| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

James F. Simon. Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2006. Pp. 324. $27.00.
In this book James F. Simon, the author of a number of legal histories and biographies, presents a concise account of the lives of President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the constitutional issues that divided them. Although it may interest lawyers and historians unfamiliar with the constitutional issues of the Civil War era, Simon aims primarily at a popular audience. He limns his protagonists' lives in sprightly prose, providing richly distilled descriptions of the political and military context in which their ideas clashed.	1
The book is a good read, and teachers might consider it for undergraduate classes in American constitutional history or on the Civil War. However, there are shortcomings for that purpose. Simon does not use a conventional footnote or endnote system. Eschewing superscript numbers, he follows the text with notes keyed to each page and the relevant phrase. These are very concise and mostly limited to the sources of quotations. A student would rarely be guided to further reading, and in many cases it is not clear what sources Simon drew on for his information and insights. A very brief discussion of sources preceding the notes does not provide much illumination.	. . .

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