Radical Republicans Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction

A Copperhead in Quincy Goes to Washington: Senator William A. Richardson

STALWART ILLINOIS DEMOCRAT WILLIAM A. RICHARDSON was no stranger to political maneuvering during a military engagement. Writing from the war front in Mexico, 1847, Richardson described how a neighboring American squadron had all of their horses stolen by Mexican soldiers. He then abruptly changed the subject discussed the need to arrange a meeting to appoint delegates, get your friends to work, Richardson advised, and all will be well.1 His station in this war was fundamentally different than the situation he would face thirteen years later. Richardson his fellow Democrats had a choice to make when Lincoln issued his Proclamation of War: Would they stand united with the administration to quash the rebellion, continue the partisan struggle, or even utilize the chaos of war to gain political leverage?The winners of the political debates surrounding the Civil War are well documented. Lincoln, the Radical Republicans, even pro-war Democrats receive a great deal of historical attention. This article will investigate those who opposed the war openly challenged the Lincoln administration. These Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, operated throughout the North, including Lincolns home state. William A. Richardson (Image 1) was a leading figure of the Democratic Party in Illinois. He was a political servant to Stephen A. Douglas during Douglass lifetime as well as a proponent Douglass political philosophy. But while Douglas was supportive of Lincoln at the onset of the war, Richardson gradually evolved an opposite stance. He personally attacked Lincoln in public speeches worked with fellow Illinois Democrats to challenge federal laws. His role in national local politics will be the primary concern of this article. Through an examination of Richardson within the larger milieu of Copperheadism, a clearer picture of both Richardsons politics as well as the nature of the peace movement will be discerned. Since the 1960s, the leading Copperhead historian was Frank Klement. Klement's research supported the idea that the Republicans, out of political malignancy, exaggerated the danger of Peace Democrats for politcal advantage.2 More recent interpretations, however, have highlighted the menacing disruption the group caused. The Copperheads, under this lens, nearly commandeered the Democratic Party endangered the outcome of the war.3Like many other Peace Democrats, William Richardson has received scant attention from historians. Jerome Thavenet's 1967 thesis took a redeeming, slightly hagiographical, view of Richardsons political career.4 A few Illinois journal articles delve into facets of his life; Robert Holt's 1933 political biography of Richardson compared him to his mentor, Douglas, emphasizes lost opportunities Richardson had in making his mark on the national stage.5 Robert Howard's article focused on Richardson's work prior to the war, but also stressed Richardson's failures as a statesman.6 In more broad treatments of the Peace Movement, Richardson is often overlooked in favor of more flamboyant Copperheads, such as Clement Vallandigham. When Richardson is mentioned, he is often mischaracterized or quickly glanced over. The purpose of this article, then, is to situate Richardson within the context of the larger Peace Movement, noting confluences divergences in their trajectories to illuminate a more accurate characterization of Richardson, his role in national politics, the Peace Movement in Illinois. An analysis of Richardson's career illustrates that he was an influential figure in a powerful opposition movement that nearly succeeded in challenging state laws drafted to expedite the war effort in Illinois. Richardson, however, was not conspiratorial or traitorous. The Civil War presented questions problems the nation had not yet faced Richardson looked backwards instead of forwards to answer those problems. He was a romantic conservative who never fully grasped the gravity of the Civil War. …

“The Grandest Battle Ever Fought for the Rights of Human Beings”: Radical Republicanism and the Universalization of the Land War

