The Fire in the Rear

Abstract

Jennifer L. Weber. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in North. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xi + 286 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00. Few would dispute that in all of American history, Civil War marked severest test ever of nation's democratic political institutions. The roots of sectional crisis that led to war lay deep in origins and evolution of nation's social, economic, and racial order, but proximate cause was refusal of large numbers of citizens to accept victory of a particular political party at a peaceful and fair election. The nation's founders had been highly suspicious of parties, and according to Adam Smith in No Party Now: Politics in Civil War North (2006), antipartyism persisted through much of nineteenth century, at least as a potent rallying cry against one's partisan opponents. Even so, as Richard Hofstadter demonstrated in The Idea of a Party System (1969), Americans had also come to embrace parties as essential bulwarks of republican government. And yet, after Republican victory in 1860 large numbers of Southerners sought to dislodge their states from Union rather than submit to Republican party rule, which they believed threatened their way of life. President Abraham Lincoln and his allies recog- nized instinctively what this rejection of their party's triumph meant. They cast secessionist project not merely as an attempt to dissolve indissoluble Union but most fundamentally as an assault on republican itself, a vast conspiracy against what Lincoln called government of people, by people, for people. That outcome of an election sparked Southern rebellion and ensuing civil war inevitably raised apprehension regarding viability of system of partisan conflict in loyal portion of nation. It was with no little irony that in fighting to preserve republican institutions, Lincoln and Republicans felt enormous pressure to wage struggle without themselves abusing those institutions. As Lincoln put it, We can not have free without elections; and if rebellion could force to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us (p. 198). But Lincoln also feared what he called the fire in rear (p. 12).