The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (review)

This study of the liberal republican movement provides a sympathetic treatment of a small group of Republicans who were the founders of a challenge to the Republican party and the Ulysses S. Grant administration during the election of 1872. The author specifically identifies twenty-three individuals he regards as core members of this group. They were "among the educated elite of America" (xxiii), and they had participated actively in the formation of the Republican party in the 1850s and had supported the Union cause during the Civil War.

This group only reluctantly supported many of the Union government war policies, which expanded and centralized federal power and threatened their long-standing faith in limited government and "classical republicanism" (210). They were appalled by the corruption of the Grant administration, and they deemed Reconstruction an unacceptable expansion of federal power. Liberal republicans favored extending the franchise to the freed slaves, and Andrew Slap asserts that most were convinced that with the right to vote blacks had sufficient political power to protect themselves. By 1870 most liberal republicans also favored restoring the franchise to former Confederates to bring an end to the sectional conflict and to focus the United States on "problems the liberal republicans considered more important"(238). While they wanted to help the freed black slaves, concludes Slap, their devotion to "republican principles" prevented them from pursuing policies to achieve that objective.

The liberal republican movement, according to this study, originated in Missouri and soon recruited prominent Republicans in the East who shared similar values. They participated in calling for a convention in Cincinnati to form a new Liberal Republican Party, but to their dismay, they lost control of the convention and Horace Greeley, an outspoken supporter of the protective tariff, became the presidential nominee. Many then reluctantly supported Grant. Greeley was also nominated by the Democratic convention; but of course the combined support of disgruntled Republicans and half-hearted Democrats was no match for Grant, who won handily.

Slap presents his study as a correction of "old, flawed interpretations of the liberal republicans" (xviii). In particular he rejects the view in John G. Sproat's book, The Best Men, which stereotyped them as "ineffectual reformers overly committed to principles" (216) and as "racists and antidemocratic elitists" (220). On this point, Slap is unconvincing. Indeed, most of the liberal republican actions and policy positions described in this book seem to confirm Sproat's interpretation.

Slap also questions the usefulness of the quantitative study of voting behavior, with its emphasis on stable periods of voting behavior separated by critical election periods, to the study of the liberal republicans. He asserts that this approach makes their movement insignificant since they "appear foolish for having challenged an established 'period'" (xvi). Some liberal republicans in the 1870s, he adds, believed that the party system was fluid and that party realignment was likely in 1872. Slap suggests that this perception does not "mesh" with the view that the election occurred during a stable party system (171–74). This argument is also unconvincing and misses the point. The study of voting patterns is an attempt to write the political history of the mass electorate, based primarily and necessarily on quantitative data; Slap's study focuses on a small, elite political group using mainly manuscripts and newspapers. Both are perfectly legitimate approaches to very different historical problems. The liberal republicans may have believed that they were participating in a realignment in the 1870s, but their perceptions are not appropriate grounds to question findings based on a completely different type of evidence.