Introduction: Governing Parties
A: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of A Governing Party
For nearly 25 years, the Republican Party had dominated Federal politics without a real challenge from its old rival, the Democratic Party.
Governing Parties are always in decline for their entire tenure in power. This decline is not to say that their election results or domination of the political field become increasingly worse - these can steadily improve before the sudden collapse - but in their organizational quality and power-worthiness - that is, their ability to manage and wield legitimate government power effectively in the service of the State as they understand it.
When a Party is safe in power, it becomes the destination of career politicians and job-seekers. We must not think of them merely as cynical opportunists but as professionals - these are men who had decided to pursue a life in public administration. For them, ideological issues are secondary to non-existent - the work has the place of honor.
While at the beginning, the addition of such individuals contributes to the the governing competence of the Party-in-Power, it also tends to erode its ideological commitments or even bend them in the opposite direction. The Party would eventually face the choice of embracing a new identity as a technocratic body without ideological commitments (and winning elections on the claim of competence), adopting a new ideology palpable to the technocrats, or reiterating its ideological commitments at the price of alienating the technocratic faction.
An additional complication arises since, together with the technocrats, a Party-in-Power attracts people who are highly competent at feigning themselves to gain support and power while not possessing any deep-held beliefs. These are experts at turning the mass of the Party’s ideological supporters (and the Party came to power suggests the number of those is not negligible) against moderates and technocrats to pervert and shrill the creedal pitch to a state in which it is neither pleasant nor valuable to any moral purpose, and to gain by its access to personal wealth and power. Thus, the Party becomes less coherent and focused and loses its ability to effectuate an actual policy change - not to mention the nature of government. It and the opposition - which is either a remnant of its old rivals, an outgrowth of its own body, or a new challenger altogether - must for a time operate within the framework shaped by the Party’s earliest time in uncontested power and be modified and remodified as the Party starts to lose the monopoly on power and has to contend for it with its rivals.
B: The Function and Character of a Party in Power
Once a party has secured absolute power or at least ensconced itself in one branch of the government, it develops a unique set of characteristics and idiosyncratic behaviors.
Such a party does not need to create guardrails against its rivals taking its place; therefore, it constructs little and takes apart the ones in place.
Therefore, as its rivals devise strategies to dislodge it from its place, it becomes increasingly desperate to prevent such an outcome since it knows well the power of the institution it occupies and how its rivals can turn those institutions against them.
Therefore, while the Party-in-Power holds the opportunity for long-term planning and institution building, it only sometimes takes the long view. The Party Leaders are obsessed with maintaining their and the party's position since they see any victory to the other side as an inconceivable calamity.
A party that made its peace with the prospects of being out of power from time to time is confident that the Government would continue its work and long-term projects, no matter who started them, for the good of the Republic, with few changes (the Party can mend reverse or adopt these changes once it is back in power). A Party-in-Power, however, is one which either created conditions under which defeat would be insufferable or convinced itself that it is so.
C: Ideological Shifts and Practicality of Governing Parties
We must not understand the ideology of a given party as fixed. Any change of leadership, any decision by said leadership that the party has to endorse and defend, and the result of any external or internal power-play all alter the ideological commitments of the party in their time and shift them subtly.
An opposition party must make practical decisions to retain the loyalty of its followers and attempt to attain power, embracing cause it to harden its ideological stances or alter them. On the other hand, a governing party must face such challenges every day to retain and exercise power. Opposition parties have the luxury of spending much of their time and effort on critiquing the governing party from an ideological point of view. Reality tests the applicability of a governing party’s ideology every day. The Party’s leadership must be willing to alter its doctrines, make exceptions, or replace them if the Party wishes to retain power when reality becomes uncooperative.
The History of the Republican Party between 1860 and 1885 is that of a Paty-in-Power. Let us tell it.
I: The Rail-Splitter: The Policy of Mr. Lincoln
A: Free Labor, Free Soil - Abraham Lincoln and Political Economy:
The nomination of Abraham Lincoln by the Chicago Convention was unlikely, and it had far-reaching consequences beyond angering the South.
Ideologically, Lincoln was committed to the Free Labor ideal as the engine of social progress. This progress was not understood, as in the 20th century, to be that of Society as a whole towards a predetermined end or utopia - but rather, of individuals advancing through and up the ranks of Society. Such progress may or may not alter the said society - 19th-century liberals hoped that if such change occurred, it would be for the better - but this was neither the goal of progress nor its repudiation.
This idea was old in America - in a sense, it was the foundation of American Society, which, on the whole, was made of people pursuing intergenerational self-improvement and advancement up the social hierarchy. John Adams once expressed A high-minded 18th-century version during his mission to Versailles, where he declared that he studied war and politics to allow his son to study law and business, which would leave the finer arts to the grandson. The more practical 19th century would express the same sentiment in economic terms. As Lincoln would describe in his first State of the Union Address in 1861:
“It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.
Again, as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.”
In this way, the entire capitalistic system was, according to Lincoln, at its best, a vast network of mutual assistance in which those already advanced up the chain lent a hand and provided opportunities to those behind them. This way, the popular institutions of American Society can be preserved and conserved while an eternal movement flows through them and animates them with vital dynamism. Such sentiments would be against the sensibilities of European reactionaries - who view this as gross “social climbing,” whereby people rise “from the gutter” to “usurp” the place of “their betters” - but for most Americans, this message was an outright traditionalist one.
