Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865. By Marc W. Kruman. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Pp. xx, 304. $37.50 cloth; $14.95 paper.) This account of North Carolina politics from 1836 to 1865 provides an excellent synthesis that undoubtedly stands as one of the best available studies of the political history of a slave state. It differs from most recent state studies in its focus upon a comprehensive tale of political party rivalry and in the extension of its time span through the Civil War years. While Kruman is heavily concerned with political rhetoric, that concern reflects an intelligent in-depth study of thirty years of party differences and electoral contests. Headds to this traditional general approach some social analysis of party leadership and a significant quantitative analysis of election results and selected roll call legislative votes. In six initial topical chapters Kruman explains the origins of the second party system and the nature of North Carolina's political structure and analyzes twenty years of a state political rivalry that revolved about three fundamental matters: 1) a Whig-initiated program of utilizing a positive state to aid economic development, 2) a Democratic-initiated demand for democratic reform, 3) the sectional conflict over slavery. By the mid-1850s party differences had eroded and Democrats and Whigs agreed in endorsing the positive state, democratic reform, and North Carolina's commitment to slavery and the Union. Although this general outline will not be greeted as surprisingly new, Kruman relates the process of political development with unusual clarity as well as satisfying but not excessive detail, and his analysis is original. It is his major thesis that the drift toward consensus during these years was primarily a reflection of an effective two-party system which forced parties that wished to win elections to cater to popular social values. Kruman also believes that at the heart of those values stood the concept of "Republicanism," which he identifies with equality and freedom for whites in politics and the market place. He thus stresses political and ideological factors. And while, for example, he establishes the incredible extent to which slaveowners predominated in government, such a class factorproves of little importance to his analysis. In four final chapters Kruman deals with the sectional conflict and war. He stresses that during the late 1850s North Carolina differed from the lower South in the persisting strength of its attachment to the Union, 349 350CIVIL WAR HISTORY and he attributes that difference to the maintenance of an effective twoparty system in the state. Rebounding from the American party debacle of 1856-58, North Carolina Whigs presented a challenge powerful enough to allow an open debate over secession. And in the elections of 1860 they retained sufficient electoral support, bolstered by assistance from Unionist Democrats, to abide Lincoln's election in hopes of reversing the Republican and Democratic electoral triumphs by 1864. But Whigs also remained committed to the fundamental beliefs of the slave South, and Lincoln's call for troops was greeted as an intolerable threat to the equality and freedom of southern whites (i.e., to Republicanism) and was followed by a new unity in support of secession and the Confederacy. Somewhat ironically, however, the strength of the state's party system , stimulated by the burdens of war, then led to the capture of the state government by Whigs and their "old Unionist" allies the year after secession. This development, in turn, played some role in encouraging the reaction against such oppressive Confederate measures as conscription , taxes in kind, and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and soon the central government of the Confederacy was perceived by many as a more immediate threat to liberty and equality than Lincoln and the North. Because the state's Democratic party meanwhile had disintegrated , the Whigs and their allies were free to risk factional disputes that culminated in a bitter struggle over the peace movement. That struggle was settled in the elections of 1864, which marked not only a continuing commitment to the Confederate cause but the final collapse of North Carolina's second party system. This is an excellent work, and it is particularly...