Northern Republicans Research Articles

From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority—the right to make and enforce binding rules—occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–99) and congressional speeches (1851–99). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results further suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideational entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

“They are not of our race”: Northern Republican Senators, Anti-Cuban Prejudices, and the American Opposition to Cuban Acquisition in 1859

Which factors do U.S. statesmen consider when incorporating new U.S. territories? Which populations and territories are deemed compatible with the project of the American nation, and which aren’t? At the U.S. Congress in 1859, upon the presentation of Senate Bill 497, U.S. Senators were debating whether to allocate a millionaire sum of money to President James Buchanan in order to acquire Cuba. The Congress debates were divided between Northern Republican and Southern Democrat Senators, of whom the former consistently opposed the annexation of Cuba. The reasons for opposition were various, but this study focuses on the senator’s suggestion that the Cuban population was unfit for self-government. By analyzing the speeches of several Northern Republican Senators, this study analyses how religious, cultural, and racial prejudices against Cubans deterred Americans from annexation. This analysis ultimately reveals that the anti-slavery convictions of Northern Republican Senators extended only to territories where the white American population could predominate, which they deemed impossible in Cuba.

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman

Reviewed by: The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman Michael F. Holt The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War. Joanne B. Freeman. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. ISBN 978-0-3741-5477-6. 480 pp., cloth, $28.00. The notion that physical violence between Northern and Southern congressmen before 1861 augured a shooting Civil War is not new. In This Hallowed Ground (1956), for example, Bruce Catton called the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner the Civil War’s initial battle. In this terrific new book, Joanne Freeman agrees that “the first battles of the Civil War were waged in Congress itself ” (11). Yet she extends the list of inflammatory sectional brawls far beyond Sumner’s caning. By her count, between 1830 and 1861 at least seventy incidents of physical conflict—elbowing, spitting, punching, grappling, threatening with knives or guns, and dueling—occurred in, or were precipitated by angry clashes in, the House and Senate chambers. Set-tos in the 1830s primarily featured partisan strife between insulted Whigs and Democrats. From 1840 on, however, clashes almost always pitted a bullying Southerner against a Northern critic of slavery or slavery expansion. Freeman’s count of these episodes was exceedingly hard won. Both the Congressional Globe and local Washington newspapers concealed violent incidents with silence or euphemism. Thus, she relies on diaries, letters congressmen sent home, and reports about congressional affairs by correspondents for non-Washington papers. Her primary source was the eleven unpublished diary volumes of Benjamin Brown French, who served as a clerk of the House from 1833 to 1847 and then remained in Washington until his death in 1870. Brown was an insider’s insider who personally knew every president from Jackson through Gant as well as many senators and representatives with whom he regularly dined. [End Page 90] Brown’s diaries were not Freeman’s only source. She also consulted fifty-six manuscript collections and numerous congressional documents. Her encyclopedic mining of secondary works is especially striking. She apparently read almost every relevant work by other historians as well those by political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. She cites unpublished PhD dissertations and MA theses from universities other than her own. Fully 100 pages of densely documented endnotes follow her 285 pages of text. All in all, this book is simply a stunning piece of research. Freeman devotes separate chapters to the 1838 Graves-Cilley duel, the angry Gag Rule debates between 1835 and 1844, the Senate tiff between Henry Foote and Thomas Hart Benton in 1850, the sectionally fractious debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its aftermath, and the clash between Republicans and the Slave Power punctuated by the Sumner caning and later episodes of violence up through the secession crisis. She develops several themes in these and other chapters. One is to humanize nineteenth-century congressmen by portraying them as “an assemblage of sleepy, grouchy, disheveled men,” often drunk and often expectorating tobacco-stained spittle onto rugs of the House (29). More important, she stresses the difference between Southern congressmen and their Northern peers. Southerners, she argues, constituted “a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government who strategically deployed violence to get their way” because their constituents expected them to act aggressively (10). Most Northerners, in turn, refused to stand up to the bullying, at least until the mid-1850s, because they believed their constituents frowned on violent behavior. “By discouraging Northern violence and encouraging Southern violence,” she summarizes, “the American people fostered the [sectional] imbalance of power in Congress” (137). “Sectionalism,” shaped “the balance of power on the floor,” and Southerners, through insults, threats, and actual physical violence, thus dominated Congress until the mid-1850s, when Northerners finally met threat with threat and punch with punch (73). At that point, Northern Republicans and Southerners engaged “in a fight for control of Congress and thereby for the fate of the nation” (211). These statements illustrate some of the questionable assertions in this otherwise estimable book. Her generalizations about public opinion outside Washington go beyond her own evidence and remain unproven. She also...

