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Introduction
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Introduction _ There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. —Hamlet During the first year of the Civil War, Republican U.S. senator John P. Hale announced on the floor of Congress that “the liberties of this country are in greater danger today from corruptions, and from the profligacy practiced in the various departments of the Government, than they are from the enemy in the open field.” Despite the grave military threat that the Confederate armies posed to the continued existence of the nation ’s republican government, the senator claimed to fear the political corruption of members of his own party as an even more alarming menace . He also drew a connection between corruption and government expenditure that might easily baffle a casual modern reader. When the New Hampshire state legislature declined to return the veteran legislator to the upper chamber in 1864, due largely to his having accepted a substantial cash payment in return for using his official influence on behalf of an indicted government contractor, many stunned Northerners reflected that they had hardly known how true his earlier words of warning really were.1 Newspapersofbothpartiesin1862expressedmuchthesamesentiment as did Hale, even blaming corruption for the very outbreak of the war. The Republican Harrisburg Telegraph, in January, argued that the “rebellion” couldonlybe“crushed”ifloyalAmericansfirstweededoutanderadicated its root cause. The editor referred not to slavery but to political corruption . In December of the same year, an essayist for the Bellefonte Democratic Watchman likewise insisted that the war was “the legitimate fruit of The Enemy Within 2 POLITICAL CORRUPTION.”2 Two religious journals expressed similar sentiments, also in 1862. One proposed that the war represented a “test” of the nation’s capacity for self-government, necessitated by the fact that “our political corruptions were more than political moralist or good citizen could bear.” The other traced the conflict’s origin to the “political corruption” that had “come in apace” as the nation developed. “Here is the great danger in republics,” the writer, a minister, warned; “corrupt politics” lead to “treasons and revolutions.” If Americans wished to avoid the biblical fate of the Israelites, he went on, the time for repenting of the nation’s corruption and casting it out was nigh at hand.3 This misapprehension as to the actual underlying cause of the war reflected potent popular suspicions of the corrupting influence of government power that would plague the North throughout the conflict. Northerners were obsessed with corruption during the Civil War because they had been educated in the principles of republicanism, which warned that they must vigilantly guard against the encroachment of government power against the individual liberties that they cherished just as dearly as did their Southern counterparts. The fact that Northerners continued to adhere to elements of this premodern political philosophy throughout the conflict often regarded as the first modern war suggests that its revolutionary nature and impact can be overstated, and that great continuity with the American past remained, and persisted, even after the conflict. In modern American political culture, corruption possesses a relatively narrow meaning, basically encompassing the acceptance of bribes inexchangeforthemisuseofpower.Theexposureofsuchcorruptionconfirms , for modern observers, their skeptical attitude toward the possibility of honest and efficient government, particularly in the post-Watergate era.CivilWar–eraAmericansconceptualizedcorruptionquitedifferently, and drew quite different conclusions from its suspected existence or direct exposure. “Corruption” possessed a broader meaning to nineteenthcentury citizens of the republic, encompassing almost any misuse of power, or even (as the historian Harry Watson noted) any “social, economic , and moral changes that could undermine the basis of republican society.”4 In the wake of T. Harry Williams’s influential 1952 description of the Civil War as “the first of the modern total wars,” this view of the conflict, connecting the war to its successors, has tended to obscure some critical elements of nineteenth-century culture at play in the 1860s, notably , the intense suspicion of corruption. This vital strand of the era’s polit- [3.236.214.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:46 GMT) Introduction 3 ical culture, exacerbated by the vast growth of government bureaucracy and spending during the war, reflected citizens’ persistent republican suspicion of government power and fear of social and political decline.5 Congress and state legislatures devoted much of their time during the war to investigations of one form of corruption or another; citizens and their representatives worried deeply about the fate of republican government because of the double threat posed by the enemy without (the Confederates) and the enemy...