The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North.

Abstract

Michael Thomas Smith's insightful new book raises important and provocative questions about Northern political culture in the 1860s. Smith revives an oddly neglected question: Why were wartime Northerners obsessed with fears of corruption and conspiracy? His response (because they had been raised in a culture steeped in the premodern ideology of republicanism) would have been self-evident a generation ago; today it is a striking claim that risks instant, eye-rolling dismissal but in fact demands careful consideration. Smith argues that at the heart of Northerners' overheated outrage surrounding ambitious and scheming war profiteers, generals, bounty brokers, bounty jumpers, and cotton traders lay a culture bred on republican fears of centralization, abuse of power, aristocratic privilege, and the “‘dissipations’ and ‘wanton extravagance’” that attended luxury and wealth (p. 19). Most recent historians have discarded republicanism as a useful interpretive tool, yet Smith finds too much otherwise irrational conspiracy rhetoric and too great a preoccupation with moral decline and its impact on civic health to ignore. He wisely refrains from rendering republican ideology a magic bullet, instead presenting a balanced and nuanced tapestry in which republicanism was interwoven with partisan politics, evangelical Protestantism, anxieties over economic development and urbanization, and fiercely contested ideals of manliness—all intensified by the pressures of a war for national survival. The result leaves the reader hard put to deny that republicanism continued to be a central facet of Northerners' outlook into the 1860s.