within [End Page 195] the Constitution and the democratic political order. Lincoln did not crush dissent or stymie his political opposition. The Democratic Party itself was not curtailed, but Vallandigham, as an extreme Copperhead Democrat, did find himself arrested, hauled before a military commission, denied a writ of habeas corpus, and, somewhat whimsically, banished. His prosecution, Mackey suggests, even benefited Democrats by removing a figure whose extremism impugned the party's Unionism. Mackey's work dovetails with a growing scholarship that investigates the war's ambiguities, especially regarding loyalty and disloyalty, by focusing on a geographical region that was ambiguous itself: the Midwest. This was a region where North and South intermingled. The Midwest included slaveholding states that remained in the Union alongside free states, such as Indiana and Ohio, that housed significant pro-Southern populations. As such, the Midwest was particularly volatile during wartime and is an ideal place to explore how the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants and loyal and disloyal citizens were never clear cut. Legal and military authorities struggled to impose order amid fluid conditions along the North-South border, a region beset by irregular warfare and unstable loyalties. Vallandigham's political identity as an antebellum Jacksonian Democrat, which made him wary of federal power and committed to white supremacy, fused with the political culture of the lower North to produce one of the most virulent domestic critics of the Lincoln administration. Midwestern Copperhead Democrats, Mackey concludes, posed an "internal security threat" (p. 46). Mackey's account reminds us that the Civil War was also waged in midwestern states like Indiana, even if they were spared large-scale conflict between regular armies. By placing legal history in its wartime context and within a midwestern setting, Mackey delivers a spirited defense of Lincoln's war powers and...