Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (review)

272CIVIL WAR history for such a book, and should pave the way for a fuller story of one of the Union's most unusual and intriguing men, who today lies in an unknown grave. Steven Lee Carson The National Archives Washington, D.C. Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War. By V. Jacque Voegeli. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Pp. vu, 215. $5.95.) From the beginning of its settlement the Midwest was plagued with a fear of being inundated by Negroes from the South. Prior to the Civil War midwesterners had presumed that southern slaveholders intended to use the region as a dumping ground for their old and worn out slaves. The war increased apprehension; not only were fugitive Negroes fleeing to the Midwest, but Union military authorities began sending large numbers of them to the region. In addition, anti-administration Democrats accused Republicans of carrying on an antislavery crusade with racial equality as the ultimate goal. The charge was not new; Republicans had already encountered it in their pre-war political campaigns. Nevertheless, both the dislike of Negroes and Democratic propaganda forced Republicans to clarify continually their stand regarding the Negro. Voegeli's book deals with this Republican effort and the midwestern reaction to it. Republicans began their counterattack by insisting that the accusation "to make the niggers the equal of whites [was] a monstrous and villainous lie" and by contending that the increase of Negroes in the Midwest was a wartime phenomenon. Emancipation, in effect, would reduce the black population in the Midwest because Negroes would not be able to compete in an industrial society. Furthermore they preferred the more temperate climate of the South: "Why should the freedmen leave their homes . . . and the 'prospect of wealth and independence, to seek a strange country, a forbidding climate, penury, and starvation.'" (p. 7) Republicans delighted in ridiculing Democrats for protecting "their sable favorites" and, after the enlistment of Negro troops, for opposing the use of Negroes as soldiers out of fear that "a nigger might be hurt." (p. 85) As Republicans became more committed to emancipation, party members began to equate it with loyalty to the Union and insisted that opposition to Republican policy amounted to treason. Republicans seldom presented emancipation as a humanitarian ideal; rather they preferred to stress it as a military measure designed to weaken the Confederacy. Events on the battlefield determined the success of these Republican countercharges. Before 1863 midwesterners had never enthusiastically supported emancipation, but following the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg the idea became more acceptable. As the military situation became less hopeful during the summer and early fall of 1864, midwesterners lost book reviews273 their zeal for making the war an antislavery crusade, only to have it enlivened again after the capture of Atlanta. In the final analysis, this wavering attitude indicated that midwesterners were perhaps more concerned with preserving the Union than with destroying the South's "peculiar institution." In the last chapter Voegeli suggests reasons why the Republican party failed to achieve equality for the Negro once it had secured his freedom. He believes that Republicans could not overcome their basic anti-Negro prejudice. Negro inferiority was too instilled in the white mind by the 1860's to be easily erased. For example, George W. Julian, the militant abolitionist, criticized fellow Indianians in 1858 for hating "the Negro with a perfect if not supreme hatred," but still at the end of the war he recoiled at the thought of miscegenation. Another Republican, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, publicly supported Negro suffrage yet lamented the presence of Negroes in the national capital, declaring that he was "sick and tired of niggers." Voegeli points out that midwestern congressmen were willing to legislate anti-discrimination measures for Washington, D.C, and elsewhere, but were reluctant to support similar laws at home. This attitude has always been the paradox of midwestern thinking toward civil rights. Voegeli thinks that the dispersion of Negroes throughout the United States, especially into the West, would have helped to achieve racial equality. He feels that the failure to do so "may well have been one of the most tragic failures of...