New from the University of North Carolina Press:
With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era, by William A. Blair (Pennsylvania State University). A description from the Press:
Few issues created greater consensus among Civil War-era
northerners than the belief that the secessionists had committed treason.
But as William A. Blair shows in this engaging history, the way
politicians, soldiers, and civilians dealt with disloyalty varied
widely. Citizens often moved more swiftly than federal agents in
punishing traitors in their midst, forcing the government to rethink
legal practices and definitions. In reconciling the northern contempt
for treachery with a demonstrable record of judicial leniency toward the
South, Blair illuminates the other ways that northerners punished
perceived traitors, including confiscating slaves, arresting newspaper
editors for expressions of free speech, and limiting voting. Ultimately,
punishment for treason extended well beyond wartime and into the
framework of Reconstruction policies, including the construction of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
Establishing how treason was defined
not just by the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the courts but
also by the general public, Blair reveals the surprising implications
for North and South alike.
A few blurbs:
"William Blair’s With Malice toward Some represents a
remarkably fresh contribution toward historians' understanding of
treason and loyalty during the Civil War era. Highly original and deeply
researched in heretofore neglected sources, Blair offers a elegantly
written reinterpretation that operates at many levels, with many
different actors, and with profound implications for the American
constitutional system during wartime. A must read for nineteenth-century
American historians." --William A. Link
"This book makes a very important contribution to the
scholarship on treason and disloyalty during the American Civil War and
Reconstruction; it has wonderful new research while drawing on the
latest literature; and it is a very good read." --Michael Vorenberg
More information is available
here.