“The Grandest Battle Ever Fought for the Rights of Human Beings”:Radical Republicanism and the Universalization of the Land War* Andrew Phemister (bio) That American who understands the Irish cause and does not sympathize with it is a rascal and a traitor to the principles upon which his government is founded.1 As much scholarly effort has previously demonstrated, during the nineteenth century Irish Americans made great use of the tradition of American republicanism to highlight the connections between the ideals of the American Revolution and Ireland’s cause.2 The political and social upheaval of the Irish Land War, however, escaped these national limitations and served a more substantive and extensive purpose within the ideological genealogy that Irish Americans had promoted. To many American radicals the crisis in Ireland appeared as the frontline of a third great political revolution, forming a symbolic triptych with those inaugurated by Washington and Lincoln. In framing the conflict as a defense of natural rights, the Land League’s [End Page 192] rhetoric helped to place the question of Irish land on an international stage at a critical ideological juncture when these familiar political and philosophical assumptions were dissolving. The fight over Irish land added vigor and tangible purpose to a long-established but threatened republican political tradition. In tapping into a deep well of popular moralism, the conflict released latent frustrations shared by the dispossessed and disenchanted on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish historians have long seen the Land War as a formative or transformative experience for Ireland as a political entity.3 By taking a transnational perspective, however, we can observe the interplay of American and Irish political discourses and see its international importance more clearly. In this cross-pollination the powerful voice of the New York Irish World played a prominent role in constructing the ideological contours of the conflict in a language of republican exceptionalism. This process of ideological exchange was aided by the internationalism of Irish leaders like Michael Davitt and the global ambition of the American land reformer Henry George. In equating British imperial force with the worst depredations of industrial capitalism, Irish Americans tapped into a powerful seam in American political culture that allowed them to universalize the struggle of the Irish tenant farmers. In doing so, they were able to elevate Ireland as both the offspring and the consummation of the ideals of the American republic. It is only through understanding the Land War in this context that it is possible to explain why former abolitionists such as James Redpath and Wendell Phillips adopted the Irish cause as a new moral crusade and, through the discourse of natural rights, framed the Irish land question as part of a global struggle. From the beginning of the agitation the Land War was an international event whose causes and consequences were not confined to Ireland. It was precipitated as much by the effect of economic globalization as by a succession of poor harvests, and it was fueled by the transfer of both money and ideas from the United States and from Britain. More so than the Famine a generation earlier, the crisis of 1877–79 involved an economic depression that generated a different kind of threat to [End Page 193] political stability.4 It was, as George had observed firsthand during his initial visit to Ireland in 1881, “a financial famine. In any part of Ireland the man who has money in his pocket can get all he wants to eat.”5 A more extensive credit network, significant increases in land rents, and rising expectations over the preceding decade were signals of economic growth, but all of these factors would contribute to the severity of the crisis. Developing communication and interaction with Irish America in particular had also broadened popular horizons somewhat. “The spread of education and general intercourse with America” had, in T. M. Healy’s assessment, “made the people conscious that their lot was paralleled by that of no other nation in the world.”6 Increasing mechanization in British agriculture had led to a reduction in seasonal remittances, and competition from American agriculture added further pressures to certain sectors of the Irish economy.7 It...

Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince

Reviewed by: Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince Brian Kelly Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915. By K. Stephen Prince. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. [xii], 321. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-1418-2.) The long retreat from Reconstruction, culminating at the dawn of the twentieth century in a rigid system of racial subordination, has been the subject of a number of illuminating studies in recent years. While most of these books acknowledge that a changing national context, and not merely the South’s internal trajectory, is essential for understanding this process, [End Page 187] scholarly attention has focused mainly on shifting political and economic trends. Concentrating on the intellectual and cultural context in which white southern identity was remade after the war, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 brings new depth to our understanding of the nation’s turn away from the egalitarian possibilities that flickered briefly after slavery’s demise. In exploring the reconstruction of white southern identity, K. Stephen Prince situates his book in recent historiography that challenges deeply embedded notions of southern exceptionalism. The conversation about whether the South remained distinctive, he insists, was a national one, and northerners played an active and critical role in reconfiguring the meaning of the South. Making impressive use of a diverse array of cultural artifacts—travelogues, speeches, newspaper editorials, regional literature, broadsides, playbills, minstrelsy, and film—the author succeeds in demonstrating the North’s deep entanglement in reforging an image of the South that remained distinctive yet could be fully absorbed into a shared national consensus on key issues of the day, including race. Prince sets his work directly against the “reunion” narrative popularized in the work of David W. Blight and others that sees a reconciliation of two divergent sections. Prince sees a national convergence forged largely on the basis of resurgent racism. Erudite, forcefully argued, and in places beautifully written, the book is organized into three sections: “Reconstruction,” which corresponds closely with the period between emancipation and the restoration of white home rule; “Construction,” taking the story up to the consolidation of the New South vision in the mid-1890s; and “Destruction,” focused on the white South’s place in a “Jim Crow nation” (p. 11). Using travel narratives and newspaper reports from the period immediately following the war, Prince conveys the sense of exoticism and naïveté that infused reports from northern observers. These reflected broader assumptions about the ease with which Reconstruction would change the region as free labor’s “magical transformative powers” took hold (p. 32). Popular in part because it demanded so little of northern whites, simple “Yankeeification” was untenable (p. 31). African Americans and Radical Republicans aimed for a more thoroughgoing national transformation, but they could never gain complete control. These arguments are familiar, although Prince’s insistence that the war had “destroyed [white] southern identity” takes the argument further than most, and probably too far (p. 21). The middle section of the study offers the most original interpretive advance: rather than an “interregnum” marking the uneventful years between the high drama of Redemption and the definitive turn to Jim Crow, Prince sees instead a “crucial moment in the evolution of the sectional relationship” in which “conservative southern whites” took command of the national debate, reconfiguring a “New South” that boasted loudly of its attachment to “progress” even as it maintained racial hierarchies (p. 10). Just as Henry W. Grady and others insisted that the South should be left alone to solve its “negro problem,” so, too, southern writers “performed important cultural work,” insisting that they should be trusted to tell the South’s stories (pp. 218, 11). The demeaning and stylized spectacle of minstrelsy provided [End Page 188] a coarse counterpart to the “moonlight and magnolias” marking literary production, and both reinforced—on a national stage—a benign memory of plantation slavery and collective indifference to the worsening predicament of African Americans (p. 11). The development of a national consensus about race based on the white South’s terms coincided with...

Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards

Reviewed by: Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards Michael S. Green (bio) Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment. By Leonard L. Richards. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 306. Cloth, $30.00.) Long after his Senate tenure, discussing the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage, Lyman Trumbull would tell law students, “Gentlemen, this good right hand wrote this amendment to the Constitution.” More than a century later, people who marveled at the brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln (or was it Lincoln’s performance as Daniel Day-Lewis?) without having studied the amendment’s passage in depth might have believed that maneuvering and bribery by a few shrewd political operators ended slavery. In both cases, the story was far more complex. A few historians have tried to unpack what actually happened. Their interpretations range from Michael Vorenberg suggesting that War Democrats deserve far more credit than they have received, to James Oakes emphasizing that Republicans had long been more united on the goal of ending slavery than scholars have believed, to scholars of slavery arguing for the “self-emancipation thesis”—that slaves, acting on what they knew politicians ultimately would have to do, forced Lincoln’s hand. Leonard L. Richards has waded into the debate with a combination of narrative and analysis focusing mainly on the political players and factors that shaped the movement toward the amendment. Richards laments the popularity of the mistaken belief that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Interviews with teachers led him to conclude that “few knew anything about the Thirteenth Amendment, and virtually no one knew that getting it through Congress was an uphill battle” (x). To explain that battle, Richards finds the pivot for his story in the efforts of James Ashley, a Radical Republican congressman from Ohio who had been a stalwart early opponent of slavery. Throughout the book, Ashley’s story unfolds, including the political difficulties he faced at home, the principles he upheld (and his regret when he failed to uphold them), and his support for and management of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. After the House rejected the amendment in 1864, Ashley became more strategic. The two chapters that Richards devotes to the radical congressman’s efforts to round up votes provide a valuable lesson in politics. Richards focuses on Ashley’s quest for border-state support from two political enemies, Frank Blair of Missouri and Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, bringing to life this “odd couple,” as he calls them, with the same verve with which he portrays Ashley. The border-state congressmen included lame ducks whose distaste for emancipation could be overcome with persuasion or patronage. Richards simply states that “Ashley got the [End Page 291] support of eighteen of the nineteen men that Blair and Davis helped him line up. Had three of those men voted no, the amendment would have gone down to defeat” (153). Similarly, Ashley looked for help from northern Democrats and got it, whether they voted yes or simply did not vote. Richards is unsparing in his description of their party’s willingness to play the race card, and his examination makes clear that northern Democrats were crucial to passage but had little genuine desire to end slavery and thereby, as Democrat-turned-Republican Montgomery Blair suggested, eliminate the issue that had deprived them of power. The elder Blair was utterly loyal to Abraham Lincoln, and Richards is judicious and thoughtful in parsing the president’s role. He tends to let Lincoln’s failures speak for themselves, subtly criticizing the border states for their obstinacy on compensated emancipation and Lincoln for sticking to that idea and colonization. He also demonstrates that these ideas were hardly original to Lincoln. He is fair in discussing Lincoln’s emphasis on keeping Kentucky in the Union at the expense of moving faster against slavery, as Ashley and his allies wished. Richards also assesses the charges that corruption helped ensure the amendment’s passage: “Although there is no proof ‘beyond a shadow of doubt’ that Lincoln himself made deals, there is ample reason to believe that he allowed others to do...

Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee

Reviewed by: Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee Steven E. Nash (bio) Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. By Susanna Michele Lee. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 270. Cloth, $95.00.) Susanna Michele Lee’s Claiming the Union sheds new light on something we thought we already knew. Lee examines the records of the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), the post–Civil War congressional commission tasked with assessing southerners’ claims for lost and damaged property, and interprets them differently from many scholars before her. The SCC records are a staple of Civil War loyalty scholarship, casting significant light on southerners marginalized or silenced by the Lost Cause’s facade of white unity. Claiming the Union is not another attempt to glean every last hint of wartime loyalty out of postwar records. Lee successfully places the wartime struggles over loyalty and citizenship in the SCC’s proper Reconstruction context. This placement of the SCC squarely within the Reconstruction era is insightful in and of itself. But Lee offers much more than that; she argues that the process embedded in the SCC’s direct engagement with southern civilians informed a “vernacular citizenship” that shaped postemancipation American citizenship (7). The overall result is a thoughtful and effective book that enriches our understanding of the complex nature of postemancipation American citizenship. In Claiming the Union, Lee carries key questions about the war (such as loyalty and African American agency) through to the postwar period. For instance, the issue of loyalty had significant postwar ramifications as Radical Republicans battled moderates within their party and Democrats over the issue of who should rule. Radicals argued that past loyalty was the crucial factor for postwar political participation, which led them to favor stringent standards for claims. Moderate Republicans and Democrats preferred a political foundation based on future loyalty that would allow former Confederates to regain their citizenship quickly. As Lee makes clear, [End Page 467] these debates had significant impact on the process of reunion by creating a vernacular citizenship. Less concerned with the formal legal definitions of citizenship, Lee layers the war’s impact on fundamental social relationships (master and slave, husband and wife, citizen and noncitizen) against the claims each group made upon the federal government. This dialogue between southern civilians and the federal government effected changes in the meaning of citizenship through practice—direct engagement with the SCC—rather than through legal reform in a postemancipation United States. Chapters on women, former slaves, and free blacks enhance Lee’s analysis of citizenship in the post–Civil War United States. The white male SCC commissioners initially looked for open opposition to secession and overt acts of Unionism in assessing the loyalty of these “noncitizens.” However, they quickly realized that their interrogatories were ill suited for southern dependents. In fact, the commissioners’ initial list of questions made no reference to people of color or women. Women’s and African Americans’ claims forced the government to wrestle with their professions of loyalty and their place within the postwar citizenry. It is here that some of the more subtle elements of Lee’s analysis shine through. In dealing with women, Lee reveals the sectional divisions between northern and southern womanhood and male perceptions of gender difference. Accustomed to elite and middle-class white women’s involvement in reform movements, the northern commissioners struggled to understand southern white women’s professed detachment from politics. The commissioners became especially incredulous when white southern women professed personal sympathies for Confederate family members while simultaneously espousing Unionist beliefs of their own. African Americans struggled to show their loyalty to white male commissioners who viewed them as inferior and incapable of citizenship. Their persistent claims to the Union, however, forced the commission to change its procedures to allow black southerners to assert their loyalty. Strategic professions that described all black men as loyal to the Union may not have fully swayed the white commissioners, but they helped foster stronger ties among former slaves and antebellum free blacks after slavery’s demise. One of the most basic and yet most useful contributions of Claiming the Union is its contextualization of the...

