Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era.

Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era. By Michael A. Ross. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxvi, 323. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-80712924-0; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 0-8071-2868-6.)

At the outset, a bit of so-called truth in advertising is appropriate. I eagerly examined Michael A. Ross's dissertation on which this book is based while my co-author and I were preparing our history of the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), also published in 2003. Further, I served as an anonymous referee when one of his chapters was published in article form. I thought the dissertation was superb and, having had this opportunity to read the published book, emphasize the point once again.

A scholarly study of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller is long overdue. Charles Fairman's 1939 biography placed Miller within a negative view of Reconstruction that later historians have largely rejected. Moreover, scholarship in American legal history has transformed the field since Fairman's book appeared. Ross goes far beyond Fairman, placing Miller in the context of late-nineteenth-century American history. Ross argues, convincingly I believe, that Miller reflected a minority view of Republicanism that was increasingly marginalized and isolated as the Republican Party became the party of big business at the height of the Gilded Age. By the end of his life in 1890 Miller could point to what Ross has aptly characterized as a number of shattered dreams.

Unique among Supreme Court jurists, Miller was a former physician who taught himself the law. Ross examines Miller's background, including his relocation to the Iowa city of Keokuk and the exciting vision for profit and expansion held by its residents, who were then relegated to a backwater community passed over by dynamic changes in transportation and industry. The author details Miller's emergence as a leading local attorney, an influential Iowa Republican, and a staunch supporter of Lincoln. Miller was the first Supreme Court justice appointed from west of the Mississippi. There is no doubt that his overwhelming support from the Iowa congressional delegation in Washington as well as his outspoken adherence to the Union influenced Lincoln. But Ross raises the interesting possibility that had the beleaguered president probed more deeply into his nominee's background he would have found areas where Miller held very different views from his own.

The bulk of Ross's study explores Miller's career as a Supreme Court justice. In his time, postwar economic and industrial change transformed his old party and led Miller to function more and more as "the melancholy legal voice of a lost Republicanism" (p. 254). Ross shows that Miller's most famous and controversial opinion, the Slaughter-House Cases, should be seen as an affirmation of inherent state authority rather than an effort to undercut Reconstruction. The justice's growing isolation among his brethren is very well analyzed. My only regret is that Ross does not go far enough in explaining why after 1878 Miller "became uncharacteristically silent in cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause" (p. 251). Overall, this is an outstanding book from a scholar in marked command of his subject. It will and should become the standard reference for any further study of Justice Samuel Freeman Miller.

JONATHAN LURIE

Rutgers University