| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North. By Mark E. Neely Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiv, 257 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-674-00742-5.)

Mark E. Neely Jr., the McCabe-Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University, won his endowed chair with books that challenged other professors' theses. His most important volume, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991), jousted so successfully as to win a Pulitzer Prize. His latest duel, this time with a David Potter—Eric L. McKitrick thesis, assaults the theory that the two-party system, by moderating opposition to Abraham Lincoln, helped the Union win the Civil War, especially because the Confederacy lacked such an institutional salvation to moderate opposition to Jefferson Davis.

Professor Neely replies that the Northern Democratic party was too weak to moderate much of anything. Instead, the U.S. Constitution, keeping Lincoln in power for four years no matter what the hapless Democrats did, aided the Union's cause more than any two-party system could. The rancorous combat between the two Northern parties, Neely adds, reached unmoderated extremes that benefited the nation not at all.

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