1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr.

Reviewed by: 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace by Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Mike Bunn 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace. By Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. 364 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1953-3. 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace explores in unprecedented depth the devastating final year of the war, as well as the tumultuous beginnings of the Reconstruction Era in the state. In the pages of the book, author Christopher Lyle McIlwain, Sr., argues for a reconsideration of our collective understanding of both, contending our hazy shared memories of the denouement to Alabama's wartime [End Page 267] trials and its postwar reality are heavily colored by a debilitating accretion of myth, legend, and partisan scholarship. McIlwain believes the year 1865 in Alabama history is rather simply defined by a cascading litany of bad decisions on the part of irrational leaders which manifested themselves in an unnecessarily prolonged and particularly devastating period of economic struggle, political turmoil, and isolation from the mainstream of American society that handicapped the state's progress for generations afterward. McIlwain opens his study by chronicling perhaps the paramount blunder among a series of poor choices by Alabama leaders, a decision which, in his opinion, flew in the face of common sense—the attempt to continue to wage a war he contends had long been lost by 1865. Continuing the theme from his recent book Civil War Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 2016), he portrays Confederate nationalism as something akin to either an elaborate hoax foisted on a gullible populace or a tragic disconnect with reality. The state's elite come in for the harshest of his criticisms, as he examines their self-serving efforts to prolong the war, offering either editorial or financial support—but rarely battlefield service—with a thinly veiled contempt. While he tracks in cursory fashion some of the major military campaigns which ravaged the state from the Tennessee Valley to Mobile Bay in the spring of 1865, this is no military history. McIlwain's focus is on the progressive disaffection with the Confederate military effort within Alabama and the wasted opportunities to end the struggle prior to the dismantling of its industrial complex, the complete destruction of its economy, and a wasteful loss of life. The conviction that the state's leaders should have been willing and able to move on and make the best deal they could with their conquerors in the wake of Appomattox undergirds McIlwain's assessment of events during the latter half of 1865. He notes that despite conventional wisdom, a good deal indeed could have been obtained when viewed from their perspective. President Abraham Lincoln, he argues, offered even more generous and lenient terms than commonly understood, pointing to evidence that indicates the president [End Page 268] did not intend to insist on full political rights for black citizens as a condition of the readmission process. Thus with Lincoln's assassination, Alabama's path towards rejoining the Union with any degree of its traditional political autonomy grew considerably more difficult. But the early days of President Andrew Johnson's administration offered opportunities for a relatively smooth readmission process, as well, asserts McIlwain. When Alabama's leadership stubbornly refused to comply, it not only marked the beginning of a hegemonic shift in the state's political power structure, but spelled doom for the state's prospects of economic recovery. It is actually in Alabama's marked recalcitrance during the first months of Johnson's tenure, McIlwain argues—not the later vindictive reprisals of radical Northern Republicans—that the state's postwar fate was sealed. Alabama leaders followed a course of arrogant retrenchment in the latter half of 1865, highlighted by the passage of an exceedingly conservative constitution which raised the eyebrows of observers in Washington. Overall, the first few months of Alabama's postwar era revealed state leaders to be committed to subverting efforts toward the full extension of civil rights to black citizens; the election of outspoken former rebels to the highest of offices; and even the entertaining of an outrageous attempt to repudiate the state's war debt. All this only encouraged...

