No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought Book

By the author's admission, more of a collection of organized stories, anecdotes & accounts than a definitive study, along with a plea for more research but Neely goes a long way in dispelling the popular historical conception that the Union's two-party system was an important factor in wining the Civil War. Neely shows how modern historians impose our 20th-21st century party system onto the 1860s, when the political/federal government system was still evolving & doing so in competition with state governments & political bosses. Neely concludes (among other findings) that Lincoln's expanding federal rule via the Constitution was likely far more important that the election process. Neely's best evidence that elections were less important to the war effort than is commonly believed is his account of actual campaign materials (including some Lincoln was aware of) from the presidential election of 1864, which far from being uplifting, shows both parties at their worst: Republicans, refusing to concede any mistakes by their goverment & to protect their many incompetent, politically-appointed generals, campaigned that Democrats were traitors & promised to lock them up after the election, while avoiding taking any responsibility for failure through xenophobic rants about foreign conspiracies & sustained anti-semitic campaign against American Jews, who controlled the banking system for foreign powers. Democrats weren't as organized but some of their more prominent campaign material blamed immigrants & also accused Republicans of forcing whites to accept African-Americans in every aspect of life, from churches (many denominations of the era opposed "race mixing") to marriage'while those attacks sound eerily like ones used today against immigrants & marriage equality, Neely keeps his focus how on19th century values were different that ours & how we need a deeper understanding of political & social life in the Union during the war.