| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Elizabeth D. Samet. Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 273. $55.00.
Elizabeth D. Samet's book is a study of authority and democracy. It reads as a roving conversation that begins by characterizing the competing voices of George Washington, then attempts to demystify the works of Herman Melville, outline the differing styles of William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, and link Frederick Douglass's texts with the famed black unit in the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. It closes with a critique of the enthusiasm for war expressed in 1917 by Theodore Roosevelt. Although not meant to be "a systematic study of the psychological, sociopolitical, legal, or ethical dimensions of obedience" (p. 8), Samet's book explores, in useful ways, republican masculinity born of war.	1
One must be patient with the book's organization. Part of the fault lies with its seriously misleading title, because Samet deals superficially with the half-century from Washington's death to the buildup to the Civil War, and she skips all the history from Appomattox to the Spanish-American War. And how can a book on masculine military models entirely ignore Andrew Jackson? This study has far less to do with the "progress" of consent than with manipulations of character and dramatic means of securing obedience. The author's insights are many, but dispersed.	. . .

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