ISBN
9780190851767
Price
$27.95
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
Peter Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia and author of many books on American legal history, has now brought his expertise to the sectional crisis. Uncivil Warriors argues that lawyers exercised an important influence on policy-making during the Civil War. This may seem axiomatic, but the book, particularly in its focus on the role of lawyers in political and military positions in the Union, attempts to show two things. First, the conflict remained, as Hoffer puts it on page 119, a “civil Civil War,” meaning that the war’s prosecution reflected a search for conduct according to various laws of war, rather than devolving into “extremes of brutality,” as he writes on page 3, which have characterized more modern civil wars. Second, the war’s political outcome in the constitutional end of slavery was possible, again, because of lawyers’ prominent role in formulation of early Reconstruction policy in 1865.
DOI
10.31390/cwbr.20.4.22
Recommended Citation
Roberts, Tim
(2018)
"Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers’ Civil War,"
Civil War Book Review: Vol. 20
:
Iss.
4
.
DOI: 10.31390/cwbr.20.4.22
Available at:
https://repository.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol20/iss4/22