Since, for Lincoln, Labor is the most human of all the factors of production, it has precedence - in the sense that placing limitations and controls on one’s ability to employ and exchange one’s labor is the most egregious offense against Liberty.
Lincoln’s nomination had brought the Republican Party into an alliance with the growing new sectors of the American economy - with the railways, the industrialists, and the workers and financiers whose labor and credit they employed. He made his legal career mostly in arguing for railway land contracts. He spent long months “riding the circuit” of Federal and State courts to facilitate the construction of the Illinois railway system. This system would be vital for Chicago, his hometown of Springfield, and other towns like it.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, Lincoln was not the only Midwestern railway lawyer on the ballot in the 1860 elections. His arch nemesis, Stephen Douglas, had crafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act to secure the Transcontinental line for Illinois. But while Douglas’s interest in the railways was mercenary and political, Lincoln bought into the ideology of development and communication as redemptive developments. He sought to create the condition by which the free laborer could get a better return for the sweat of his brow and be less bound by the shackles of local capital and landholders attempting to restrict him from access to the broader market.
For this reason, Lincoln was an ardent antislavery man - Slavery did not only robbed the slave - that is, a laborer - of his just wages and prevented him from putting them to their proper employment in the improvement of their earner and his lot- but it also harmed the free laborer. By providing a class of landowners a class of bound laborers and miss-classifying the latter as “capital,” it destroyed the equilibrium between the three factors of production. It shrunk the market in which free laborers may exchange their labor and thus reduced their earnings - and slowed down social progress.
B: Tariffs and Union - Abraham Lincoln as an American Nationalist
For Abraham Lincoln, the great goal of politics was not economic but the creation and nurturing of a national community.
Indeed, there is no contradiction between the two. In the eyes of Lincoln, sound economic policy, which preserved and increased the wealth of all Americans- what was often simply called “good government” - was not just a duty the Government owed to the citizens as individuals but to the Nation as a body. Bad times increase the possibility of intersectional and interclass malice and jealousy, sharpen all divisions, and dangerously reduce the integrity and strength of the National Community. The goals of the Union were not prosperity and trade but Justice and Liberty - and those could be established only by a strong nation capable of preventing injustice.
Thus, the position Lincoln carried over with him from his days as a Whig makes perfect sense. For him, the protection of American manufacturing - coupled with the easing of internal movement and trade - was a national, not an economic, issue. Unlike other Whigs (which had become Know-Nothings since), he didn’t dislike immigrants - he criticized the Know-Nothings quite openly- his opposition to Free Trade did not stem from hatred of foreigners and foreign things but out of sincere belief that American strength requires at the moment, protection.
But for Lincoln, tariffs were not only temporary means to shore up American industry (and thus tie Americans to each other while creating more opportunities for social progress for the American laborer) but a superior form of revenue for the Federal Government. Throughout most of his life, Lincoln opposed direct taxation. He saw it as inherently wasteful, burdensome, and inefficient. Tariffs, he reasoned:
“The tariff is the cheaper system, because the duties, being collected in large parcels at a few commercial points, will require comparatively few officers in their collection; while by the direct tax system, the land must be literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing. And again, by the tariff system, the whole revenue is paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those chiefly, the luxuries, and not the necessaries of life. By this system, the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country, pays nothing at all. And surely, that country is extensive enough, and its products abundant and varied enough, to answer all the real wants of its people. In short, by this system, the burthen of revenue falls almost entirely on the wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and laboring many who live at home, and upon home products, go entirely free."
As President-elect, Lincoln told a Pittsburgh crowd:
“Fellow citizens,
as this is the first opportunity which I have had to address a Pennsylvania assemblage, it seems a fitting time to indulge in a few remarks upon the important question of a tariff–a subject of great magnitude, and one which is attended with many difficulties, owing to the great variety of interests which it involves. So long as direct taxation for the support of government is not resorted to, a tariff is necessary. The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family, but while this is admitted, it still becomes necessary to modify and change its operations according to new interests and new circumstances. So far, there is little difference of opinion, but the question... how far imposts may be adjusted for the protection of home industry gives rise to various views and objections.”
Since Lincoln favored binding Americans to each other in one nation, the federal government must be strong. To be strong, it must have funds, and the tariff was. In Lincoln’s opinion, the best way to find these funds is without the creation of great invasive agencies of direct tax collection, which would have altered the nation's character for the worse.
Protectionists often ascribe national security reasoning to their policies. They posit that the protected industries are essential for defense against an external force. But Lincoln was never worried about an outside attack as much as for the integrity of the American nation.
We have seen before how easy it was for 19th-century nations, especially in the New World, to come to be and fall apart. Between the rise of Santa Anna and the Treaty of Hidalgo, the Mexican nation had almost ceased to exist and lost much territory. Throughout his life, Stephen F. Austin has been an American citizen, a Spanish subject, a Mexican citizen, and the president of independent Texas. Nationhood seemed malleable. We have seen how it was the policy of the Whigs to create real economic and social ties that would bind Americans together through shared economic interests. While upholding the idea of economic and social nation-building, Lincoln was worried more about another element that might tear the United States apart: national identity's moral and cultural elements.
