Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854-1865

Gillette, professor of history at Rutgers University, comprehensively challenges the familiar image of New Jersey as a Northern state with Southern sympathies. He describes New Jersey's border-state status as the product of geography rather than politics or economics. Neither New Jersey's extensive prewar trade with the South nor the wartime strength of its Democratic party, he asserts, influenced its loyalty to the Union in the critical decade from 1854 to 1865. Gillette shows how the state's Democratic legislators and administrators made consistent and successful efforts to raise troops and sustain support for the war. Of scholarly interest. (Feb.)