The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era

Preface

preface In March 2002 I gave the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures for the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. The three lectures made a case for the importance of politics in understanding the lives of ordinary Americans in the North during the Civil War era. It may seem odd that I should have to make a case for the importance of political life in the middle of the nineteenth century, now famous as the period when Americans devised the mass political party and enthusiastic campaigning techniques. Many of the people who heard the lectures, however, knew their modern context well: the currently confused and beleaguered status of political history. The introduction to a recent book of essays on American political history, for example, recalled the complaints of political historians expressed at a professional meeting in 1995: ‘‘Their field was becoming marginalized in the profession, even excluded from it. Back in the 1970s, social history had passed political history as the subfield producing the most doctoral dissertations, so that political historians were now outnumbered in their own departments. More seriously, senior chairs were no longer being replaced, and graduate students could not get jobs.’’1 Nine years later, at the annual meeting of the same association, a panel was convened to discuss why political history was dead and whether there were any signs it might recover. Apparently, many at the meeting thought recovery unlikely.2 AlandmarkofthedemiseofpoliticalhistoryisGlennC.Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin’s Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century, published in 2000. That book launched the most sweeping attack ever made on the importance of politics to the daily lives of nineteenth-century Americans. My Brose Lectures were originally conceived as an answer to it. But in the course of revising the lectures for publication I came to see that circling the wagons was an inadequate response. I could not merely reassert the centrality of political life in nineteenth-century America, reminding readers that the national attic remains full of political ribbons, badges, cartoons, and posters from that era. In the first place, the authors of Rude Republic made generous exception for the Civil War era itself, saying that politics, though insignificant in the lives of most Americans throughout the century, did reach the apogee of their ability to engage people’s attention over the issues that led to civil war, especially slavery and related constitutional issues .3 And what I was most familiar with was the politics of the Civil War era. Second, political historians who had never doubted the importance of politics in the nineteenth century had themselves done much to downgrade the political history of the Civil War itself. Surely no survey of the American political system in the nineteenth century hadlesstosayabouttheCivilWarthanJoelH.Silbey’sAmericanPolitical Nation, 1838–183 (1991).4 Silbey’s interpretation of the important developments in the political parties of the century made a case for the insignificance of the Civil War. Third, it was true also that political historians, whatever their degree of emphasis on the importance of the four-year period of war at midcentury, had exaggerated the centrality of political concerns in the overall period: America was more than a ‘‘political nation.’’ Its citizens were concerned, as Altschuler and Blumin were justifiably at pains to point out, about family and workplace and schools and religion and other private matters into the consideration of which partisan politics did not always intrude. So the book resulting from those lectures is more concerned with locating the boundaries between the spheres of political and private life than with making imperialist assertions for one sphere or the other. kThe evidence that first seemed to me to call Rude Republic’s conclusions into question came from material culture. In the first lecture , ‘‘Household Gods,’’ popular prints provided a link between home and public political concerns that Rude Republic had overlooked . But material culture soon caused me to reexamine other important arguments about political experience in the period. The viii preface second lecture, ‘‘A New Branch of Trade,’’ recovered innovations in political technique and in the production of campaign souvenirs based on photography, which in turn suggested an image of political life so vibrant and dynamic as to call seriously into question the dismissive attitude toward Civil War politics taken in The American PoliticalNation .Inthethirdlecture,‘‘ASecretFund,’’theproductionand distribution of forward-looking campaign posters and persuasive politicalpamphletsbytheUnionLeagueClubsduringtheCivilWarpro voked a...