A Political Nation

New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History

Gary W. Gallagher, Rachel A. Shelden, Gary W. Gallagher, Rachel A. Shelden

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• Print ISBN:
  9780813932828
• Subtopic: North American History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813932835
• Index: History

This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians.

In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders—those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction.

The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior, A Political Nation underscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics.

Contributors:
Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville · Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College · William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University · Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey · William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities · Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia · Sean Nalty, University of Virginia · Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University · Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University · Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University · J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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III

Parties and Federalism in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction

“Come Weal, Come Woe, I Am with the Anti-Slavery Party”

Federalism and the Formation of the Pennsylvania Union Party, 1860–1864

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SEAN NALTY

In early June 1864, a strange assemblage of Republicans, Democrats who endorsed President Lincoln and the war, and border-state Southerners gathered in Baltimore to formally nominate the incumbent for a second term. Just four years before, Republicans had denounced Southern Democrats as part of a “slave oligarchy,” but here were Northern Democrats and loyal slaveholding politicians pledging their support to the same candidate who had earlier won on an expressly anti-Democratic, anti-Southern platform. Why did Republicans and even some non-Republicans embrace the new party? For many at the convention, the war had convinced them that old party questions paled in comparison to the goal of preserving the Union. Indeed, Republicans referred to their party in 1864 as the National Union Party, which represented a kind of wartime fusion among proadministration political groups.¹

Historians have long considered why the Republican Party underwent a metamorphosis into the National Union Party. James McPherson, for instance, describes the 1864 National Union Party Convention as a Republican ploy “to attract War Democrats and southern unionists who might flinch at the name Republican.” In his estimation, the party gained these additional adherents at little cost to traditional Republican principles. Even while demanding the unconditional surrender of the Confederate armies and the abolition of slavery, the platform adopted in 1864 entirely ignored the “divisive reconstruction issue.” Thus the National Union Party emerged with the paramount objective of simply dealing with the exigencies of war, with little consideration given to its future beyond the war’s end.²

In contrast to McPherson’s depiction of the Union Party as a change of name by Republicans to cultivate a sense of wartime unity, Michael Holt advances a different understanding of the significance of the National Union Party. In exploring the contrast between President Lincoln’s conciliatory policies toward the South and harsher measures favored by Republican majorities in Congress, Holt focuses on the electoral strategy of Lincoln in pursuing his reelection for 1864. The president, according to Holt, “set out to destroy the Republican party as it existed in 1860 … an exclusively northern party whose sole basis of cohesion was hostility toward the South and the Democratic party.” The new, bisectional National Union Party would replace anti-Southernism and condemnations of the Slave Power with a more conciliatory treatment of Southerners as outlined in Lincoln’s “Ten-Percent Plan.”³

Common to both these interpretations is an emphasis on the emergence of the National Union Party as a national party during the 1864 campaign. Precious little has been done to explore why various Northern states embraced the Union labels well before the 1864 election. By examining how Republicans and non-Republicans responded to the formation of a Union Party in Pennsylvania, I hope to shed light on the practice of federalism amid the stresses of civil war.

This essay first reconsiders the importance of the original Constitutional Union or John Bell supporters of 1860 to the wartime political scene in Pennsylvania. I argue that, far from representing a feeble, antiquated set of principles as depicted in some historical accounts, Bell supporters like Philadelphian Henry Charles Lea were instrumental in helping to reorient the Pennsylvania People’s (i.e., Republican) Party ideology from its original emphasis on free labor and anti-Southernism toward an ideology of antiparty nationalism. These “Bell and Everett” men of 1860 also brought a reformist impulse into their new political homes. The inclusion of these men in the Union Party after 1860 generated an important tension within the wartime Union Party between the “wire-pulling” political practices of Pennsylvania Republican political leaders and the antipolitical sentiments of the former Bell voters. This tension would persist until the emergence of the Progressive movement and the corresponding rise of the ideal of the independent, issue-oriented (as opposed to party-oriented) voter.