"Tell Us Something about State Rights": Northern Republicans, States' Rights, and the Coming of the Civil War

"Tell Us Something about State Rights"Northern Republicans, States' Rights, and the Coming of the Civil War Michael E. Woods (bio) In August 1857, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase visited Cincinnati, ostensibly to discuss a state treasury scandal. His main purpose was to stump for reelection. Chase was chosen as Ohio's first Republican governor in 1855, but his two-year term would soon expire, and he came to Cincinnati to solicit votes. Like other Republicans, Chase wasted no opportunity to discuss slavery; before finishing his late-summer speech, he examined that "great question that constantly absorbs our thoughts, and demands our continual attention and enlists our feeling." Alluding to the slave power theory he had long expounded, Chase warned that "the Federal Government is reduced to be the despotism of a slave oligarchy." The evidence was plain: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision—all reflected slaveholders' insidious influence on federal policy. Suddenly, a voice from the crowd shouted: "Tell us something about State Rights." Chase, having planned to do precisely that, was unfazed. "I am bringing you to that question," he promised. "I will show that these aggressions of Slavery encroach upon State Rights; that they have invaded the sovereignty of Ohio." Exploring an issue that had shaped his career since he defended fugitive slaves as a young Cincinnati attorney, Chase blasted proslavery federal policy as overbearing and unconstitutional. He charged southern slave-catchers and federal officers with violating Ohio's laws and sovereignty. He affirmed, "I believe with Jefferson, that the cardinal principles of our Union is the preservation of the reserved rights of the States; and … if we wish to maintain our liberties, we must have our laws obeyed." The alternative was degradation to a status "worse than the veriest slaves of European despotisms." Chase closed with paeans to frugal government, free soil, defeat of the slave power, and civil rights for free blacks, and "retired amid hearty applause."1 He won a second term. Historians should ask antebellum Republicans to "tell us something about state rights," too. The exchange between Chase and his eager constituent reveals much about Republicans' rise to power and recasts the [End Page 242] relationship between states' rights and Civil War causation, a topic plagued by threadbare clichés. Despite historians' best efforts, the notion that conflict over states' rights, rather than slavery, triggered secession and war remains widespread.2 Neo-Confederates make it a tenet of political faith. But it also permeates mainstream discussions, from college essays to the Huffington Post.3 Narratives of Civil War causation that supplant slavery with states' rights rest on two equally weak assumptions: that the subjects can be compartmentalized and that states' rights was a southern doctrine. Scholars have demolished the first postulate far more thoroughly than the second. Excellent studies, old and new, demonstrate slavery's pervasive influence in debates over everything from tariffs to territorial expansion.4 Slavery was a brutal part of the context in which theorists wrote, orators spoke, and voters cast ballots. Excise slavery, and American political history becomes unintelligible. White southerners would have been fools indeed to ignore the millions of enslaved people living around them. They were not fools. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," declared Mississippi secessionists. "We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede."5 But the association of states' rights with the South remains resilient and can distort our view of sectional politics. Even the argument that states' rights was merely a shabby cover for proslavery interests lends a sliver of credibility to narratives that pit southern secessionists against Yankee centralizers. This essay challenges both assumptions by exploring why and how antebellum Republicans, members of a primarily northern antislavery party, employed states' rights. They used states' rights in two ways: as a practical strategy and a rhetorical resource. Pragmatically, Republicans deployed the doctrine against specific proslavery policies, particularly as slaveholders demanded increasing federal support during the 1850s. Republicans believed fidelity to states' rights would thwart the slave power, denationalize slavery, and hasten its demise. States' rights would preserve free soil and protect...

The First Congressional Debate on Public Carry and What It Tells Us about Firearm Regionalism

In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, a prominent issue remains unresolved: whether, or to what extent, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms outside of the home. This Article explores this unresolved issue through a newly uncovered source, the congressional debates surrounding the District of Columbia’s public carry law in the 1890s. These debates provide new insights into the understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in the years following the drafting and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two conclusions can be drawn from the debate. First, there was no national consensus regarding a right to public carry under the Second Amendment. This is important because the Supreme Court in Heller stated that the Second Amendment “codified venerable, widely understood liberties.” Second, the Senators’ and Congressmen’s varied positions on the Second Amendment and the permissible scope of public carry regulations generally fell into regional patterns. Representatives of states in the North and West supported a more limited public carry right, while those representing states in the Deep South, with some exceptions, supported a broader Second Amendment right. Because the Northern Republicans were the ideological force behind the drafting and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, their restrictive view of public carry should be given special weight when determining the constitutionality of contemporary public carry regulations.

