Ex Parte Milligan reconsidered: race and civil liberties from the Lincoln administration to the War on Terror

Abstract

abolitionist ferment, Hope insisted, misleadingly, that Southerners for political and economic reasons were more likely to free their slaves out of the Union than within it and that efforts to educate and Christianize slaves constituted evidence of a gradual emancipation process already in progress. Sometimes Turner overdoes his historiographic contextualizing. In probing Hope’s belief that English and Southern peoples constituted a “single family” (36), Turner engages Hugh Dubrulle, James McPherson, William R. Taylor, Richard Devon Watson, Robert Bonner, Michael O’Brien, John McCardell, Michael Bernath, Drew Gilpin Faust, and O. Vernon Burton, all within a few pages. Explanatory notes might better have handled much of this. Turner also disserves readers with meaningless lists, such as the names, and often the titles, of the 22 “Lady Patronesses” of the Grand Southern Bazaar of 1864 at Liverpool (127–128), that, if truly essential, could have been appendices. Turner’s study is grounded in exhaustive research in secondary and printed primary sources, and it contributes significantly to scholarship on Anglo-Union-Confederate affairs during the Civil War and postwar Confederate memory in the United States and Britain. Importantly, Turner’s findings challenge recent scholarship downplaying British affinity for the Old South and the Confederacy. Our understandings of the Victorian Anglo-American world are richly informed by this impressive book.