Philip B. Lyons. Statesmanship and Reconstruction: Moderate versus Radical Republicans on Restoring the Union after the Civil War. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. Pp. xi+343. $110.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewPhilip B. Lyons. Statesmanship and Reconstruction: Moderate versus Radical Republicans on Restoring the Union after the Civil War. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. Pp. xi+343. $110.00.Peter C. MyersPeter C. MyersUniversity of Wisconsin–Eau Claire Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 5, Number 1Winter 2016 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/684571 Views: 276Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The fleet as an ideological pillar of Dutch radical republicanism, 1650–1672

The premature death in 1650 of Willem II, Prince of Orange, enabled the regents of the States of Holland to institute a civil administration, the ‘True Freedom’, in the Dutch Republic. For much of this regime’s 20-year ascendancy the principal task of its head, Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, was the defence of the country and its maritime commerce against a variety of international threats. De Witt took it upon himself to instigate the creation of a powerful permanent fleet. He came to show an increasing identification with the fleet and an appreciation of its symbolic and patriotic importance that transcended its defensive role. Depictions of the fleet provided it with iconographic significance. This article argues that the fleet became an essential ideological pillar of the republican regime in its struggle to maintain itself against external threats and to secure a degree of acceptance by the predominantly pro-Orange public.

"A Mockery in the Name of a Barrier": Literacy Test Debates in the Reconstruction Era Congress, 1864-1869

Between 1864 and 1869, the United States Congress debated an educational requirement for voter registration–a literacy test–as a means of dealing with the millions of new American citizens created by emancipation. These debates offer a critical early perspective on the development of literacy as a racial marker serving official racist agendas. Rhetoric supporting a test relied on the premise that a more literate and educated electorate is an obvious and uncontestable cultural good, necessary for the continued health and indeed survival of the nation. When the test was first discussed, its primary advantage was that it offered a way to talk about the inferiority of the newly emancipated Southerners without resorting to racial explanations; thus, freed slaves were dangerous not because they were black but because they were ignorant and uneducated. The 1869 debates about the Fifteenth Amendment, however, reveal a growing awareness of literacy’s rhetorical utility and the ways a belief in its inherent “goodness” might be used for ends divorced from the measurement or promotion of literacy: Radical Republicans proposed including a ban on such requirements in the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, certain that Southern whites would use it as a tool of disfranchisement. These debates, in the context of the test’s subsequent history as a tool of racist exclusion, demonstrate the rhetorical power and pliability of the idea of literacy within official policy.

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border ed. by Jonathan Earle and Diana Mutti Burke (review)