The Rebel Soldier Who Became Chief Justice of the United States: The Civil War and its Legacy for Edward Douglass White of Louisiana

Edward Douglass White (1844-1921) was appointed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1894 when he was a sitting U.S. senator, and was elevated to chief justice in 1910. Given his background—White was a Democrat, Confederate veteran, sugar planter and lawyer from New Orleans, and son of a Louisiana governor—one would have expected White to share the legal and political views of others of his background, class, and region, which were generally hostile to federal power and supportive of white supremacy. Yet White was a nationalist on the Supreme Court. He was considered a de facto Republican by many prominent northern Republicans, and was elevated to the chief’s seat by William Howard Taft. As a justice White voted repeatedly to uphold expansive uses of Congress’s regulatory and taxing powers, including powers first exercised by the Union during the Civil War to tax income and raise armies by conscription. White did not have enlightened racial views, and joined the majority of the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. But he also wrote the Court’s decisions holding unconstitutional that so-called “grandfather clauses” that were used in the South after the war to prevent African-Americans from voting, and voted in favor of civil rights in other important cases. Previous biographers have recognized the importance of White’s experience as a Confederate soldier to his life and later judicial and political outlook. But the details they have published about White’s military service have been only brief and vague, and sometimes simply wrong. Relying on a far broader array of original and secondary sources than any previous study, this paper explores what exactly White did, saw, and experienced during the Civil War. Crucially, though, the story is also one about omissions and even deception by White. A newly-discovered document shows that he lied to Federal interrogators about his war service when he was captured in 1865. In later life White rarely spoke of the war, and when he did he offered almost no details about his service. He failed to correct the record when inaccurate biographical details about his service were published. His actual war service was almost certainly much less extensive and honorable than previous biographers have claimed. The most detailed information we possess shows him joining a marauding guerrilla band in rural Louisiana in the closing months of the war. Later in life, what White did clearly and honestly express about the war was deep regret that it occurred at all, anguish about its human toll and effect on his beloved country, and self-criticism about his youthful service on the Confederate side. This picture that emerges of White and his war service is much more complex than offered in previous biographical studies, and provides a surer foundation for assessing his jurisprudence on the Supreme Court and accurately understanding his place in the country’s political and legal history.

The Quarrel Forgotten?: Toward a Clearer Understanding of Sectional Reconciliation

Americans slaughtered one another in horrific numbers in the 1860s. According to the most recent estimate, at least 750,000 soldiers may have perished in the Civil War, while perhaps 50,000 noncombatants died indirectly as a result of military operations. (1) Yet by the end of the nineteenth century President William McKinley, a Union veteran from Ohio, was able to tour the reunited republic hailing the restored amity that supposedly prevailed between the erstwhile warring sections. In December 1898 he told spectators at a peace jubilee in Atlanta, Georgia, that it was time the U.S. government accepted responsibility for care of the southern dead-men who had given their lives to destroy the country he loved. Fifteen years later, a Virginia-born president, Woodrow Wilson, journeyed to Gettysburg, site of the most famous Federal victory of the war, to tell an audience of veterans and civilians that Americans had found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten-except that we shall not forget the splendid valour, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes. (2) This essay reviews a range of modern scholarship on the tangled process of sectional reconciliation-a process that greatly assisted the United States' emergence as a great power by reducing persistent and divisive internal tensions after the carnage of the Civil War. It contends that while historians such as Nina Silber and David W. Blight have been right to pinpoint construction of a sentimental culture of reconciliation as a primary source of North-South amity, their influential studies unwittingly conceal the persistence of smoldering wartime hatreds and tenacious partisan allegiances built on perpetuation of those animosities. During a period dominated socially, politically, and culturally by men and women who had experienced the turmoil of the Civil War era, sectional memories-northern as well as southern-countered and sometimes trumped the gushing rhetoric of nationalist politicians. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, most Americans certainly thought of one another as compatriots. However, the formidable strength of Civil War remembrance made the process by which they came to that conclusion both complex and uneven. The first modern scholar to sense that reconciliation between Americans was a genuine historical problem rather than an inevitable attainment requiring no explanation was Harvard professor Paul H. Buck, whose book The Road to Reunion 1865-1900 was published in 1937. (3) Born in 1899, Buck was himself a product of sectional reconciliation who regarded it as one of America's noblest achievements. Acknowledging that considerable animus existed on both sides after Appomattox, he charted the damaging impact of Reconstruction on sectional relations before explaining the rapid growth of reconciliatory forces primarily in terms of the development of a national market, the rise of a sentimental literary culture, the decline of sectionalism in mainstream politics, and a burgeoning soldiers' reunion in which ordinarily the mass of veterans on each side accepted an easy camaraderie. Although Buck noted the determination of politicians, especially northern Republicans, to sustain sectional hostility for selfish political purposes in the 1880s, he contended that reconciliation was virtually complete by 1898, when northerners and southerners joined forces once again to fight against Spain. Blacks, he conceded, were the losers from this process (he devoted several pages to the failure of federal voting rights enforcement) but he voiced no criticism of his fellow northerners' decision to accept racial segregation as part of the postwar settlement. Optimistically, he told readers that Jim Crow had permitted a degree of peace between North and South hitherto unknown, gave to the South the stability of race relations necessary to reconcile her to the re-united nation, and gave to the Negro a chance to live and to take the first step of progress. …

