"Countless Thousands Mourn": America's Great Racial War

Although festschrifts often contain uneven and disparate essays, the period of the Civil War has prompted a surprisingly substantial set of collections, including works honoring such prominent scholars as Robert Durden, David Herbert Donald, and C. Vann Woodward. ¹ Designed to celebrate the notable teaching career of Richard H. Sewell at the University of Wisconsin, Union and Emancipation can take its place among them. Certainly Sewell’s own studies have set a strong example for the seven contributors. For instance, his second book, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (1976), effectively explains the origins of the Republican party and its ideological development. Union and Emancipation also shows how salient traditional political history still is. Despite the welcome diversity of professional interests today, it is gratifying that digging into the letters of politicians, military leaders, reformers, and other conventional sources can still uncover new veins worth mining. In some cases, the contributors combine a thorough grounding in political history with interdisciplinary approaches, a breadth of intellectual curiosity for which Sewell himself might take partial credit.

The first two essays explore old territory with new, complex readings of the Democratic and Republican parties in the 1850s. Robert E. May revisits the charges of a “Slave Power Conspiracy” that helped to undermine the administrations of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. According to antislavery Yankees, these “Doughfaces” secretly promoted the constant eruptions of southern filibuster campaigns beyond American boundaries. May points out that the succession of presidents sought obsequiously to placate the southern wings of their parties, but they would only go so far. Bellicose and slightly mad, some southerners on the far, far right sought to expand slavery’s borders. Readers will be surprised by the number of “freemen-like” plots that, according to May, were hatched in southern ports. Such adventurers as William Walker collected arms, acquired ships, sometimes eluded detection, and sailed off to conquer some unsuspecting Central American or Caribbean country. The Chief Executives of the 1850s uniformly tried to suppress these violations of treaty obligations, international custom, and statutory law. May might have noted that Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan opposed the soldiers of fortune with much more forcefulness and less equivocation than John F. Kennedy did during the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco of 1961.

May admits that U.S. naval forces, customs officials, and others charged with surveillance sometimes failed to apprehend the irregulars aiming to overthrow the governments of Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Spanish colony of Cuba. According to his researches, federal efforts were often thwarted by the hobbling division of constitutional authority between state and federal governments, incompetent and sometimes collusive middle-level officials, and pro-expansionist grand juries that refused to indict offenders. Trying to find middle ground during a time of sectional mistrust, these administrations, chiefly Democratic, sought distance from both the pro- and antislavery extremes. At least in this limited sphere, Democrats Pierce and Buchanan did not make worse the fracturing of their party despite their ineptitude in other situations.

Within the Republican party of the 1850s, the same difficulties arose that the Democrats faced in search of a stable center. In a study of Northern State Rights in the Wisconsin Republican party, Michael McManus persuasively demonstrates how radicalism threatened to divide the party despite the large majorities that Wisconsin Republicans garnered in the last five years before war. According to McManus, Sherman Booth and other hotheaded opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law ironically adopted Calhounite principles of State Rights to place liberty ahead of federal law and constitutionality. Like the southern reactionaries, Wisconsin extremists mistrusted both parties and government itself and considered any aid given to a fugitive slave as legally justifiable even though it clearly violated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Preferring work toward legislative repeal of the hated proslavery law, Timothy Howe, later a U.S. Senator, prudently argued that state party adoption...