Lincoln, whose father was a Virginian, who was born in Kentucky and lived in Illinois throughout his career, had a keen sense of the oneness of America. It also made perfect sense to him, who worked closely with many people who immigrated to the United States, that one can become an American. He mostly worried about the United States tearing itself into pieces over the moral question of Slavery. The more time passed, the more convinced he became that Americans must decide soon who they are and what they wish for.
II: Nation Building in the 19th Century and the American Civil War
A: Nation and State in the 19th Century- Liberal and Illiberal Nationalization Projects
As we pointed out in the last chapter, New World nations were hardly alone in the struggle to define and merge themselves out of the territories of the old royal states of the Ancient Regime.
Even great and venerable states such as France and Britain had some difficulties. England went through a process of nationalization over three centuries. Still, the joining with Scotland and Ireland was always awkward. It became more so with the 1707 Act of Union, which created a single state in place of the dual monarchy of England and Scotland, and that of 1808, which eliminated the Irish Government. Within a century, three ancient rival nations were declared mere appendages of a new one created by statute - Great Britain.
Liberal Nationalism - Civic Homogenization vs. Localist Harmonization
France, if anything, was worse for wear by the comparison. The shadows of feudalism hang heavier over France than England; the work of nationalizing the realm's administration had started three centuries later. Napoleon assembled his code of law almost five centuries after Henry II had begun his great enterprise across the channel. The English tongue was commonly understood and in use by the entire society dwelling between Kent and Cumberland and had made great headways into the Celtic lands in the north and the west - but the French were highly divided in their speech - to the degree of mutual unintelligibility between North and South France, between Paris and the Provinces.
The differences did not stop there - the French “pays” diverged from each other- even their closest neighbors - in customs, economy, and even climate far more than English counties. While the kings of France could have done little to alter the climatic diversity of their country - even if they would have liked to do so - it was the decentralized nature of the French State throughout most of its existence that exacerbated the natural diversity between their subjects.
The issue was solved brutally and efficiently in France through the twin military service and public education institutions - which French Republicans view as indispensable. The State enrolled provincial children in its public schools and instructed them in “proper” French. Speech, play, and song had to be conducted in that dialect, while the local dialect was strictly forbidden. In the French army, into which all able-bodied male Frenchmen were conscripted, France's unity (expressed through the supremacy of Parisian dialect, manners, and norms) was stressed upon recruits and officers alike. While the great cities of the South managed to retain some of their identity, the peasants - the majority of the French citizenry up to the middle of the 20th Century - had felt the patronizing hand of Paris much heavier. They depended on the National Government for schools and - due to the unitary nature the French government had inherited from the Bourbons and continued to further emphasize - for local government, country roads, legislation, and a justice system.
Further, while the urban middle classes could have escaped the hand of the State (if they so wished) by enrolling their children in private and religious schools and conscription by the practice of replacement (up until 1870), the peasant was more vulnerable to the influence of these institutions. He often had no other school to send his children to - and he was always in danger of being selected by lot to service as a private - that is, subject to the total weight of military discipline. As the 19th century progressed, the French Nationalizing institution became more efficient and closer to the ideal of equality. By 1905, the Two Years Law had equalized the system by introducing compulsory two years of active service, with 25 years of reserve duty for all French Citizens aged 21 and above.
Britain, however, could not and needed not to take such direct and drastic measures. The centralization of identity was even more desperately needed than in France. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales have all been distinct and well-formed nations for centuries, but four mature nations can be more easily unified than to create one out of a still disjointed people. In nature, the nationalization process is almost as slow as the formation of continents. But once it is complete, a grand project of the right kind can unify separate nations within a single one. British common law, which already penetrated every corner of the British archipelago, did not allow for many of the draconian measures of the paternalistic French State. Still, it had its unifying appeal - ironically, the very same ones that prevented Continental-style nationalization projects: protection of the individual British subject and his locality, trial by jury, strong aversion to peacetime conscription and standing armies, as well as the Church of England as the fulcrum of local education and community.
The Gladstonian Liberals and the Beaconsfieldean Conservatives had found themselves two parallel ways to nationalization- two grand projects to serve as the national cement. The Liberals wished to reform and equalize the State to create a proper legal sense of the “British People” who imbue the State with will and legitimacy by their cheerful consent in protecting their rights. In this sense, Gladstonians were building on the success of the Common Law as a unifier. On the other hand, the Conservatives saw the Empire - that vast field where young Britons can go forth to seek their fortune in the service of Britain - as the great unifier. The Empire strengthened Britons’ sense of shared greatness and put them in front of many tribes and nations that looked incredibly foreign compared to their fellow British soldiers and adventurers. It also helped foster a sentiment of paternalistic superiority in the British people. The Empire imbued Britons in the same sense of noblesse oblige expressed in Disraeli's Feudal Principle towards other nations that the Conservatives saw as the basis of a well-ordered society.
The difference between the British and French experience was in its intended and tangible results: The French State sought to create a nation of citizens who were alike not only in their rights and obligations towards the State but also in their language, manner, customs, and character. It achieved limited success - while the diversity of France was greatly diminished and altered, it was never eliminated. The liberal nature of the French Government - and it is essential to note that even at its most authoritarian, France remained one of the most liberal countries on the European mainland - and the repeated fighting against a single enemy in 1870, 1914, and 1939 - achieved the ironclad unification of French nationalism. On the other hand, the British Government sought not to eradicate local differences but to harmonize them and make them part of a whole. The Victorian monarchy and the British Military celebrated Scottish and Welsh identities and English ones. The only place where French-style forced integration was attempted was Ireland - the one place where British nationalization failed.