The Rebel Soldier Who Became Chief Justice of the United States: The Civil War and Its Legacy for Edward Douglass White of Louisiana

Edward Douglass White (1844-1921) was appointed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1894 when he was a sitting U.S. senator, and was elevated to chief justice in 1910. Given his background — White was a Democrat, Confederate veteran, sugar planter, and lawyer from New Orleans, and son of a Louisiana governor — one would have expected White to share the legal and political views of others of his background, class, and region, which were generally hostile to federal power and fervently in favor of white supremacy. Yet White was a nationalist on the Supreme Court. He was considered a de facto Republican by many prominent northern Republicans, and was elevated to the chief’s seat by William Howard Taft. As a justice White voted repeatedly to uphold expansive uses of Congress’s regulatory and taxing powers, including powers first exercised by the Union during the Civil War to tax income and raise armies by conscription. White did not have enlightened racial views, and joined the majority of the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson and other decisions that denied equal rights to African-Americans. But he also wrote the Court’s decisions holding unconstitutional that so-called “grandfather clauses” that were used in the South after the war to prevent African-Americans from voting, and voted in favor of civil rights in other important cases. Previous biographers have recognized the importance of White’s experience as a Confederate soldier to his life and later judicial and political outlook. But the details they have published about White’s military service have been only brief and vague, and sometimes simply wrong. Relying on a far broader array of original and secondary sources than any previous study, this paper explores what exactly White did, saw, and experienced during the Civil War. Crucially, though, the story is also one about omissions and even deception by White. A newly-discovered document shows that he lied to Federal interrogators about his war service when he was captured in 1865. In later life White rarely spoke of the war, and when he did he offered almost no details about his service. He failed to correct the record when inaccurate biographical details about his service were published. His actual war service was almost certainly much less extensive and honorable than previous biographers have claimed. The most detailed information we possess shows him joining a marauding guerrilla band in rural Louisiana in the closing months of the war. Later in life, the one thing that White clearly and honestly expressed about the war was deep regret that it occurred at all, anguish about its human toll and effect on his beloved country, and self-criticism about his youthful service on the Confederate side. This picture that emerges of White and his war service is much more complex than offered in previous biographical studies, and provides a surer foundation for assessing his life and judicial work, and accurately understanding his place in the country’s political and legal history.

