Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln by Jonathan W. White (review)

This solidly written book, a history of the 1864 presidential election, is one of those single-issue books that historians love or loathe. The facts are straightforward. Among civilians Lincoln won by 55 percent, among soldiers by 78 percent. The author’s target: a position he associates with James McPherson, Chandra Manning, and others, that Lincoln’s greater victory among soldiers shows that many previously Democratic soldiers switched parties to become Republicans. He does not believe that the 78 percent figure proves that by 1864 soldiers had aligned with Lincoln on abolition, and he particularly opposes Ira Berlin’s claim that abolitionism grew into a mass movement among soldiers and eventually bubbled up into Republican ranks.

Instead White asserts that Republicans made abolition a top-down test of orthodoxy in the army and used army discipline to force out officers who disagreed. A list of ugly expulsions of officers—sometimes with fixed bayonets—followed these revelations of dissent from Republican orthodoxy. These stories are generally well told, though the stories are often too short to prove the case of abolitionist orthodoxy. The Republican Party’s suppression of dissent made it difficult to be publicly Democratic, according to White. This authoritarian pressure from above combined with a Democratic Party platform that called for an immediate peace made voting Democratic distasteful, even for Democrats. Voter turnout among soldiers was 80 percent; White says turnout should have been higher. By combining the 20 percent of nonvoters with the 22 percent who voted for George McClellan, White asserts that “more than 40 percent of the soldiers did not vote for Lincoln’s reelection” (11).

This book suffers from a severe case of Civil War history (a common malady), namely the unwillingness to consider much about the period before 1861 or after 1865. For example, White doesn’t wrestle with scholarship that has shown that most public voting was coercive before and after the war. Voters carried a paper ballot in front of a crowd and risked opprobrium for voting against the party of the men watching the polls. A vote in 1864, made in uniform in front of scores of armed men from the neighborhood, must surely have given a would-be Democrat pause depending on the politics of his regiment, but White discusses neither the formal machinery of voting nor the formalized walk to the polls.

The reason speaks to a larger problem with the argument. There was certainly voter coercion in 1864, but much of the evidence White gives suggests collective coercion, not the machinations of some distant despot. This kind of collective violence around polls was visible in periods of high voter turnout from the 1830s to the 1880s, North and South. White tells us that the 80 percent voter turnout on the site of active battlefield campaigns was normal for the nineteenth century, but actually it was matched only in 1860 and 1876, both dates in which civil war seemed imminent. The officers who White shows were drummed out of the corps may have disputed Republican orthodoxy, but some officers declared that the war had no objectives, proclaimed that Lincoln had a black heart, or called for Lincoln’s execution—good reasons to expel an officer from the ranks. Deserters who claimed that they deserted because of abolition did face the prospect of execution, but they were executed for desertion, not for their views on abolition. Of course such exemplary punishment probably did lead soldiers to think twice before voting Democratic. And this is probably an important corrective about soldiers’ votes.

But the voting choice of a soldier is a subtle thing. The author does not discuss “the state of court and party” theory of the American political development school, or the critical elections school led by Walter Dean Burnham, or the ethnocultural basis of party allegiance that tends to put confessional Christians in the Democratic Party and consigned moralists/ Sabbatarians...