| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. xiv, 273 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8047-4725-3.)
In Willing Obedience Elizabeth D. Samet analyzes representations of authority, allegiance, and autonomy in personal, philosophical, and fictional accounts from the formative period of the United States. During that era, especially in response to military conflicts, Americans debated how to balance duty and obedience to the state against individual freedom and conscience. Essentially Samet argues that Americans were engaged in a long-running cultural civil war over models and means of command and consent. The desired result was, to use Edmund Burke's phrase, liberal obedience.	1
The problem for Americans was that obedience was both vice and virtue. Submission due to force or thoughtlessness was a surrender to tyranny. Compliance based on consent was, conversely, a positive act of will. Complicating what should have been a simple dichotomy, however, was the power of personality. Some men exuded such magnetic authority that the "'electric cord,'" as noted by Abraham Lincoln, linking citizens together in an allegiance to principles and laws (p. 55) was threatened. John Adams worried about people obeying George Washington rather than acting upon their own power. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau saw a more subtle threat and warned against denying one's true self through unthinking obedience to legal and political institutions.	. . .

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