Silver and Segregation

Silver and Segregation Wyatt Wells (bio) The early 1890s saw the intersection of the two most divisive political issues of the 19th century: race relations and the currency. An effort to protect the voting rights of southern blacks and another to preserve the gold standard gave rise to an alliance between Silverites and Segregationists that influenced public life in the United States well into the 20th century. Although the Compromise of 1877 terminated Reconstruction, it did not settle the questions of what race relations and politics would look like in the postwar South. Many northern Republicans expected southern Democrats to respect the rights of African Americans, and at least a few of the latter promised to do so. African Americans often voted and, in some areas, held public office. In most southern states, the Republican Party still functioned, electing local officials, state legislators, and the occasional U.S. Representative. In the 1880s a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats won state elections in Virginia, and in the 1890s alliances between Republicans and Populists did the same in North Carolina and Louisiana. Nevertheless, during these years, southern Democrats often used fraud and intimidation to eject Republicans from office, and southern states enacted the first Jim Crow statutes. In 1890 a petition from blacks in Oklahoma to President Benjamin Harrison lamented that “[t]he passage of unfair laws affecting elections, labor and the landlord and tenant system, by the legislatures of southern states, has caused widespread unrest and discontent” and “produced a feeling of profound discouragement and utter dismay among Africo-American [sic] voters in the entire country.”1 Click for larger view View full resolution An 1888 cartoon showing Benjamin Harrison in a boat trying to shoot ducks, “voters,” with a musket, “force bill,” and catch fish, “voters.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Many Republicans sympathized with the plight of southern blacks. They valued the GOP’s history as the party of freedom and recognized that the Democrats’ lock on the South made it much harder for their party to win national elections. Unfortunately, the Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for most of the 1880s, allowing them to block civil rights legislation. In 1888, however, the GOP won control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, and Republicans came to Washington with an ambitious agenda that included a voting rights bill. Senator George Hoar (R-MA) and Representative Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) took charge of what its opponents soon dubbed the “Force Bill.” This measure provided for the appointment of federal election inspectors in any congressional district where a certain number of voters requested it. These inspectors would keep track of voting practices and election returns, and ideally, their very presence would discourage chicanery. If, however, inspectors disagreed with local or state authorities about the outcome of an election, the federal courts would decide the winner. Although less [End Page 2] sweeping than the voting rights measures of Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era—among other things, it only applied to elections to federal office—the Force Bill would have acted as a brake on the pervasive fraud and intimidation that characterized elections in the South and might have set a precedent for further action. It enjoyed strong support among rank-and-file Republicans. As a party operative in Indiana wrote, “Our people are just as anxious for the passage of new elections laws as they were for the pension bill [for veterans of the Civil War]”—a strong statement considering the central role of veterans in the GOP.2 Dissent came from those who considered themselves reformers. The only Republican senator who refused to endorse the Force Bill, Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota, was an agrarian radical who eventually joined the Populist Party. Terrance Powderly, the leader of the country’s largest labor organization, the Knights of Labor, opposed the Force Bill outright. In a printed exchange with Henry Cabot Lodge, he insisted that southern blacks suffered no more from electoral fraud than people in the North and that the secret ballot and better education would eliminate the problem altogether. Overall, Powderly gave the impression that civil rights was a nuisance that distracted reformers...

Legitimacy and Interventionism: Northern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction

Legitimacy and InterventionismNorthern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction K. Stephen Prince (bio) After the Civil War, an Ohio native and Union army veteran named Albion Tourgée headed South, intending to do his part in the region’s political and social rebirth. Settling with his family in Greensboro, North Carolina, he bought a home, started a law practice, and involved himself in Republican Party politics. His fondest hope, he told his wife, was to “do good” in his adopted region. Events soon robbed Tourgée of much of his optimism. He watched a tide of white supremacist conservatism overtake North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan killed two of his political associates and repeatedly threatened his family. The North Carolina Democratic press unmercifully pilloried him as a dangerous outsider, a corrupt interloper, and an incorrigible nuisance. Sitting in his Greensboro home at the close of Reconstruction, Albion Tourgée was left to survey the wreckage, capturing the failed promise and tragic betrayal of the period in a novel whose very title—A Fool’s Errand—spoke volumes as to its tone and its contents.1 Though copious in its criticism of murderous and anti-democratic white southerners, A Fool’s Errand reserved some of its most stinging rebukes for the North. Tourgée had little trouble understanding white southern distrust of the northern strangers that came into their midst after the war—known then, and ever since, as “carpetbaggers.”2 What he failed to comprehend was the maddening ease with which the northern public had sold out its own. “Perhaps there is no other instance in history,” Tourgée fumed, “in which the conquering power has discredited its own agents, denounced those of its own blood and faith, espoused the prejudices of its conquered foes, and poured the vials of its wrath and contempt upon the only class in the conquered territory who defended its acts, supported its policy, promoted its aim, or desired its preservation and continuance.”3 The North, Tourgée insisted, had betrayed the carpetbaggers. [End Page 538] The carpetbagger remains one of the most enduring symbols of the Reconstruction era. Technically, a carpetbagger was simply a northerner who went South in the wake of the Civil War and took part in Republican Party politics.4 For most of its lifespan, however, the term has been an epithet, denoting a lowly, immoral northern opportunist, a demagogue who preyed on the defeated South, perverted sectional peace, and rose to power by deceiving African American voters. As late as 1988, historian Richard N. Current’s classic Those Terrible Carpetbaggers could be labeled “a reinterpretation” precisely because it insisted upon the humanity of these historical villains. Current concluded that the carpetbaggers were, in reality, no better and no worse than most other Americans. The average carpetbagger was an educated, moneyed Union veteran who hoped to make his home in the South and entered politics largely as an afterthought. Some were undoubtedly corrupt, but many others were honest and deeply committed to the ideals of Reconstruction, to African American civil rights, and to the rebuilding of the South.5 If Current successfully debunked the terrible carpetbagger stereotype, the more recent work of historian Ted Tunnell has shed important light on its provenance. “Carpetbagger” was never a value-neutral term, Tunnell argues. From the first, it was an ingenious piece of political propaganda, a highly self-conscious “rhetorical weapon” that white southerners coined to discredit Radical Reconstruction and African American suffrage.6 The carpetbagger’s less-than-sterling historical reputation, Tunnell concludes, had less to do with graft and corruption than it did with the politics of white supremacy. If we accept, with Current and Tunnell, that the carpetbaggers were not actually that terrible, we are still left to account for the phenomenon that Tourgée described—the widespread, nearly universal, northern acceptance of the “terrible carpetbagger” stereotype during the latter years of Reconstruction. A study of the northern Republican repudiation of the carpetbagger promises to shed new light on the manner in which Americans conceptualized and experienced the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction. As it traces the fate of the carpetbagger in the northern Republican print media...

