With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War by Nathan P. Kalmoe

Abstract

Reviewed by: With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War by Nathan P. Kalmoe Adam I. P. Smith (bio) With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War. By Nathan P. Kalmoe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 260. Cloth, 99.99; paper, $29.99.) For a few decades, in the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had both strong two-party competition and a widespread acceptance by both parties of the legitimacy of the other. Before and after that brief interlude, the country has been an outlier among long-standing democracies in lacking public tolerance of partisan competition as valid. It was at the high point of party legitimacy, post–World War II, that Richard Hofstadter wrote The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (1969), which presents the early republic as one in which Americans threw off the immature fear of faction and embraced the healthy interchange between party rivals, without violence or (much) resentment. The indisputable premise of With Ballots and Bullets, in contrast, is that partisan competition can be violently consequential. As Nathan P. Kalmoe, a political scientist, writes, when a party loses power, especially in a fraught, highly polarized nation, "the losing party's leaders determine a country's fate." Such leaders "decide whether a democracy and its citizens will live or die based on what they say about the legitimacy of the outcome and how their followers should respond" (xxiii). If that is painfully true today, it was perhaps even more so after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. Kalmoe's core claim is that what followed was "ultimately a partisan civil war" (xxiv). He argues that "Democratic partisanship guided the rebellion and reduced willingness to defend the nation, even as Republican partisanship fueled democratic resolve to fight in battlefields and at the ballot box" (9). Kalmoe raises important questions about what partisanship really is. As he rightly argues, partisanship often hides its face; indeed, the strategic use of "antiparty" rhetoric by partisans was especially characteristic of this period precisely because the legitimacy of a party system had not been properly established (contrary to Hofstadter's argument). A republican ideal of nonpartisanship retained enormous ideological power, which was why the Confederacy saw its apparent lack of a party system as a strength. [End Page 576] Kalmoe is surely right that partisanship framed and drove sectional conflict—or at least that sectional interests were channeled through parties. No one would dispute that the Civil War left a powerful legacy of partisan division in the North. Although his data showing the correlation between the Republican vote in the Gilded Age and the number of Grand Army of the Republic posts will not surprise most historians, it is valuable to see the evidence laid out so clearly. The heart of Kalmoe's argument concerns the wartime North, which he sees as bifurcated between a Republican Party that supported the war and a Democratic Party that—like its southern wing—did not. Using statistical studies of election results and content analysis of a sample of newspapers, he traces the dynamic but resilient partisanship during the war years, showing how Democrats moved toward an ever more hard-line opposition to the war, driven by fanatical hatred of conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, and, of course, emancipation. Kalmoe does not dwell on the multiplicity of party labels and the frequency with which intraparty factional candidates competed in wartime elections, but in broad outline the notion that the war consolidated the Democratic and the anti-Democratic vote is convincing. That does not indicate a complete lack of fluidity in the electorate; in my view, the lengths that Republicans had to go to remake and rebrand their party (Lincoln ran in 1864 as a candidate of the "National Union" Party) tell us something important about how they viewed politics in wartime. But Kalmoe's argument that the Republican coalition of 1860 essentially held together, with some additions, in 1864, is surely right. Nonetheless, I think he overstates the extent to which the northern Democratic electorate was en masse opposed to the war. "The...