CHAPTER VIII: The Politics of the Civil War
Emancipation and the Rise and Triumph of the Radical Republicans
Emancipation and the Rise and Triumph of the Radical Republicans
After the Union victory at Valley Pike, and the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the rupture between the anti-slavery and abolitionist factions of the Republican Party came to the fore. The abolitionists themselves were internally divided, not on abolition, but economics. The leading abolitionist Senator from New England, Charles Sumner, now fully recovered from his beating he suffered from Preston Brooks when speaking out against slavery prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, was an ardent immediate emancipationist but also a leading voice of the “Bank Republicans.”
Sumner was a leading proponent of the National Banking Act of 1862,[1] meanwhile fellow Radical Thaddeus Stevens was strongly opposed to it. The National Banking Act tore up the Republicans, and it also tore into the Radicals. It offered two different visions, including two different visions for what Reconstruction could be.
Sumner and other New England abolitionists had argued that slavery had prevented the economic development of the southern states. Hence, the claims of slavery being a “benevolent” institution were hollow and facetious on economic grounds. Sumner and other “Bank Republicans” hoped that abolition would pave the way for a new economic industrialization to sweep across the American South, especially in the wake of its destruction from the war.
Senator Charles Sumner, Massachusetts. Sumner was a leading abolitionist voice and "Radical" in the Senate. A Senator from Massachusetts, he came from a stern moralistic Protestant background that influenced and shaped his abolitionist views. A former Whig, Sumner was unique among "Radical Republicans" that he was also among the "Pro-Bank" faction of Republicans in political-economy matters. He strongly supported the passages of the National Banking Act on the twin grounds that it would fulfill the modernization and industrialization of the United States and help fund the war at the same time. Most Radicals were anti-capitalist and anti-Bank in economics, but Sumner's connections was able to leverage enough Radical support for it. Sumner was also famously canned by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks in the Senate Chamber prior to the outbreak of the Civil War.
At the same time, friends became foes. When the Senate passed the National Banking Act by a two vote margin, the bill suffered intense criticism from Democrats and Radical Republicans like Stevens. Stevens was an agrarian and labor man, part of the “Labor Republicans” who favored farmers and industrial workers over banks and large industries. Furthermore, Stevens envisioned an agrarian rebuilding for Reconstruction. Stevens wanted to seize rebel land, re-apportion it to freed slaves, and bury the very nature of the old agrarian plantation way and revive the hope of Jefferson’s agrarian and democratic ideal. In various ways, Stevens was the first of a long line of Republican Jeffersonians who were agrarian and reformist and anti-capitalist, but fervently pro-abolition in a way that Jefferson and the party he founded could never be.
The divisions between Radical Republicans were generally geographic. While Radical Republican abolitionist could be found from Maine to Minnesota, their economic visions varied greatly. Radical Republicans centered in Boston were fervently pro-state capitalist. Supporters of the National Banking Act. And envisioning a nationalized and universal capitalist America. Radical Republicans in the Midwest were strongly agrarian and pro-labor, and generally antagonistic toward the National Banking Act and other state-sponsored capitalist programs. One could say this would be true of New England Republicans too. But this forgets the Unionist Compact. Most of the American Party presence in New England were in the rural areas. And the American Party was equally anti-capitalist.
The fight for emancipation and abolition was not just about over racial equality, but also economics. While Democrats were never going to support abolition in any number, among the abolitionists the lines and visions of Reconstruction varied based on economic grounds. Midwestern Radicals like James Ashley and Thaddeus Stevens were ardent anti-capitalist and pro-agrarian and pro-labor in their economic beliefs, as was Senator Benjamin “Bluff” Wade of Ohio. Massachusetts Radicals like Charles Sumner and Representative Thomas Eliot were strongly supportive of national banking acts, financial centralization, and the establishment of commercial industries and businesses (not just in New England, but across the whole of the U.S.).