Reviewed by: Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border ed. by Jonathan Earle and Diana Mutti Burke Zachary S. Garrison Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. Ed. Jonathan Earle and Diana Mutti Burke. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7006-1928-3, 360 pp., cloth, $37.50. Born out of a desire to overcome the historiographic border that has long separated Civil War historians in Missouri and Kansas, a group of scholars representing both sides of the divide came together in 2011, with the goal of correcting a persisting myth, namely, “all white Missourians supported slavery and the Confederacy and all Kansans were freedom-loving abolitionists who were victimized by Confederate guerrillas” (2). Organized and edited by Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke, the fifteen individual essays are presented collectively as Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri, indicating that blood was spilled on both sides of the border. The essays begin with an introduction by the late Michael Fellman, whose passing not long after the conference is marked in the dedication page. Fellman’s groundbreaking Inside War influenced much of the book’s contents, and his essay, “I Came Not to Bring Peace, but a Sword,” is a powerful introduction to the violence that wreaked havoc along the border. By tracing the western tradition of the Christian war god, Fellman deconstructs America’s sense of Christian mission and duty, demonstrating how both Missourians and Kansans trusted that God was on their side, both fully believing they were “serving God and destroying the devil” (17). From there, the chronology of the essays reveals the conflict’s deep roots, starting with the early presence of slavery on the border. Kristen Epps examines the desire of southern migrants to establish slavery in Missouri and their eventual success despite never adopting the large-scale plantation system associated with the Deep South. But rather than position Kansas as Missouri’s opposite, a land of freedom, Nicole Etcheson explains that pro-slavery forces in the western territory saw themselves as the only legitimate legislative power, fighting tooth and nail against free-state forces. As with the topic of slavery, the goal of this collection is to upend conventional interpretations of the border. Tony R. Mullis outlines how Kansas militia units, initially formed in order to protect against Missouri Border Ruffians, went on the offensive by 1860, leading their own grizzly attacks on slaveholders. Christopher Phillips contends that many Missourians were not rabid secessionists but instead attempted to inhabit neutral ground. Federal occupation, however, drew a sharp line between loyal and disloyal, utilizing an oath of allegiance and curtailing civil liberties “as part of a broader strategy to establish control” (132). And Joseph Beilein Jr. argues that the Civil War was a “clash of divergent concepts of manhood,” and within this context, Missouri guerrillas are better understood as defenders of [End Page 183] southern manhood, protecting hearth and home, which included women, children, and slaves (169). Brent M. S. Campney further flips the traditional narrative by demonstrating that postwar racial violence was not just a phenomenon of the South but also took place in Kansas—the lynching of thirty-three African Americans between 1864 and 1874 serves as stark evidence. Such activity flies in the face of the “free-state narrative” constructed by Kansans in the decades following the end of Reconstruction (227). After Missouri failed to pass the 1865 constitution, leaving freedmen without the right to vote, black leaders immediately organized, pushing back against claims of inferiority. Yet, much like the “free-state narrative,” Jeremy Neely tells of how Missouri guerrillas spent many postwar years defending, and in many ways celebrating, their actions through reunions and veteran meetings. And Aaron Aster’s close study of Lexington, Missouri’s Weekly Caucasian reveals the ways in which a language of white supremacy developed in opposition to Radical Republican rule. The concluding theme of memory, then, makes clear that while reconciliation proved uneven, the gradual understanding that white Kansans and Missourians both favored racial inequality served to reunite the two states and cross the border. One common difficulty in arranging conference paper selections is finding a unifying thread. In...

에이브러햄 링컨 대통령과 공화당 급진파간의 갈등: 1864년 대선을 중심으로

에이브러햄 링컨 대통령과 공화당 급진파간의 갈등: 1864년 대선을 중심으로

Belén de Sárraga: una "obrera" del laicismo, el feminismo y el panamericanismo en el mundo ibérico

En este artículo se analizan los orígenes, discursos y trayectoria de una de las más representativas líderes del librepensamiento y el panamericanismo: Belén de Sárraga. Su vida está unida a los avatares del republicanismo radical, el laicismo, los trabajos masónicos, el anticlericalismo y los postulados feministas. Su heterodoxia espiritista originó formas de vida transgresoras pero firmes, creadoras de cultura política en cuatro frentes: educativo, periodístico, pacifista y secularizador.

The two faces of domination in republican political theory

I propose a theory of domination derived from republican political theory that is in contrast to the neo-republican theory of domination as arbitrary interference and domination as dependence. I suggest that, drawing on of the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau, we can see two faces of domination that come together to inform social relations. One type of domination is extractive dominance where agents are able to derive surplus benefit from another individual, group, or collective resource, natural or human. Another is what I call constitutive domination where the norms, institutions, and values of the community shape the rationality of subjects to accept forms of power and social relations and collective goals as legitimate forms of authority. Each of these make up two faces of a broader theory of social domination that is more concrete and politically compelling than that put forth by contemporary neo-republican theory. I argue that this understanding of domination should be seen as a kind of ‘radical republicanism’ where the centrality of asymmetrical power relations are placed at the centre of all political concerns. I end by considering the relevance of the common interest as a central means by which to judge the existence of these kinds of domination as well as establish a convincing evaluative criteria for critical judgment.

Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War by Carole Emberton, and: A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War by Stephen V. Ash (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War by Carole Emberton, and: A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War by Stephen V. Ash Paul E. Teed Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War. Carole Emberton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-02427-1, pp. 296, cloth, $45.00; A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War. Stephen V. Ash. New York: Hill & Wang, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8090-6797-8, pp. 304, cloth, $27.00. The two books considered here offer fresh insights into the role of violence in shaping the culture and politics of the Reconstruction South. The first, Carole Emberton’s Beyond Redemption, provides an extended analysis of the ways in which post–Civil War Americans struggled to apply the language of redemption in their attempts to explain the unprecedented violence of the war and its aftermath. The second, Stephen Ash’s A Massacre in Memphis, [End Page 75] focuses on the horrific violence of the 1866 Memphis race riot both as a key moment in the political history of Reconstruction and as a case study in the long history of American racial violence. While the violent white supremacists who toppled Reconstruction governments in the South called their movement “Redemption,” Carole Emberton’s book demonstrates that the concept of redemption generated a multivalent discourse central to the entire postwar generation’s attempt to make meaning from the unparalleled violence of the Civil War. She contends that, on the one hand, redemption could be the language of peaceful postwar change, as former slaves, abolitionists, and Radical Republicans argued for expanded and federally protected citizenship rights in order to redeem the sacrifice of soldiers and the sufferings of African Americans who had endured violence and oppression at the hands of cruel masters. On the other, redemption could also require continuing violence, especially as white southerners who rejected the moral and political legitimacy of congressional Reconstruction policy aggressively challenged the Reconstruction order. In that context, black and white men increasingly equated citizenship with martial manhood, a highly gendered concept that required violent demonstration as contending groups made their claims upon or against the national state. During this period, Emberton argues, the discourse of redemption from violence existed side by side with a strong and highly gendered tradition of masculine redemption through violence. Beyond Redemption’s focus on the ambivalent character of Civil War–era violence-redemption narratives is particularly effective in its analysis of the discourse of black enlistment. Although the leading black abolitionist Frederick Douglass celebrated the presence of black soldiers on Civil War battlefields as a transformative event in which collective black manhood and citizenship could be achieved by the redeeming experience of military service, Emberton argues that white society viewed black troops differently. Because white leaders feared that blacks might be uncontrollable on the battlefield, for example, they regularly subjected black soldiers to humiliating forms of coercion and strictly scrutinized their conduct for signs that they might seek revenge for slavery. White officers such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson took pains to reassure superiors about the bravery of their solders, but they were equally concerned about their troops’ levels of obedience and sometimes worried that they would act savagely toward southern civilians. Far from having the liberating experience Douglass hoped for, moreover, black soldiers [End Page 76] were often forced into the army by brutal “press gangs,” denied legitimate bounty payments, and poorly trained. Government officials also refused to equate military service with citizenship, sometimes describing the service of black troops as an obligation they owed their government rather than as an indication of their new status as members of the political community. While Emberton is careful not to isolate the Reconstruction discourse of redemption from the antebellum period, she is sometimes overly general in her descriptions of earlier antislavery discourse. For example, she argues that abolitionist images of black suffering focused exclusively on the damage slavery did to white society and that “nothing was said of the trauma, grief, and dislocations that white violence...

Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 1873–1874 by Claudine Chalmers (review)

Reviewed by: Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 1873–1874 by Claudine Chalmers Ron Tyler Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 1873–1874. By Claudine Chalmers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. 246. Illustrations, color plates, notes, bibliography, index.) For anyone who has looked at images of the American West during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the names of Frenzeny and Tavernier are well [End Page 325] known. Both natives of France, Paul Frenzeny was the son of an exiled Hungarian nobleman who joined the French army and served in several campaigns, including France’s ill-fated intervention in Mexico in 1866, then drifted northward to New York before returning to France. Jules Tavernier was the son of a British candy maker and remained in France to pursue art studies when his family returned to England. They might have met during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871; says Claudine Chalmers, also author of Splendide Californie! Impressions of the Golden State by French Artists, 1786-1900 (2001) and Paul Frenzeny’s Chinatown Sketches (2012), but they definitely encountered each other after immigrating to New York, where they both published sketches of the war in Harper’s Weekly, perhaps the most successful American illustrated newspaper of the day. It was a propitious time in the United States. The Civil War was a fresh memory. The nation now faced west with the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the discovery of gold in several western territories, Longhorn cattle drives to Kansas, the slaughter of the great buffalo herds, the Indian wars, the pacification of the Mormons in Utah, and the development of an urban metropolis in San Francisco. And Harper and Brothers hired this dynamic pair of young artists to gage the pulse of the country in a coast-to-coast foray and document it in a series of illustrations for the magazine. The success of their endeavor was revealed in the pages of the Weekly throughout the tour, the last image of which was not published until January 1876. They adopted as one of their subjects immigrants as they moved west. Beginning their tour in New York, they moved through Pennsylvania and across the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri. There they boarded the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (supplying several images for the line’s house publication, The Great Southwest), passing through Indian Territory to the railroad’s terminus at the rapidly developing railroad center of Denison, Texas, in September 1873. They remained there a short time, apparently spending several days with a nearby rancher, before setting out for Wichita and illustrating key activities of the Texas cattle trade as they went. Moving on through Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, and Utah, by the summer they were in San Francisco, where they added an exclamation point to their tour by taking—and almost dying in—a balloon ride. The engravings made in Texas and on the trail—Guarding the Herd, Calling the Night Guard, and Slaughtered for the Hide, among others—have become almost ubiquitous, with Slaughtered for the Hide, showing a buffalo skinner at work, gracing Harper’s cover and the pages of many Texas and western history books since then. But there is a dearth of material on Frenzeny and Tavernier in Texas. The pioneer historian of western images, Robert Taft, one of the first to write of the Frenchmen’s trip, reported that a researcher had combed the pages of the Denison News without finding a single mention of the pair. Perhaps that is partly explained by the fact that Harper’s did not announce their tour, and they published the Texas pictures after they had left the state. The subsequent silence of Texas editors is probably explained in the fact that they disdained Harper’s Weekly, which the San Antonio Ledger and Texan described on June 22, 1876, as a “vile publication” of the radical Republicans. On the whole, this is a well designed and produced volume. Unfortunately, some of the usual errors have crept in: a sentence is repeated on page 121, and the author cites the wrong newspaper article in note...

Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart by Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon (review)

Reviewed by: Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart by Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon John C. Inscoe Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart. Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ISBN 1-4214-0896-5, 136 pp., paper, $19.95. Like that on the Civil War itself, new scholarship on secession shows no signs of saturation or abatement. The decision to leave the Union was made eleven different times by eleven different states over five months, which in itself provides a vast range of variables and contingencies subject to scholarly scrutiny. The authors of the three essays here—drawn from a series of lectures at the University of Sussex—contend that their collective purpose is to explore “the multiplicity of inner conflicts that wracked Americans during this crisis and the disparate actions that those same divided Americans took to resolve them” (3). They have each pulled from that cacophony of voices new issues and fresh insights into the multidimensional dynamics that drove the political debates over the winter—and, despite the book’s title, well into the spring—of 1861. William Barney, long one of our more astute chroniclers of how the Deep South states made their exoduses from the Union, argues that far more so than [End Page 467] those of the upper South, the impulses of lower South slaveholders to secede were driven by slave behavior, real and suspected, and by a growing fear that Lincoln’s election had encouraged their own bondsmen to think that emancipation would soon follow. The realization that slaves wanted—and even expected—their freedom led to planters’ discomfort over their very ownership of those oppressed, Barney contends. “So deeply buried was their guilt that whites in the Lower South could imagine the black quest for freedom only in terms of a bloodbath directed against themselves”; thus, their seemingly irrational and reckless determination to take the step that many recognized as a “Rush to Disaster,” as he titles his essay (33). “This was the slaves’ revenge,” Barney concludes in the most original of the cases made here (10). Elizabeth Varon, who has produced Disunion! (2011), the best comprehensive treatment of the sectional crisis in recent years, provides the most tightly focused of the three essays by revisiting more familiar ground—the implications of Robert E. Lee’s decision to cast his lot with the Confederacy. She walks us through the two months of deliberations by what she terms Virginia’s supercharged secession convention and how its debates shaped Lee’s own shifting sentiments, noting that his very personal decision was made in a very public forum and was driven far more by political calculations than his biographers have acknowledged. In assessing the factors at play in both his and his state’s road to disunion, Varon reminds us that to understand what turned them into “reluctant rebels,” one can’t overlook those convictions and values that “had held them back in the first place” and that the value they placed on the Union stemmed in large part from the fact that their forefathers had been such crucial players in its creation (56). Robert Cook tackles a far more expansive set of issues by examining the sense of history and role of collective memory on the part of all factions with stakes in the crisis at hand. As with Lee and other Virginians, the American Revolution was the most common reference point and offered “a capacious memory lode [that] was as pliable as any other such trove” (70). From southern unionists and fire-eaters to northern moderates and more radical Republicans, many Americans drew lessons and parallels from the War of Independence that played into their own ideas for resolving the crisis at hand. The more recent past, Cook shows, was equally relevant in their efforts to sway opinions, North and South. During the showdown over Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s advisors urged him to act like the stalwart Andrew Jackson in dealing with his own South Carolina showdown in 1832; southern extremists exaggerated while moderates minimized various sectional slights over the course of the 1850s; and (echoing...

셰익스피어 󰡔줄리어스 시저󰡕에 나타난 ‘차이’와 ‘반복’의 양상

Shakespeare describes conflict of power in Julius Caesar which is based on Roman history. Particularly he focuses on the moment when Caesar tries to become the emperor by defeating Pompeius, one of three powers in triumvirate of Rome. The republicans of Rome revolt against his coming dictatorship that they have regarded as the barriers of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice.’ Cassius, a radical republican, induces Brutus to conspire the assassination of Caesar with other aristocrats for protecting democracy of Rome. This conflict of power which exists everywhere of human society can be applied to Foucault’s theory of ‘power’. In this paper, I try to apply the aspects of ‘repetition’ and ‘difference’ to the theory of Deleuze. Caesar shows ‘repetition’ of self-righteousness and stubbornness in proceeding his enthronement of emperor, which comes to be the cause of Brustus and Cassius’ revolt against the dictatorship. However, Brutus and Cassius also imitate Caesar’s repetition after getting power by assassinating Caesar. They cannot prove any ‘difference’ from Caesar which has been suggested as the cause of their revolution. This should be criticized only as the imitation of Caesar’s negative repetition. Thus, by negative effects of their repetition, they show distrust and disharmony between them. In addition, Portia becomes the victim of Brutus’ ideology of ‘Roman’, which excludes women in deciding major issues even in the family. Shakespeare shows very negative aspects of Roman mob in this work. They show periodical changeableness according to the change of power in Rome. However, their inconsistency can be evaluated as the possibility of ‘difference’ which we cannot find in repetition of Caesar and republicans. As a matter of fact, the people as the minority of power have developed into democratic citizens in modern society by overthrowing the dictatorship of kings and aristocrats in human history.