It is also important to note that the two liberal states of Western Europe were not in danger of disintegration - the population of France and Britain had been loyal to their national government for centuries at this point - the only revolts were ones demanding national political change rather than secession (with Ireland as the constant exception). Even the Jacobite Rising of 1745 sought only to place a Stuart on the combined British throne - despite its misuse by Scottish secessionists ever since. Similarly, the War in the Vendée was intended to restore France's Ancien Regime- not create an independent Bretagne state.
It should also be noted that the end goal of both projects was to create citizens to participate in their liberal (and increasingly democratizing) institutions. They did not condition participation in and benefiting from those institutions and of Citizenship on nationalization - on the contrary, they made civic participation mandatory and used it to advance nationalization. No ethnic or regional group was legally inferior or subservient to another in either country since the French Revolution and the British Reform Laws. The question was how to make the citizenry of the State into a nation.
The alternative, as we should see, could have been far worse.
Good Subjects- Russification as a Model of Illiberal Nationalization
In the Russian Empire, it was long understood that a hierarchy existed that, unlike in the rest of reactionary Europe, was not merely one of class but also ethnicity and religion.
The Romanov Czars ruled over the Russian Orthodox populace. They have been ethnic Germans since the reign of Catherine the Great. Still, this Empress and her descendants worked hard at Russifying themselves on the one hand and altering the definition of Russianness into something they could comfortably fit into. They wrote and spoke good Russian to their subjects (albeit not in polite circles until 1812) and publicly exhibited their devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church (with varying degrees of sincerity). Their Empire was the Autocracy of the Russian People - which, they argued, was initially granted by the Byzantine Emperors themselves - which made them the last Roman office-holders still extant.
Below them was the much-cowered nobility. Proud and wealthy, the Czars had long put their neck under the State’s yoke. Louis XIV had turned his nobility into an ineffective gaggle of flatterers. Peter the Great made them unto administrators and clarified that he reserved the right to elevate whichever talented commoner he saw fit to the highest degree - even, as was the case of his wife Catherine I - even unto the Imperial Throne. Most commoners did not enjoy such meteoric rise - unless a favorable Imperial gaze fell upon them, they remained locked in their respective classes of “merchants” (that is, all city dwellers who were not bonded servants or noblemen) and the servile peasants - the majority of the Russian population.
Nevertheless, the Czardom had a unique ethnic tinge to it. It was understood that other ethnicities - even those who have joined the State voluntarily, such as the Cossacks - have a subordinate role within it. In the case of the Cossacks, it meant their leaders exchanged greater autonomy for a lesser degree of participation in the State - which remained in the hands of Great Russians - and an obligation to serve in a tightly prescribed military role as shock troops and enforcers. Other minorities have not been that fortunate.
In the middle of the 18th Century, the Russian Empire acquired many non-Russian, non-Orthodox subjects. Catholic Poles, Jews, Lutheran Baltics, Muslim Tatars, and Animist Laps. An ethnic hierarchy was maintained over the next two centuries and persisted throughout the Stalinist era. In general, ethnicities who mainly belonged to Orthodox churches (such as Ukrainians and Georgians) enjoyed a more favorable status than those who didn’t (such as Poles, Baltics, and Jews). The Czarist program of abusing their control of the Orthodox Church to first reduce all Orthodox churches in their empire to dependent appendages of the Holy State Synod and then using the institutions of the Imperial Orthodox Church to push for full integration into the Russian ethnicity dictated the favoring of Orthodox minorities.
Those who would not be integrated through the hijacking of their religious institutions saw them harassed and intimidated in the guise of “advancement” and “regulation.” Catholics, Protestants, and Jews were all subject to a barrage of “inspections,” closures, confiscations, false accusations of corruption, espionage and revolution, and imprisonment or replacement of religious leaders - especially if their flocks participated in revolts against the Empire - and regardless if they had something to do with it. In other words, the religious institutions of their non-Orthodox subjects were seen by the Czars as hostages held to guarantee compliance and integration.
The actual program of integration superficially resembled the French program - forcing the minorities into both public schools and the army, where they would be forced to use exclusively the Russian language and to live Russified lives - or at least, as Russified as possible version of their culture. But the similarities end there. The French State wished to make people who were already, legally, the citizens of a liberal regime into each other’s brethren. But no version of Jewishness would have allowed its bearer to be the equal of a native-bor, Orthodox Russian. Even Jewish converts suffered from prejudice even if they removed legal barriers explicitly placed on Jews. The burden of conscription was deliberately placed more heavily on Jews - and crueler enforcement mechanisms were purposefully designed. The goal was not the creation of a national community but the simplification of ruling a diverse empire and robbing minorities of any reason to dream of a dignified life outside the imperial order - in which they were always inferior.
B: The Republican Party as a Nationalist Party
The nomination of Abraham Lincoln secured the Republican Party not only as a Unionist party but also as a Nationalist one. However, American Nationalism had challenges that no European state had to contend with. On the one hand, the limitations on federal power have become more numerous and powerful.
First, the nation was divided between the free and the bond, on the one hand, who were distinguished not only by mere lineage but also by visible racial characteristics that were tremendous obstacles to integration.