The Rough Politics Of Reforming Health CarePower, Politics, and Universal Health Care: The Inside Story of a Century-Long Battle By Altman Stuart Shachtman David Amherst (NY) : Prometheus Books , 2011 429 pp.; $26.00

The Rough Politics Of Reforming Health CarePower, Politics, and Universal Health Care: The Inside Story of a Century-Long Battle By Altman Stuart Shachtman David Amherst (NY) : Prometheus Books , 2011 429 pp.; $26.00

Civilization, Republic, Nation: Contested Keywords, Northern Republicans, and the Forgotten Reconstruction of Mormon Utah

Civilization, Republic, Nation: Contested Keywords, Northern Republicans, and the Forgotten Reconstruction of Mormon Utah

Historical and Literary Re-iterations of Dutch Settler Republicanism

ABSTRACT Historical and literary accounts of the Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam rebellions of 1795 – 1799 are analysed in relation to three consecutive myths of Afrikaner national identity. In terms of the British imperialist myth of the Afrikaner as rural degenerate, the rebels were semi-civilised burgher racists, who sought to dignify their killing and enslavement of the Khoikhoi and Xhosa by recourse to northern hemisphere republican discourses. In terms of the apartheid myth of the Afrikaner as God's chosen volk, the rebels were a beleaguered Christian people who were beset by marauding African foes, and who resisted heroically the tyrannical Dutch East India Company and British governance from Cape Town. In terms of the post-apartheid myth of the Promethean Afrikaner, a brave minority of Afrikaners (most notably the Graaff-Reinet landdrost Honoratus Maynier) opposed the racist violence of the frontier rebels, and stood up for equality and justice. In the same way that the image of the Afrikaner as rural degenerate should be related to British imperialism, and the image of the Afrikaner as God's chosen volk to Afrikaner nationalism, the myth of the Promethean Afrikaner must be related to the nation-building ideological project of the African National Congress.

Congressional Parties and Civil Rights Politics from 1933 to 1972

The reversal in the parties’ positions on civil rights is widely viewed as one of the most important political transformations in the last century. Drawing upon new indicators of members’ support for civil rights—which more effectively gauge preferences than do the roll-call-based measures analyzed in previous studies—we show that northern Democrats displaced northern Republicans as the leading advocates of civil rights in the House beginning in the mid-1940s, and that the gap gradually increased thereafter. Rather than a relatively sudden change driven by national party elites, we argue that the civil rights realignment was a response to the two parties’ coalitional partners.