Therefore, the politics of the Civil War can be viewed much more than the usual abolitionist-slavery dichotomy that dominates much of Civil Wars scholarship and narrative. It is equally a battle over the future of the political-economy of the United States. And like the many ironies of American history, Radical Republicans were united with pro-slavery Democrats and Copperheads on this particular issue, splitting with other Radical Republicans and the mainstream Republican Party in their support for a state-sponsored capitalist and commercial economy that equally had backing from anti-slavery and urban Democrats, principally in the Mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania and New York where stronger pro-business Democratic wings were present.
The debates over emancipation, the legality of emancipation, and the push by Radical Republicans for a new Constitutional Amendment that would abolish slavery was a major aspect of the later politics of the Civil War and into the new "Reconstruction Era." During the debates, the new Republican Party was on fragile grounds with Radicals pushing for emancipation and the more moderate members of the party, mostly economic and unionist in politics, were skeptical but quietly supportive. The greater internal divisions in the Republican Party rested on westward expansion, the Homestead and Banking Acts, pitting the pro-capitalist and economic nationalists on one hand against the agrarian, populist, and emancipationist Radicals on the other.
The west, long the battle ground between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian vision for America, was contested area during the Civil War. Pro-slavery expansionists always saw the west as open and fertile territory for slavery’s expansion. The more traditional Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populists, to which Polk and Douglas can be counted among them, saw the west as territory ripe for democratic agrarianism—while keeping slavery curtailed to where it was already established (except when these laws were overturned in the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Compromise of 1850). “Go west, young lad!”
In Chapter IV we examined the problem of this longstanding battle over the nature of whether Whigs were truly anti-Manifest Destiny. We concluded no. Hamilton and the Federalists, Clay and the Whigs, always envisioned an America that stretched coast-to-coast, but the principal concern of the old Federalist-Whig vision was concentration along the east coast first. By building up a network of commercial and capitalist centers, which would then lead to the industrialization of the Midwest, the future of the west would be won in time. As this was occurring the “Jeffersonian-Jacksonian flight” to the west occurred. This included the Fire-Eaters. The west was the region of flight, or escape, from Hamilton’s Leviathan.
The Homestead Acts helped ensure the opening of the west to the democratic and agrarian spirit of Radical Republicans and Democrats. This would equally lead to the west being the hotbed of reformist and egalitarian movements after the Civil War. Women’s suffrage, ironically, saw a home in the western states. While western Democrats opposed it, and western Republicans (the continuation of Radical Republicanism having moved west) supported it, the triumph of women’s suffrage in the west was because the west lacked the embedded laws and traditions of the east. Without the roots of male-only property and suffrage, there was nothing that opponents of women’s suffrage could truly appeal to and rest on.
The west was also seen as a good place for freed slaves to migrate to and claim as their own according to certain Radical Republicans. While Stevens and Wade wanted to bury the south, other Radicals such as Sumner saw the future emancipation of the slaves as a migratory crisis, to which the west would be well-suited to take on the many freed slaves who would need land to call their own. This caused internal divisions as to how to resolve the “crisis of emancipation.” While it is easy to think, wrongly, that the Radicals were united in emancipation and abolition, such thoughts and presentations are deeply misleading. It is true that Radicals were united in their abolitionism, but many were still unsure and divided as to how to handle the very obvious migrant crisis that would follow from immediate emancipation. Some saw a "New South" with freed slaves and whites living side by side. Others saw a "New South" where freed slaves would hold a considerable advantage over whites. Even others, still, saw the newly opened Western lands as open territory for freed slaves to head to with the support of the Homestead Act.
Ohio Senator Benjamin "Bluff" Wade, the second most prominent Radical Republican in the Senate behind Charles Sumner. Unlike Sumner, Wade was an ardent agrarian populist and anti-Bank Republican. Wade, Stevens, and Ashley, leading Radicals, planned to "bury the South" with Reconstruction. Concern over the future of the American West, was another major concern over the debates on emancipation. The Radicals who wanted to bury the South intended to create a free and equal agrarian black population in the American South rather than the West. Others saw the newly open West as the best place to resettle freed slaves, which conflicted with other hopes for the West to be open to White northerners and farmers.