Second, the Republic was divided by the cultural and moral divide slavery had created.
These divisions could not be solved by the Federal Government, whose hands were virtually tied by the Constitutional restraints that guaranteed the autonomy of the States. The Federal Government was not only barred from nationalizing slaves - from protecting, instructing, and regulating them as members of the nation - it could not do so even to free citizens. At most, the Whigs hoped to forge the United States into a unified commercial and industrial network, but cultural integration from above was out of the question.
Nevertheless, Republicans believed that Americans were integrating themselves into the Nation. Far from dissolving it, westward expansion moved America toward a genuine national community. They saw this as part of a trend beginning in the Revolution - when Americans decided to see each other rather than the British and the Loyalists as their brethren. To them and Lincoln, belonging to the American Nation was, from the start, a matter of choice and affection - of a loving conversion into a chosen lot.
The existence of a large enslaved population was a severe handicap for such a prospect. Not only were slaves artificially locked out of the Nation, but the institution of Slavery divided the country into two radically different moral, legal, economic, and political zones.
In the North, slavery was abhorred as immoral and illegal and “completely contrary to our system of law and government,” which dictated a system of free or “contract” labor, which was utilized in middling farms and a growing industrial sector, which produced democratic townships and villages. In the South, it was enforced by the state governments, who even limited manumission, the foundation of growing the South’s main cash crops and the Planter Class’ social standing - and control over the South’s politics.
Furthermore, while radical Republicans (who embraced the previously maligned label of “Abolitionists” and “Black Republicans”) had embraced the idea of granting full citizenship to freedmen, many moderate Republicans were apprehensive. The Blair brothers of Missouri were not an unrepresentative case of actual racial animosity coupled with anti-slavery commitment - but even Abraham Lincoln, who rejected racism either on its merits or its relevance to the issue of civil rights, did not believe freedmen could be made into members in good standing of the American nation. To him, the fact of racism was too challenging to overcome for the creation of a color-blind nation. The solution, therefore, was the same one as Clay’s - restrict Slavery to its current territory and prepare a program of manumission and colonization in Africa. He had held on to this position as late as 1862.
C: The American Civil War and American Nationalism as a Humane Enterprise
Secession and Confederacy as Reactionary Ideologies
Republican Nationalism was not merely the natural development of Whiggish nationalism or latter-day Hamiltonian integration. It was also the antithesis to the repeated threats of secession and the formation of a rival confederacy to the United States sounded by Southerners, at least since the days of Calhoun.
When we described the development of Nationalism in the United States, we ran into the risk of giving the impression that it occurred on the background of a total lack of national feelings above the state level - either of essentially separate nations in a contingent union or of a country populated entirely by individuals free from any patriotic attachment. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we have demonstrated, Americans already had a great sense of their oneness when the Declaration of Independence was signed - colonists from all 13 Colonies expected mutual loyalty, trust, and support. We should instead think of this vague feeling maturing into a coherent belief system.
But the counter-movement to the organic crystallization of the American nation was a deliberate intellectual and political attempt to either resist it or to construct an internal alternative to it - namely John C. Calhoun’s decades-long effort to position his home state of North Carolina as a nation within a nation and then, once this attempt failed, to agitate for a Southern unity against the North and American unity.
This movement was connected to the European Reaction - the attempt to artificially reverse, using government power, the sentiments of nationhood that had developed naturally across various regions. Calhounist attempts to divide Americans between functionally independent nation-states are not inherently different or disconnected from the Austrian and Neapolitan attempts to keep Italians and Germans divided in their petty principalities or Restoration French or Imperial Russian attempts to keep Frenchmen and Russians divided along class and ethno-religious lines.
Like European Reactionaries, Southern Ideologues attempted to use state (and Federal) power to block the spread of written materials opposing their cause (such as Northern newspapers and novels). There was an attempt to criminalize the sending of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and similar publications to the Slave States in the United States Mail.
Another Reactionary use of force was for coercive extralegal or pseudo-legal measures to intimidate or eliminate the political rivals of those in power.
The police raids, imprisonment in oubliettes, clandestine executions, and exile to remote provinces - all these measures taken by European Reactionaries were not materially different from the lynch trials and other measures slavery ideologues and secessionists against abolitionists and unionists. The assembling of secession conventions in remote places, the careful sifting through of the citizenry for people allowed to elect and be elected as delegates, and the well-known conclusion of such conventions were not that different from the measures some European autocrats created institutions of pseudo-representations when they couldn’t resist the outcry for some public participation in politics. The difference was that democracy was well entrenched in America but new in Europe. The American reactionaries first opposed American nationhood, democracy only as its complementary companion. In Europe, the opposite was true - Reactionaries first resisted nationalism as the harbinger of democracy but then embraced a version they could weaponize against it.
Ideologically, slavery advocates and secessionists also grew closer and closer to European reactionaries.