"Crete the Opening Wedge": Nationalism and International Affairs in Postbellum America

This essay explores American interest in a seemingly obscure insurrection on the island of Crete from 1866 to 1869. Focusing in particular on the writings of northern Republicans and their Democratic critics, it suggests that these groups, immersed though they were in their ongoing North-South sectional conflict, looked to developments beyond the eastern United States to articulate and affirm rival understandings of their country. In fact, the precise meaning of the distinction between things foreign and domestic was itself a matter of dispute, with northern Republicans often presuming that Americans were defined by a dedication to the struggle of civilization against barbarisms at home and abroad. In interpreting the insurrection, and northern Republican interest in it, Democrats found a means of expressing their sectional-partisan grievances and of describing their more rigidly and adamantly racial understanding of American identity. Both groups integrated discussions of Crete into a broader argument over national character that was grounded in competing understandings about what was possible and what was good in society. Both, moreover, turned to Crete in the context of their immersion in and perceptions of society in the North and South.

Economics of peace making: the case of The International Fund for Ireland

The civil unrest in Northern Ireland, which began in 1969/1970, formally came to an end on May the 8th 2007, when devolved government began in earnest in Northern Ireland, with Unionist (Protestant) and Republican and Nationalist (Catholic) political parties joining together in government. One of the reasons for this historical peace is related to the work of The International Fund for Ireland. This article will discuss the mechanisms this Fund used to transform structures of conflict, and to create economic foundations for peace in Northern Ireland.

Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered

Few transformations have been more significant in American politics in recent decades than the Democratic Party's embrace of racial liberalism and Republicans' adoption of a more conservative stance towards civil rights-related policies. We hypothesize that pressure to embrace a liberal position on civil rights was much stronger among northern Democrats and their coalitional partners than among northern Republicans and their affiliated groups by the mid-1940s, as the Democrats became firmly identified as the party of economic liberalism and labor unions. To test this hypothesis and develop a more fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of party positioning on civil rights, we collect and analyze a new data source: state political party platforms published between 1920 and 1968. These unique data suggest that Democrats had generally become the more liberal party on civil rights by the mid-to-late 1940s across a wide range of states. Our findings – which contradict Carmines and Stimson's prevailing issue evolution model of partisan change – suggest that there were strong coalitional and ideological pressures that led the Democrats to embrace racial liberalism. This finding not only leads to a revised perspective on the civil rights revolution, but also to new insights into the dynamics of partisan realignment more generally.

Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894

Congressional enactment of the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 marked an unprecedented federalization of voting rights. The various election laws aimed to make real the promise of the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the constitution. A complex duality characterized this new departure in the constitutional understanding of democratic suffrage. On one hand, Republican leadership looked to secure the rights of freedmen in the Reconstruction-era South. At the same time, from the outset, northern Republicans strategically worked to strengthen the party in all regions with a particular interest in urban America. From the immediate postwar years down to the early 1890s, congressional committees regularly investigated the problematic and deeply partisan politics of enforcement. Often, House and Senate investigators were more concerned with developments in northern cities than with the state of African American voting across the rural South. This urban story of the consequences of constitutional revision illuminates the often-obscured national dimensions of Reconstruction and its aftermath, while also alerting us to shifting visions of the vote across the final third of the nineteenth century. This essay explores this nationalization of Reconstruction in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment's enactment by first documenting the central place of New York City in the emerging postbellum electoral regime and then expanding out from Manhattan to look at broader patterns of urban experience with enforcement.

La presencia soviética durante la Guerra Civil en el Frente Norte (Euskadi, Santander y Asturias). El informe Brusiloff

The material assistance provided by the USSR, the efficiency and determination shown by most of the communist organized groups and their insistence on winning first the war, helped the Spanish Communist Party towards a big expansion during the Republican period. In the Northern Front line this spreading was limited due to the lower soviet assistance, the relatively low communist influence and the lack of confidence of most of the political parties, socialists, Basque nationalists and anarchists, towards the soviet communism. Furthermore, the problems due to a more powerful Francoist Army and the obstacles created by the own soviet presence (lack of confidence of the republican military command officers towards the soviet ones, feelings of being superior or having higher status of the second ones over the republicans, communication problems, not suitable advisors, advisors rotating, etc). At the end, there was almost no influence to improve the offensive and defensive capabilities of the Northern republican Forces.