| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael A. Ross. Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era. (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2003. Pp. xxii, 323. Cloth $69.95, paper $24.95.
Michael A. Ross provides a stimulating, well-documented, and engrossing revisionist portrait of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller. In the last Miller biography, written in 1939, and in subsequent legal and historical scholarship, Ross emphasizes that Miller has been viewed as a misguided opponent of Reconstruction and racial equality and an agrarian who feared the decline of frontier and river towns.	1
The first three chapters provide a lucid documentation of Miller's life as a doctor, then lawyer, who became involved in politics in Keokuk, Iowa, defending the town against a railroad bridge that threatened to cripple an already struggling economy. Miller is portrayed as a slaveholder in his early life who began to change his views in the 1840s, in large part due to the writings and speeches of the politician Cassius M. Clay, who supported emancipation but not abolition for primarily economic reasons. As a result of this background, Miller viewed economic change and African-American rights through an optimistic vision born of his free labor ideology. In the financial panic of 1857, Miller became a champion for those who opposed the repayment of bonds issued by the city to the railroads—because the citizens never authorized them in the first place. His free labor ideology celebrated the right of ordinary citizens to rise in station and riches and not to allow robber barons to limit that right. Ross emphasizes that Abraham Lincoln nominated Miller on the basis of similar views on slavery and his willingness to uphold Lincoln's controversial war measures. On economic issues, however, Miller differed from Lincoln. These differences would inform the jurisprudential core of Justice Miller.	. . .

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