Introduction: Conservatism in the Civil War North

This issue explores the history of conservatism in the northern United States during the Civil War era, a subject that until very recently has been neglected in the rich historiography of the period's politics.¹ Inattention to conservatism in the midnineteenth century contrasts with its central place in histories of recent American politics. That scholarship regards conservatism as an essential factor in the demise of New Deal liberalism, the rise of the right, and the transformation of the major parties into more clearly defined left versus right ideological camps. Historians of post-1945 America often associate conservatism with "the right," a connection that anchors it to a cluster of cultural and economic policies that have found consistent support with one party, the Republican, and a comparatively stable coalition of supporters—evangelical Christians, whites, rural voters, and big business. Perhaps it is this understanding of conservatism in our own time that has obscured its role in the Civil War era, when the term stood for very different things.²

To say that Civil War–era historians have neglected conservatism does not mean they have been uninterested in the past's implication for the present or the mid-nineteenth-century equivalents of today's political right. Instead, the disparity in interest has more to do with the changing historical meaning that Americans have given to conservatism. As our contributors show, unlike the recent past, when conservatism stood for a set of policies as well as a marker of partisan affiliation, in the Civil War era the term signified a sensibility—a way of thinking about politics—rather than a rigid proscription for legislative action or an ideology tied to a specific party or voting constituency. Civil War–era conservatives valued orderly progress worked out through established institutions, most importantly the federal Union; an emotional temperament of restraint and measured judgment in opposition to rashly acting on momentary passions or the will of the mob; and the use of government to advance moral purposes in public life. As Adam Smith explains in his essay on the rise of American conservatism, such an outlook on politics became increasingly attractive to voters witnessing the succession of political crises running from the Mexican War in 1846 to secession fifteen years later.

Yet although few historians would quarrel with the claim that this moderate disposition often went by the name of conservatism, they have not been very interested in exploring the power of this outlook to shape the politics of the sectional crisis, Civil War, or Reconstruction. As noted above, that may have to do with the pull of present-day politics on the study of the past. Civil War conflicts echo in today's politics, not only thematic ones related to race, gender, and region, but literal ones tied to Civil War monuments and racial violence carried out in the name of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. In this scheme of an enduring Civil War, the protagonists track with the conservative-right / liberal-left divide of twenty-first-century American politics; defenders of neo-Confederate heritage align with the conservative right, whereas their opponents generally affiliate with the liberal left.³

Although tempered by time, the predominantly Southern advocates of patriarchal Christianity, white supremacy, and maximal protection for property rights bear a stronger resemblance to today's political right than do the Northern conservatives who advocated moderation and compromise. Some scholars have applied conservative to the South's proslavery reactionaries, but contemporaries more often labeled them radicals, or fire-eaters, who would overthrow the Union rather than concede power.⁴

As this frame applies to the North, historians have done remarkable work recovering the scope and influence of antislavery activists on party politics and revising an older interpretation that emphasized abolitionist "come outers" who regarded the party system as so thoroughly corrupted by slavery that it should be shunned entirely. Greater knowledge of antislavery engagement with partisan politics has been accompanied by an expanded understanding of what constitutes the political in nineteenth-century America. Studies of the public sphere have shown the significance not only...