Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers' Civil War, Peter Charles Hoffer, Oxford University Press, 240 pages, bibliographic notes, index, 2018, $27.95.
Reviewed by Jeremy Weber (Air War College, Air University) for H-War (April, 2019)
Just when it seemed the Civil War could not possibly provide fresh material, along comes Peter Hoffer’s Uncivil Warriors; The Lawyers’ Civil War.
In 184 pages, Hoffer, a legal historian, tells the story of the lawyers
who used their skills to frame the issues presented by this unique war,
resolve disputes, and generally maintain some form of order to the
conflict. He portrays the war ultimately as not one of guns or honor,
but “a Civil War by lawyers, of lawyers, and in the end, for lawyers”
(p. 4). Along the way, Hoffer supplies a new appreciation of the role of
law—and lawyers—in initiating, carrying out, and terminating warfare.
Hoffer’s work is an introduction to the role of
lawyers in the Civil War, not a treatise. He focuses on the two legal
issues at the heart of the conflict: the status of slavery and the
purported secession of seven states from the Union. Hoffer convincingly
demonstrates that both issues were at least as much legal questions as
political ones, and lawyer/politicians used the language of law to
understand, analyze, and resolve these questions. As Hoffer notes, the
work lawyers performed in placing the conflict in a legal framework made
the Civil War, “unlike civil wars before and after, remarkably
rule-bound” (p. 3).
However, lawyers did not play an equal role on both
sides. The cabinets of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were
replete with lawyers, Hoffer notes, but Lincoln (being a lawyer himself)
was able to harness the talents of his lawyer/politicians. In Hoffer’s
exploration of the advocacy and competition within the Lincoln cabinet,
we see shades of the Team of Rivals narrative that has become
familiar to many. Yet Hoffer goes beyond this story to explore the
reason Lincoln was able to not only tolerate, but value the role his
lawyer/politicians played in challenging his thinking. Davis, on the
other hand, was not receptive to legal counsel, and suffered for it in
the form of rash decisions and lack of congressional support.
Uncivil Warriors also adds value by
exploring the constitutional mindset that Union lawyer/politicians
struggled with, the idea of an “old Constitution” of limited federal
powers and states’ rights. The book is fundamentally an exploration of
how Lincoln and his team of lawyer/politicians—along with the Supreme
Court—wrestled with, rubbed up against, and ultimately cast aside the
old Constitution to which Lincoln had pledged himself in favor of a new
Constitution marked by federal supremacy, human rights, and governmental
obligations.
Uncivil Warriors does not fully cover the
role of lawyers in the war. Hoffer does not explore the many lawyers who
accepted commissions to serve on the battlefield. He spends little time
exploring the war’s legal development most known by military and
international lawyers—the development of the Lieber Code, the document
that gave rise many of international law’s foundational agreements. At
other times, the book seems to struggle to maintain its focus, as in its
extended discussion of the Supreme Court’s In Re Merryman decision (admittedly an important subject). The inclusion of both an epilogue and a
conclusion in such a short work feels somewhat out of place, as does—to
be nitpicky—the title. After all, Hoffer’s thrust is that lawyers made
the war more civil, not less.
These minor points aside, Uncivil Warriors remains
a worthy contribution to the field, allowing the reader to see the war
not as a primarily political, cultural, or military conflict, but a
legal one. If war is truly a political entity, and if most politicians
(especially during that era) are lawyers, it makes sense that war should
have a strong legal element. Hoffer shows that the Civil War served as a
fulcrum around which our view of the Constitution pivots. In this
sense, Uncivil Warriors makes the Civil War seem like a fresh and underexplored topic—no small accomplishment.
Full Text Source: H-Net
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