Scholars have long debated whether or not the American people ever truly embraced a set of ideals regarding governance and society in the same way as did their European cousins. In the 1950s, popular acceptance of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition led most scholars to conclude that American voters were likely to support political candidates based upon tribal identification with political parties, as well as external forces such as economics, ethnicity, and religion. Politicians gave plenty of lip service to lofty ideals, but their actions when in office did not live up to their platitudes on the campaign trail.

Works such as Marvin Meyers's The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957), Jean Baker's Affairs of Party (1983), and Daniel Walker Howe's The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979) argued against that perspective, suggesting that, in the nineteenth century, ideals about government, constitutionalism, and individualism did underlie partisanship. Ordinary Americans supported politicians who articulated a set of shared ideals and put them into practice. Arguing that Americans in the Civil War Era mixed ideological convictions and real-world pragmatism, Adam I. P. Smith's The Stormy Present adheres to the theories of this later crop of scholars, while nonetheless advocating – as did his subjects – for a third way.

Smith has spent much of his career researching the complexities of Civil War politics. He is the author of No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (2006), an influential work challenging the binary narrative of American politics, arguing instead that Lincoln's supporters created a pro-Union coalition in 1864 that surpassed traditional partisan boundaries. In many ways, The Stormy Present is complementary to that earlier book. Here, Smith proposes that rapid social, economic, and political changes in mid-nineteenth-century America clashed heavily with an “imagined past of moral order and high-minded politics” (2). The northerners were forced to make choices about the future based on preconceived ideas about law and order, as well as Constitutional limitations on government that ultimately led to civil war and the destruction of slavery.

Conservative convictions were severely tested starting with the 1849 Astor Place Riot, in which they questioned whether the people have a right to press their interests by violent means, or whether they must adhere to law and order. In 1849, they answered no to the former, and yes to the latter. Five years later, however, the Kansas–Nebraska Bill forced them to conclude that acceptance of the law meant kowtowing to the tyranny of the slave power (80–81).

Conservative worldviews were likewise tested by events in the late 1850s. The Dred Scott Decision, they believed, rejected compromise and popular sovereignty, placing them between the two extremes of abolitionism and slave power (119–21). The 1860 presidential campaign and the secession crisis exacerbated these matters, compelling conservatives to seek a “middle ground” (157–59). Trying to stem the bleeding by promoting compromise, however, their measures ultimately failed. The South was not interested in compromise, and many conservatives accepted military action as the only means of upholding the principles of republican government (170–74).

Moderation, Smith explains, was the byword of conservatives. However, the suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, and military confiscation of slaves led them to fear that preservation of the union was no longer the aim of the government. Fearing that a prolonged war would result in permanent centralization of power, by 1864 conservatives staked out their own place in the political debate, styling themselves as champions of liberty, and their adversaries as “jacobins” (200–20).

Civil War-era conservatism has proven to be an ambiguous term to define. In Lincoln Reconsidered (1956), David Donald questioned whether a definition was even possible. Smith thinks one is possible, although he does concede that at times it was often “talismanic” – referring to a person as conservative lent legitimacy to their cause. Ultimately, conservatism was situational. Its meaning changed according to events. Conservative northerners in the Civil War era, Smith explains, were not change-makers, but instead “witnessed change as something that happened to them” (3). During the Civil War, they were pragmatists who disliked slavery only slightly more than they did extremists. Nonetheless, ideology – that is, their steadfast support of republicanism – underlay their actions. Ultimately, writes Smith, Civil War-era conservatism was about preserving institutions whenever possible as opposed to overthrowing them. In the modern vernacular, they might say “don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.”