Even the famous battles of the Wild West, like the shootout at the O.K. Corral, were, in a way, a legacy of the politics and economics of the Civil War. Wyatt Earp and his brothers were seen as Yankee Republican carpetbaggers, out to make a fortune from commerce and business. The Cowboys, represented by the Clanton and McLaury brothers, were southerners, agrarians, and Democrats. Even Sheriff Behan was not free from this tumbled nest of Civil War legacies, as he had strongly defended the Cowboys and other agrarian interests from capitalist speculators and business “carpetbaggers” eager to transform the image and identity of the American West into “miniature Bostons.”
A looming question arises in the minds of all readers. When was the Republican Party ever truly unified? The answer, of course, was never. While Republicans were always strong Protestant nationalists with a nativist bent to them, their internal differences on economics, abolition, political-economy, populism, agrarianism, and internationalism or isolationism, was always problematic and, indeed, schizophrenic. We have, in earlier chapters, and earlier in this chapter, noted the long and disparate strand of traditions that comprise America. The disparate strands are no different when translated into American politics. Even with the “Republican Ascendancy,” it was a schizophrenic ascendancy: isolationism vs. internationalism, agrarianism vs. capitalism, populist nationalism vs. economic nationalism (e.g. economic industrialization), abolitionism vs. anti-slavery, and westward expansionism vs. eastern concentrationism (e.g. “the eastern elite”).
The legacy of the politics of the Civil spilled over into the American West for the next four decades: populism and agrarianism vs. capitalism and industrialization, Homestead Acts vs. Banking Act, and "Carpet Baggers" vs. Yeoman laborers and "cowboys." Famous American lawman Wyatt Earp found himself in the midst of this political struggle. Above, American actor Kurt Russell portraying the infamous lawman and gunfighter in the film Tombstone (1993). Most Americans forget that the "Wild Wild West" was, in some ways, a result of the outcome of the Civil War and the contesting legacies of Republican and Democratic politics from 1865-1900, and Radical Reconstruction which drove former Confederates West to flee Republican policies, leading to a vengeful spite among Western Democrats toward any westward travelling northern Republicans (like Wyatt Earp).
For as much as the Radical Republicans were all united in the abolitionist camp, they varied greatly in the other dichotomies. Some were isolationists, others internationalists. Some were agrarians, and others capitalists. Some populists, and others not. Some were, of course, western, and others hailed from Boston, Philadelphia, and the townships and cities founded by the Pilgrims and Puritans. In some respects, too, the Radical Republicans embodied the logical extension of the anti-slavery politics already embedded as early as Jefferson’s drafting of the Northwest Ordinances, mixed with the staunchly Jeffersonian political economic outlook that was harshly suspicious of Hamiltonian state-sponsored capitalism. The irony of course, was that these quasi-Jeffersonian radicals were members of the Republican Party, motivated primarily from their staunch abolitionism and Protestant nationalism, but otherwise sharing many Jeffersonian characteristics in economics, political authority, and agrarian democracy.
The politics of the Civil War were far from the crystal clear, or universal, picture as sometimes presented. The successful rise and triumph of the Radical Republicans helped establish a strong and enduring dichotomy in the Republican Party: one centered around the commercial and capitalist nationalism of the Northeast, quasi-cosmopolitan, elitist, and commercialist (the scions of the old Federalist Party), and another agrarian, Protestant-nationalist, populist, and deeply moralistic in the American Midwest (the heirs of the Radical Republicans) that grew ever more isolationist and anti-imperialist, in part, because of its Midwestern location and also its anti-capitalist undercurrent that saw imperialism and expansionism as a product of capitalist ideology.
But, in the midst of the Civil War, the Republicans, for all there other internal divisions, this heavenly adopted band firmly united in advancing the cause of liberty and fought and bled for freedom’s cause to reach the sky. As a result, the Republicans were always able to “waive the bloody shirt” of immortal patriotism until the election of William Jennings Bryan. And presidential elections always had the habit of healing, temporarily, Republican divisions. The legacy of the politics of Civil War, of course, was far reaching—and this is the greatest understatement of my history.
[1] Equivalent to our National Banking Act of 1863.
SUGGESTED READING
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor
William Robinson, Jeffersonian Democracy in New England
Henry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor
William Robinson, Jeffersonian Democracy in New England
Henry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
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Intra-party squabbles were alive and well, even in the Civil War!