Just as the most ardent reactionaries spent the 19th century justifying the class system using pseudo-scientific ideas of inherent superiority, so did southern slavery advocates. The Slaves of America and the Peasants of Europe were both speculated to possess intrinsic qualities that require a paternal master’s hand for their protection and prosperity. The said masters, the Planter class of America and the noblemen of Europe, were endowed by reactionary theorists with the virtues of bravery, warlikeness, superior intellect, mental maturity, and organizational skill. At least one Southern ideologue suggested that the poor whites of the South would benefit from being brought into the system - as slaves since they are the inferiors of their Planting betters. “Fire Eating” Ideologues would come to denounce all the basic assumptions of the American Revolution - just as the French Reactionaries had rejected not merely the abuses of the French Revolution but its basic liberal assumptions:
“Until the liberation of the villeins, every man in England had his appropriate situation and duties, and a mutual and adequate interest in the soil. Practically the lands of England were the common property of the people of England. The old Barons were not the representatives of particular classes in Parliament, but the friends, and faithful and able representatives of all classes; for the interests of all classes were identified. Monteil, a recent French author, who has written the most accurate and graphic description of social conditions during the Feudal ages, describes the serfs as the special pets and favorites of the Barons. They were the most dependent, obedient, and useful members of the feudal society, and like younger children, became favorites. The same class now constitutes the Proletariat, the Lazzaroni, the Gypsies, the Parias, and the "pauper banditti" of Western Europe, and the Leperos of Mexico. As slaves, they were loved and protected; as pretended freemen, they were execrated and persecuted.”
Fitzhugh, George. 1857. CANNIBALS ALL! OR SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS. 1st ed. Richmond, VA: A. Morris, Publisher. (pp. 159-160)
Thus was Ottis’ principle of actual representation defenestrated - that principle in whose name Americans had shed their blood for an entire decade in a long and arduous revolution and that was the cornerstone of the Constitution - the idea that all citizens must be represented in the government both as individuals and as members of their corporate states. It was tossed out not because it was incomplete and therefore false but because it cried out for completion - to free the slaves and make them citizens - would have inconvenienced their masters.
In his infamous Cornerstone Speech, Alexander H. Stephens, former Whig United States Representative, said:
“But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time.
The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.
One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”
Smith, J. H., co-ed. And Alexander H. Stephens. 1861. “From the Savannah Republican: Speech of Hon. A. H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States, Delivered at the Request of the Citizens of Savannah, at the Athenaeum, Thursday Evening, March 21, 1861.” Southern Confederacy - (Atlanta, 1st edition), March 25, 1861, 2.
Thus, the idea of civic equality - even between white men exclusively - was given up. We must not misunderstand this as a needed sacrifice - but a deliberate move. Stephens still refers to his audience as “Americans” - he has no alternative name for them. But nationhood paves the way to equality under the Law - at least for the citizens, and the spirit of equality is rich and expansive. Eventually, it comes to encompass all those subject to the Nation’s laws and grant them a place in the body politic. Thus, to preserve Slavery, equality between free men must be destroyed, and for such equality to be destroyed, the Nation must be murdered.
Republican Unionism as a Liberal Nationalist Movement
Nationalists rarely say that they intend to construct a community ex-nihilo. Instead, men come to the Nation in the discovery process - as if excavating a long-buried city, only to find their familiar names graffitied on its crumbling walls. Even the term “national heritage” evokes this sentiment - the National Man is likened to a long-lost heir coming to his father’s estate.
The danger of Nationalism is always exclusion - the casting out of some from the Nation as usurpers and interlopers of the said heritage. Therefore, it is essential to distinguish between Nationalism and Ethnicism.
Nationalism wishes to create a community of all citizens in an existing state or to construct a state for an existing community that lacks one or is being oppressed by the State - either way; the end goal is to cement civic liberty and duty with civic brotherhood. Ethnicism calls for the supremacy of one group within a state at the expense of others.
During the late Nineteenth Century, French Nationalism aimed to turn Picardes, Provençals, and Bretons into Frenchmen - equal in their duties and rights and bound together by a common culture. British Nationalism aimed to create an expansive identity that could be expansive enough to contain Englishmen, Scots, Welshmen, and (Protestant, or at least Anglicized) Irishmen. The Russian Black Hundreds aimed to make Orthodox Russians superior by their ethno-religious identity to all other subjects of the Czar.
The ideology of the Republican Party had matured out of Whig Nationalism to posit that the Constitution is not merely a legal document but a nation-forming Covenant.
Widespread biblical literacy had assisted in this notion - weren’t the Israelites made unto a nation by a covenant placing them under one supreme Law? - the concentration of Republican voters in the Northeast and the Midwest, regions with long National Covenant political theologies traditions, entrenched this notion further.
The nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Leadership had emphasized further the covenantal nature of American nationhood.
As we observed before, Lincoln opposed the anti-immigrant views of the Know-Nothings. Therefore, his sense of American nationhood was that of individual election - not dissimilar to the “conversion experience” demanded by his father’s Baptist faith. His fatalism - another relic of his father’s submerged Calvinism - had eased the process- if individuals come to America and become good and loyal citizens, they were always meant to do so and, therefore, always have been Americans - just as God’s Elect were always beloved by Him - even before He had shown them His grace openly.
Lincoln’s Influence and the Ethno-religious Challenge to Republican Nationalism
The Republican Party was wider than Lincoln, even during his time in office. Still, he exerted tremendous influence that countered the Know-Nothing elements.
