To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson (review)

With this ambitious book, Heather Cox Richardson sets out to chronicle the lifespan of the Republican Party. Given the diverse array of presidents, politicians, professional organizers, and ordinary people who have filled the party’s ranks over more than a century and a half of its existence, this is no easy task. Seeking to make sense of it all, Richardson simplifies the Grand Old Party’s convoluted history to a cyclical struggle fought between its moderate and conservative wings. At its heart, she argues, stands “the GOP’s ongoing renegotiation of the party’s—and the nation’s—central unresolved problem: the profound tension between America’s two fundamental beliefs, equality of opportunity and protection of property” (p. xi).

As the standard-bearer for that first basic idea, equality of opportunity, Richardson selects Abraham Lincoln. In her interpretation, Lincoln and his allies “founded the Republican Party to guarantee that a few wealthy elites would not control government at the expense of hard workers” (p. 258). The men who created the party in the antebellum era viewed the wealthy planters of the slaveholding South as the greatest menace to American democracy and created a countermovement that held up free labor in stark contrast to, and in competition with, chattel slavery. “They saw the individual worker as the fundamental element in a healthy economy,” the originator of all value, and an operator who could rise beyond his original station (p. 17). These Republicans, Richardson notes, “believed that anyone willing to work could rise to economic prosperity” (p. 17).

As the exemplar of the second component of the unresolved problem in Republican Party history, the protection of property, Richardson singles out James Henry Hammond. A champion of the elite and Lincoln’s contemporary, Hammond articulated a vision of America “that sounded a lot like an oligarchy. When things were ordered correctly, he explained, the bottom of society was made up of drudges: stupid, unskilled workers who were strong, docile, and loyal to their betters” (p. 15). Unlike Lincoln’s vision of a society in which industrious workers could improve their lives, Hammond’s view was one in which ordinary workers were fixed in place. “Members of this mudsill class would never rise,” Richardson observes. “They were too stupid, for one thing, and they were happy where they were” (p. 15). Though Hammond presents a stark contrast to Lincoln—indeed, perhaps too stark—his role in Richardson’s narrative as the poster boy for conservative Republicans is an odd one, for he was never a member of the party. Hammond was a South Carolina Democratic senator who embodied the slaveholding powers that all the founding Republicans opposed.

From this starting point, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party describes a cyclical struggle between idealistic moderates who followed the founding ideal of egalitarianism and reactionary conservatives who worked to betray it at the bidding of elites. Lincoln’s government activism in behalf of ordinary men and women gave way to a grasping set of Gilded Age politicians who empowered industrial elites. The pendulum swung back to the moderates with Theodore Roosevelt and his increasing attacks against the “‘malefactors of great wealth’” (p. 163). But Roosevelt too was followed by a reactionary set of pro-business presidencies in the 1920s. After World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower returned the party to its antebellum roots with a more egalitarian program that made peace with the New Deal, but, once again, moderation gave way to reaction as “Movement Conservatives” captured the party in the 1960s and carried it forward, or perhaps backward (p. 267).

As a work of synthesis built largely on secondary sources, To Make Men Free offers little new information for scholars active in the field. Southern historians in particular will be surprised to see that expected topics such as race, religion, and regionalism are largely neglected in favor of an...