Second, this essay examines how advocacy of the Union Party among Pennsylvania’s leaders, such as Governor Andrew Curtin, helps to explain the governor’s conflict with the Lincoln administration over federal recruitment policies throughout the war. In particular, Curtin consciously tried to build support for the Pennsylvania Union Party among non-Republicans through his efforts to reduce the federally imposed quota for Pennsylvania enlistments. Through this electoral strategy of incorporating non-Republicans into a new Union Party, Curtin and his political allies in Pennsylvania exacerbated their long-standing factional rivalries with Simon Cameron’s wing of the Republican Party and risked alienating the War Department in Washington. I further show how the decision to embrace the Union Party idea by some political leaders in Pennsylvania helps to explain the difficult relationship William Blair has observed between Curtin and the authorities in Washington. In so doing, this essay invites a reconsideration of the role that the development of state Union parties played in the relationships among officials across different levels of government.⁴

The election of 1860 did not guarantee the Republican Party permanence in the political landscape of the time. The realignment of the 1850s had proven such a disorienting experience to many politicians that few could predict with any certainty where political alignments would ultimately settle. This seemed especially true of the victorious Republican Party, whose members had come together primarily in opposition to a Democratic Party that had generally protected Southern slaveholding interests. Yet this assemblage of former Democrats and Whigs could little agree on anything beyond a refusal to allow the further extension of slavery into the federal territories. This seemingly ad hoc Republican coalition appeared to outsiders as doomed to failure, for winning was the easy part—governance was much harder. Herschel Johnson, the running mate of Stephen Douglas on the Democratic ticket in 1860, expressed a rather common belief among non-Republicans that the party would crumble under its own weight. “The Republican Party must fall to pieces,” he argued. “Besides, who does not know, that there are two distinct wings of the party,” representing an “ultra rabid” and a “conservative” wing. If Lincoln tried to win over the one wing through patronage, “the other would instantly make war upon his administration.” Johnson perceptively identified the chief problem for Republicans: how to keep their coalition from splintering as the party transitioned from opposition to control of the White House. This process only became more difficult with the secession of South Carolina and six other Deep South states from December 1860 to February 1861. Faced with the need for unity against a Southern rebellion, the incoming Lincoln administration would have to decide how far it was willing to go to secure the support of those voters who had shunned the party in 1860.⁵

One of those groups in the North who had fought the Republicans was the Constitutional Union Party. These men looked upon the emergence of a sectional antislavery party with great revulsion, despite the affinity these Bell voters of 1860 had with the economic program of the Whig-dominated Republican Party. Despite their paucity in numbers, this group of conservative nationalists in the Constitutional Union Party seemed important allies for Republicans in the fight against secession. It is true that this group only managed to yield a paltry 2.5 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote for president. Nevertheless, interest in attracting such self-described “conservative” Constitutional Unionists to their respective parties made Democrats and Republicans eager to appeal to this small but socially prominent demographic. Representing a wide range of professional men, from the Philadelphia medievalist Henry Charles Lea to the Pottsville medical doctor, black colonization pamphleteer, and local organizer Jacob Dewees, these men did not simply give up and abandon public life once the results of the November election became known. Instead, these Constitutional Unionists eagerly contributed their time and money to influence the state’s politics during the course of the war.

While Lea would go on to join the newly formed Union Party and Dewees would endorse the Democrats, both men exhibited what the historian Adam I. P. Smith has properly characterized as a revulsion against politics as usual. The corresponding decline in the potency of old economic issues in the 1850s had left many former Constitutional Unionists convinced that party strife reflected little more than a contest for spoils. According to Lea, political “reform must begin at the beginning,” that is, at the local level, so local reform became their primary objective. Using the operations of the federal system to their own advantage, these Unionists worked to implement their principles at the municipal and state levels. In so doing, they looked to prevent the recurrence of the kind of wire-pulling, office-seeking politics that they believed had dangerously brought the country to the brink of ruin. This focus would significantly continue well beyond the war, as Progressives eventually waged a successful battle against party leaders and their machine-style politics at century’s end.⁶

The political scene after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 seemed to contemporaries to portend a complete break up of prewar political coalitions, leaving observers to imagine new parties emerging out of the wreckage. Republicans throughout the North also sensed an opportunity to incorporate non-Republican voters into their prowar coalition. To that end, local elections in the fall of 1861 saw the creation of bipartisan “People’s Union” tickets in states like New York and Ohio. In Pennsylvania, where the main opposition to the Democrats ran as the “People’s Party” rather than under the name “Republican” in order to avoid charges of antislavery extremism, a serious discussion ensued over whether to establish a “Union” organization across traditional party lines. Some Pennsylvania Republicans, such as the Snyder County newspaperman Israel Gutelius, believed that Republicans needed to extend the hand of political friendship to Douglas Democrats and Constitutional Unionists and therefore urged the creation of a state Union Party. Writing to Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth Eli Slifer, Gutelius underscored the importance of creating this new party while party lines in the state remained in flux, for “if any thing is to be don[e] to Save us it must be don[e] soon.” Saving the country from the ruin brought on by the policies of radical antislavery men in the Republican Party, according to Gutelius, required an embrace of non-Republicans by nominating them for local and state offices.⁷