Pages from a Yellow Press: Print Culture, Public Life and Political Genealogies in Modern Brazil

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaperO Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documentsO Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests thatO Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

Freedom Fit for a Feminist? On the Feminist Potential of Quentin Skinner's Conception of Republican Freedom

The aim of this paper is to make it credible that there are feminist reasons for being a republican about freedom. In focus is Quentin Skinner’s conception of republican, or “neo-Roman”, freedom. Republican theory in history has not excelled in making poverty, gender hierarchy, and racism within the republic into main sources of concern. So can there be a radical republican theory of liberty fit for a feminist, to make sense of arbitrary power in the every day life of work, households, and local communities, where power is vague and unorganized? Proceeding from three questions – What does freedom mean? Under what circumstances does the issue arise? Why should we care? – I argue that in a feminist republicanism the lived experience of the unfree will have primary and not, as Skinner now suggests, secondary importance. A feminist republican will be particularly concerned not only with what unfreedom is but with what it is like. (Less)

Lincoln and the Constitution by Brian R. Dirck (review)

Reviewed by: Lincoln and the Constitution by Brian R. Dirck James E. Sefton Lincoln and the Constitution. Brian R. Dirck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8093-3117-8, 184 pp., cloth, $19.95 This is a very useful little book for two principal reasons. First, it synthesizes a large body of recent Lincoln and Civil War scholarship and focuses the results on Lincoln's lifetime views of the Constitution and national power. Second, presidential power in a time of national emergency is a permanent issue for modern America. Commentators on current affairs, regardless of viewpoint, ransack history for useful evidence. In threats to the nation, response must always adequately counter threat, and on three occasions—in 1861, 1941, and 2001—the threats were orders of magnitude greater than anything previously experienced. Lincoln, as Dirck clearly and systematically explains, identified his particular challenge and found the constitutional tools to defeat it. Dirck's Lincoln is a broad-constructionist Hamiltonian who revered the Constitution in the same way as many of his contemporaries. Lincoln also imparted to the words of the Constitution a moral reading. To him, the Constitution was not just a collection of procedures; but a guide for the exercise of power in the interests of what was good and just. This faith convinced him that the dangers of secession and war would not destroy the Union and, with it, the Constitution. Lincoln also revered the Declaration of Independence for its bedrock principles of liberty and freedom. He regarded the declaration as a goal for the future and linked it to the Constitution as a means to secure that goal. This duality guided Lincoln through the slavery controversies of the 1850s, the secession crisis, and the war. He hated slavery in the prewar years but could find no constitutionally acceptable nor politically feasible route to its abolition. Only when slavery threatened the life of the Union, and Lincoln was president, did he conclude that his constitutional role as commander in chief gave him the authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The book is an admirable study of the interplay of principle and pragmatism. Lincoln compromised whenever success required it, as long as principle remained intact. He avoided confrontations, even in cases that warranted them, such as the efforts at partisan micromanagement by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He was also an astute judge of men. The author carefully traces the evolution of Lincoln's views. He introduced an antislavery measure in the Illinois Legislature in 1837, but focused more attention on Whig economic policies than on slavery, which he considered essentially a local issue. The Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the expansion question, thereby giving slavery a federal dimension. He now favored restriction on expansion but not federal emancipation. During the war, he adopted the "necessary and proper" concept even though the Framers gave that phrase to Congress and not the presidency. By the end of the war, he had moved closer to the position of the Radical Republicans with support for the Thirteenth Amendment and the possibility of the franchise for selected black men. [End Page 94] The author's approach to the subject, and his basic narrative, is very sound. However, there are some rather remarkable errors, perhaps the result of efforts to condense, in the interest of the Concise Lincoln Library series. The Constitution did not ban the international slave trade after 1808 (17). Louisiana became a state before the Missouri Compromise, not after (19). The Three-Fifths Compromise did not arise from, nor did its authors establish, any calculus of racial equivalencies (25). The Compromise of 1850 did not extend the Missouri Compromise line west (21). George McClellan should never be referred to as "commander-in-chief of the Union army"—as much as he would have relished the erroneous promotion (89). For many years, scholars cited states' rights as the principal cause of the conflict. In recent decades, the issue of slavery and race relations has moved to the head of the list. The 150th anniversary of the war has strengthened that perception in the public eye. Dirck maintains that emphasis. The book is a study of how...