The “Foremost amongst all” of Lincoln’s 1860 campaigners (in Lincoln’s own words) was one Carl Schurz of Wisconsin, who was born in Liblar in the Prussian Rhineland and who escaped to America in 1852 for his role in the failed German revolution of 1848, in which he sided with the Frankfurt Parliament against the Royal Prussian Army. German Americans like Schurz would comprise a significant percentage of Union troops and Southern Unionists. “Forty Eighter” Germans like Schurz and their descendants had settled in the West and became an early and stable constituency of the Republican Party in this region. The descendants of Colonial-era German migrants had long been a fixture of rural Pennsylvania and were integrated into Anglo-American society by the time of the Civil War.
The alliance between the Free Soilers and the Know-Nothings within the Republican Party had jeopardized the gains this Party made with German migrants. It virtually doomed its prospects amongst Irish Americans until the 1980s. Lincoln was one of the forces attempting to pull in the other direction. As he expressed in a letter reacting to the anti-Catholic Louisville Massacre of 1855, in which German and Irish Americans were targeted:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.”
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy [sic] those and foreigners, and Catholics.
Letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855
Another challenge to Lincoln’s generous notion of liberal unionism came not from the Know-Nothings but from evangelical abolitionists. The cause of abolition was long supported by hyper-protestant churches, such as the northern branch of the Disciples of Christ, often paired with the cause of Temperance, as we have seen before.
It is no wonder, therefore, that when war came, many in this wing of the party had seen the conflict in religious, almost apocalyptic terms.
Michael B. Allen (left) and R. Dr. Arnold Fischer (right) were the first Jewish United States Army Chaplains.
Rabbi Fischer was a well-respected Orthodox Rabbi and scholar. Native of the Netherlands, he was made Rabbi of Sherith Israel - the oldest synagogue in America.
This intense Christian framing of the conflict in certain Republican circles had made the situation very awkward to Jewish Unionists and Republicans - Jews being the largest group of organized non-Christian citizens at the time. The question of Jewish inclusion in the American Nation was more complicated. Legally, Jews have been equal citizens in America. But in certain circles, there was a deep-rooted spirit of antisemitism, claiming that only Christians can be true Americans. Two incidents demonstrate the gap between early Republican leaders, who wished to include Jews in the national enterprise, and the antisemitism of the rank and file. The most infamous incident was General US Grant’s General Order No. 11 - which expelled the Jews from Grant’s military district. This order was revoked by President Lincoln and rescinded by the general, who would eventually apologize for the incident and, as president, be extremely friendly to American Jews and sympathetic to the plight of their brethren in the Russian Empire.
In Septemeber 1861, “Cameron’s Dragoons,” or the 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, were just organized under the command of Col. Max Friedman. It elected Michael B. Allen as its chaplain. Allen was a well-respected teacher of Hebrew, a businessman of independent means, and a reputedly observant and pious man. He was not officially ordained as a rabbi. Still, it seemed he was liked well enough in the regiment and by the Washington Press - the Republican Administration newspaper, the National Republican, had reported in an amiable and understanding tone on the Rosh Hashanah services he conducted. When the YMCA representative demanded that Allen be removed from its post on the grounds of the 1861 War Budget - which required chaplains to be “regularly ordained clergymen of some Christian denomination,” the Regiment protested. The law failed to consider the gradational and semi-formal nature of Rabbinical authority and outright rejected such authority. In other words, Congress had established Christianity as the only official religion of the Army.
The Soldiers of the 65th responded by electing the eminent and ordained Rabbi Arnol Fischler as their chaplain. When the secretary of war demanded his resignation under the 1861 Law, a great effort was made by Fischler and by the Board of Delegates of American Israelites to secure an interview with the President, who issued a letter supporting the law be amended, as it was in 1862. As he returned to the Netherlands, Rabbi Fischel would not serve under the new law. Rabbi Jacob Frankel, a cantor and a rabbi of the Rodef Shalom Reform synagogue, was appointed a hospital chaplain in Washington DC, becoming the first official Jewish chaplain of the United States Army.
We should take note that in this entire episode, Representative Clement Vallandingham of Ohio - the effective leader of the “Copperheads” or “Peace Democrats” in Congress - had urged in 1861 for the Law not to include the word “Christian.” When General Order No. 11 was issued, Democrats moved to censure Gen. Grant.
The cause of these actions may have been a genuine concern for the well-being of the Jews, but they were more likely motivated by political reasons. The Republicans were alienating a not dismissable group of voters - it would have been folly for the Democrats not to capitalize on their error. Furthermore, by this point, the Democrats have decisively moved to the pro-immigrant side of the political field - their 1860 platform reads as follows:
3. Resolved, That it is the duty of the United States to afford ample and complete protection to all its citizens, whether at home or abroad, and whether native or foreign.
This position opposed the Know-Nothings and grew from a genuine investment in immigrant constituencies. Much of the Democratic hold on New York politics was due to their influence amongst the Irish and other migrants - who, in the 1850s, were naturally drawn to the ascendant Democratic Party rather than to the declining and divided Whigs. The Democratic Party was also the one less inclined to see politics in a religious light - and thus more willing to accept Jews.
D: A Republican Form of Government
Civilian vs. Military Administration During the War
The issue of General Order No. 11 brings us to the broader matter of military administration during the Civil War.
The Constitution had created the federal government and entrusted great powers and responsibilities to it, which the states irrevocably gave up. Its founding body is the People of the United States, organized in their states. At the same time, it enshrined the states’ authority for self-government and hemmed in federal and executive authority by defined and enumerated powers and functions. More importantly, it gave the Armed Forces no role in politics or administration - on the contrary, it empowered a civilian - the President - as the commander-in-chief without integrating him into the military hierarchy as a regular officer.
