Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

Abstract

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.