The Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861-1874 , and: Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 1865-1869 (review)

Abstract

366CIVIL WAR HISTORY In sum, while Grant was more successful in war than in peace, this biography is more successful in portraying Grant's career in peace than in war. James M. McPhkrson Princeton University The Reconstruction of the Neiv York Democracy, 1861-1874. By Jerome Mushkat. (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Pp. 328. $25.00) Conservative Ordeal: Northern Democrats and Reconstruction, 18651869 . By Edward L. Gambill. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1981. Pp. viii, 188. $15.95.) During the tumultuous period from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, heightened interest in biracialism and cultural change helped stimulate research on related issues in the past. One of the most valuable legacies of that period was an enriched understanding of Republican policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Our detailed knowledge of what various groups of Republicans were trying to achieve, our critical appreciation of how much they accomplished, and our complex analyses of where and when and why they failed became far more sophisticated than ever before. In a similar fashion, it now appears that the current period of retrenchment, stability, and second thoughts that began in the mid-1970s may—consciously or unconsciously—be stimulating interest on the other side of those issues. The result for historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction has been a surge of new information about the Democratic party. The best known product of this recent emphasis is probably Joel Silbey's A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868 (New York, 1977), but that work does not stand alone. G. R. Tredway's Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1973), Christopher Dell's Lincoln and the War Democrats : The Grand Erosion of Conservative Tradition (Rutherford, N.J., 1975), and Arnold Shankman's The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861-1865 (Rutherford, N.J., 1980) come to mind. The two books reviewed here, both bearing 1981 copyrights, continue the current trend. The first of the two, Jerome Mushkat's study, The Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861-1874, is a detailed narrative of intraparty factionalism. In 1861, according to Mushkat, the Democratic party in New York State was badly fragmented, unable to come to grips with the issues raised by the Civil War and, for all intents and purposes, on the brink of extinction. The organization managed to remain intact by exploiting white racism, constitutional conservatism, and Republican BOOK REVIEWS367 factionalism, in Mushkat's view, only to become the object of a prolonged struggle among its own chieftains over the most appropriate way to rebuild the party once the war ended. For a while it looked like William Marcy Tweed and John T. Hoffman would win long-term control of the party by manipulating its organizational machinery, but Tammany's own excesses brought that version of the Democracy crashing down in the early 1870s. The drama and uncertainty initiated by the outbreak of the Civil War was finally resolved, according to Mushkat, when Samuel Tilden "reconstructed" the New York Democratic party on a neo-Jacksonian basis and led it to a well-deserved victory in 1874. "At last," writes Mushkat, "the Democracy had nominated a legitimate Jacksonian, committed to the continuities in party policymaking, with vast bipartisan support, who could reestablish the old political coalition the slavery issue had shattered" (p. 241). Mushkat's book is more persuasive as a study of the near death and subsequent resurrection of Jacksonianism within the New York Democratic party than it is as a study of the New York Democratic party itself. There is surprisingly little on the Seymour administration, for example, probably because that is an aberrant (or non-Jacksonian) period in Mushkat's terms. Yet the New York Democratic party gained victory in the nation's most powerful subdivision under Seymour. To consider the party badly fragmented and fundamentally off its own track in the wake of such an achievement is to raise difficult questions about what a party actually is, how it works, and why it exists. Moreover , if Joel Silbey is correct, the underlying political pattern of the war years had been established during the 1850s and endured at least...