However, the occupation of Confederate lands had put the Lincoln administration into a puzzle.
The situation required establishing a military administration headed by the commanders of the occupying force and, ultimately, by the President. This military administration would fulfill all the functions usually under the preview of the State Government. But to do so - to administer the increasing share of the South back in Union control - seemed to be tantamount to an admission that secession was practical and legal - that the secessionists succeeded in alienating their states from the Union. If this argument was valid, there was no justification for the war - which was authorized to suppress illegal rebellion.
But this Constitutional conundrum was a mirage.
Yes, the South was an illegal revolt where the seating state governments were willing participants. In effect, rather than removing their states’ from the Union, the secessionists had eliminated legal civilian government in them - thus degenerating their states. Therefore, the military occupation was necessary not only for the preservation of order but also for the restoration of constitutional government.
The Constitution guaranteed the People “a republican form of government” in their states. This measure meant a lawful one that derived its authority from their consent.
Radical Republicans doubted whether the southern governments - which rested on the exclusion of Blacks and Unionists and the violent subjugation of the former as well as the suppression of the latter - could claim to possess the consent of the governed. But even moderates who held the opinion that Blacks could not count among the “governed” believed that southern officials engaged in an illegal war to overthrow the “old” Constitution could claim the mantle of legal, republican government.
From Contraband to Citizens
The Army of the Republic found itself not only in command of Southern territory but also of population.
Many Americans in the South sought the protective shield of the Republic before the lands they inhabited came under military occupation.
These were numerous White Unionists and a growing number of Blacks - a trickle first, a stream, and finally a mighty, consistent river. The fearmongering amongst Southern Secessionists of the intent of the Lincoln Administration had, ironically, led to this eventuality - in every plantation and townhouse in the South, the laboring under-trodden heard their masters work themselves up to a frenzy with fantasies of a wild abolitionist president, no different than that old zealot John Brown - on how the Union troops would come to “uproot the Southron way of life.” Those whose scarred backs carried this way of life concluded that freedom was near - and took significantly less risk than the old long escape route to Canada through the Northern free states - the glorious but perilous “underground railroad.”
During the Civil War, the mainstream of the Republican Party in general and Abraham Lincoln, in particular, underwent a shift in opinion from the position of opposing “the Political power of Slavery” and its expansion but falling short of opposing “Slavery itself” (as Frederick Douglass had put it), to the embracing of the idea of full and equal Black citizenship. If it had not seceded in the winter of 1860, the South would have been able to negotiate a compromise with President-Elect Lincoln. By the middle point of the war, both Lincoln and most Republicans saw Black Americans as more deserving of the rights and privileges of citizenship than Southerners.
This shift followed and legitimized the changes that were taking place on the ground - former slaves escaping to the Union camps were first described officially as “contraband” - enemy property temporarily ceased and put to military use, in this case, manual labor - to form them into valiant and valuable fighting regiments.
That change was begun by actions of state governments and of particular actors within them (such as those of US Senator James “Jim” Henry Lane of Kansas, who organized the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment against the express wishes of the Secretary of War), had led to change in Federal policy (as the Emancipation Proclamation should be interpreted) and finally, in Federal Law.
As Frederick Douglass had observed in his famous “Men of Color to Arms!” essay of 1863:
I hold that the Federal government was never, in its essence, anything but an antislavery government.
Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered, 'it was purposefully so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim of property in man.
If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed. There is in the Constitution no East, no West, no North, no South, no black, no white, no slave, no slaveholder, but all are citizens who are of American birth.'
Such is the government, fellow citizens, you are now called upon to uphold with your arms. Such is the government that you are called upon to co-operate with in burying rebellion and slavery in a common grave. [Applause.]
Never since the world began was a better chance offered to a long enslaved and oppressed people. The opportunity is given us to be men. With one courageous resolution we may blot out the hand-writing of ages against us.
Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U. S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in these United States. [Laughter and applause.] I say it again, this is our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it. The immortal bard hath told us:
"There is a tide in the affairs of men /
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to a fortune /
Omitted, all the voyage of their life /
Is bound in shallows and in miseries /
We must take the current when it serves /
Or lose our fortunes.”
Kelly, W. D., Anna E. Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. 1863. Addresses of the Hon. W. D. Kelley, Miss Anna E. Dickinson, and Mr. Frederick Douglass : At a Mass Meeting, Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, For the Promotion of Colored Enlistments. Compiled by Commission for United States Colored Troops:. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 1 vols. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Commission for United States Colored Troops. PP 7.
This speech by Douglass was more than strategic. It was a declaration of Nationalist and Unionist principles that America was a unified nation with a single people and that Black Americans were an integral part of both.
Within two and a half years of the battle of Island Mound, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. By the end of 1865, it had been ratified by 36 states. Slavery has been killed - run through by a Union bayonet, and black Americans did more than share of the thrust.
The next phase of the struggle for Nationhood lay in the double challenge of the reintegration of the South into the Nation, which required restructuring of its social and economic system without the institution of Slavery which underpinned it before the war and the recognition of black Americans as full and equal citizens under the Law.
We shall see in the next chapter how the Republican Party wrestled internal and external forces in this effort.