The initial response to the idea of a new “Union Party” among non-Republicans was extremely positive. Some Democrats anticipated such a move from the start. One Douglas Democrat who had recently joined the Second Pennsylvania told former Philadelphia mayor Richard Vaux that the “talk in the army is of a great National party formed of the Douglas Democracy and those men who were driven out” by the radicalism of certain antislavery leaders in the Republican Party. Recognizing the great popularity of the patriotic zeal for unity, even former president James Buchanan advised Bucks County Democrats to cater to the public desires. Democrats, he urged, should sustain various pro-Union resolutions put forth by some Republicans and Democrats, since “this is the course of expediency & what is of infinitely more importance is the course of our highest duty to our country.” The records of the members of the Fifteenth Ward Bell and Everett Association in Philadelphia provided evidence of the receptivity of Constitutional Union Party members to a broad-based Union Party. In resolutions probably written in 1861, this group indicated its opposition to any “unconstitutional” legislation to abolish slavery and further declared that in “A. Lincoln our worthy president we find a man for the times … in whom we place full confidence, a conservative man & who will receive our full support.” Little-known men like twenty-six-year-old Constitutional Unionist Joseph G. Rosengarten, forty-year-old Democrat (and former Constitutional Unionist) Thomas S. Stewart, and Douglas Democrat Thomas Greenbank sought nominations for state legislature from both major parties. Both “Union Democrats and Union Republicans,” as one Philadelphia newspaper pointed out to its readers, worked together to elect the incumbent Republican state treasurer at the beginning of 1862.⁸

Some Pennsylvania Republicans scarcely hid their revulsion at the idea of becoming a kind of broad-tent organization, especially if it might weaken or sacrifice those antislavery principles that had animated the founding of the Republican Party. A major problem with establishing a Union Party in Pennsylvania was the long-running rivalry between Governor Andrew Curtin and Lincoln’s secretary of war, Simon Cameron. Each man had sought to outmaneuver the other politically in the past, with Cameron, a former Democrat, generally taking a far more advanced position against slavery than his rival. The inchoate nature of the early Republican Party made Cameron and his allies deeply suspicious of the ease with which the former Whig Curtin and his followers embraced the idea of a Union Party.

Were Curtin and his allies looking to build up a coalition for the purpose of excluding Cameron and other strongly antislavery Republicans? Cameron supporters seemed to think so. They believed Curtin wanted to attract Democrats and other non-Republicans into a pro-Lincoln coalition that would greatly diminish their own power and influence. One Republican in Lewisburg acknowledged the existence of “a kind of ‘Union Movement’ here, got up by the Democrats, though the call is signed by republicans without much reflection I suppose.” Opposing the efforts of men like Israel Gutelius to fuse Republicans and non-Republicans into a new party, this Republican counseled state leaders to limit the spread of this movement as far as practicable. If too many Democrats and other non-Republicans were placed in “Judgeships, Congress, & [the] Legislature,” he reasoned, “they will soon crawl to the throat of the administration.” Cameron himself received a similar warning from a Philadelphia Republican, who predicted that “there will be a new howl against you … the conservative, Old-Line Pro-Slavery Whigs, Negro-driving Democrats, & weak-kneed Republicans” uniting against pro-Cameron Republicans. Thus it was far better, according to the pro-Cameron faction, to concentrate the party’s efforts on retaining the loyalty of good Republicans instead of trying to win over former rivals.⁹

Even as Republicans, Democrats, and Constitutional Unionists began to come together during the first year of the war, discussions over the future of slavery threatened to derail this fusion of the old parties. Among the more radical Cameron men, criticism of Lincoln’s handling of both the war and the issue of slavery grew steadily once the president began to countermand the antislavery edicts of some of his commanders. Amid repeated clashes between Confederate and Union forces outside Richmond, Republican members in Congress during June 1862 prodded Lincoln to move toward a more aggressive stance on slavery and adopted a bill calling for the confiscation of all rebel-held property, including slaves. Some Democrats took advantage of this congressional pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Political Culture in Antebellum America
• II The Politics of the Secession Crisis
• III Parties and Federalism in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
• Works by Michael F. Holt
• Notes on Contributors
• Index