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To Try Men's Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History offers the first comprehensive narrative of how governments in the United States have used oaths and other tests to define, demand, and police allegiance. Harold M. Hyman traces these practices from their medieval and Reformation antecedents to their transplantation in the New World, where they became recurring features of American political life. Structured episodically to reflect their crisis-driven character, the book examines loyalty tests during wars, rebellions, and fears of subversion, showing how they emerged, the forms they took, and what purposes they served. Drawing on wide-ranging archival sources, Hyman avoids simple partisan or ideological categories: champions and critics of loyalty tests span the American political spectrum, from Sam Adams and Jefferson to Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. The result is a nuanced account of loyalty tests as both instruments of state power and symbols of partisan solidarity, marked by convenience, controversy, and contradiction.

Central to the study is the oath--of office, allegiance, or conformity--as the quintessential loyalty test. Hyman demonstrates how oaths functioned to expose dissenters, secure regimes, and enforce religious and political orthodoxy, while also sparking resistance, especially once the passions of emergencies had passed. He shows how loyalty tests have repeatedly been judged "cruel and oppressive" in retrospect, yet reemerged in subsequent crises, from the Civil War to the Cold War. By situating American loyalty tests within broader historical traditions and following their transformations into modern indices of allegiance, To Try Men's Souls provides a powerful lens on the tensions between liberty and security. Scholars of constitutional history, political culture, and civil liberties--as well as citizens concerned with the balance between dissent and patriotism--will find in this book an indispensable, thought-provoking history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.