"The Wisest Counsel of Conservatism": Northern Democrats and the Politics of the Center, 1865–1868

Reflecting on the state of national politics in early 1867, John A. Dix confessed to erstwhile Republican senator James R. Doolittle that he had lost faith in both political parties. Dix, a longtime Democrat from New York, was a former senator and Treasury secretary and had served as a Union general during the Civil War. By 1867, however, Dix had concluded he had "no hope except in the formation of a conservative party, with loyal men, & preferably, republicans at its head."¹ Dix was certainly not alone in his desire for a new "conservative party," especially among Northern Democrats. Yet, surprisingly, in this context, "conservative" did not necessarily mean Democrats. Indeed, in the years immediately after the war, politicos in both parties, and among Democrats especially, spoke continually of the importance of what former Michigan governor Robert McClelland called "the conservatives of both parties" and securing "the entire conservative vote" to achieving their political goals.²

As the war ended, the desire of Dix and other Northern Democrats to form new political coalitions around "conservative" voters—independent of the Democratic Party—was constant, and this raises several questions about postwar politics and the nature of partisanship during the Civil War era. What did conservative mean in this specific political context, and why were these Democrats' views of conservatism divorced from the Democratic Party? After all, was the Democratic Party not the conservative party in the United States during the nineteenth century? It would seem strange indeed that if Dix was suggesting the Democratic Party had not been conservative enough to his liking, his solution would be a more conservative party led by, as he proposed, Republicans. What was going on?

Unraveling this problem requires a more nuanced understanding of Northern Democrats and the problem of conservatism during the Civil War and particularly Reconstruction than we currently have. We have, for example, many excellent finegrained studies of the politics and ideology of the Republican Party; until recently, however, Northern Democrats had not received a comparable level of study. Even now, while there have been several recent reappraisals of the role Northern Democrats played in the sectional crisis of the 1850s and during the war, we lack a complete understanding of what Northern Democrats were up to during the postwar years.³

Similarly, there is a growing body of scholarship that takes seriously the politics of conservatism as a distinct ideology or mode of thinking during the Civil War era—what Adam I. P. Smith has recently labeled "a disposition."⁴ Yet, that literature has not fully examined the shape conservatism took after the war. In fact, many of the same tenets that defined conservatism before the Civil War would continue to inform the approaches of self-styled conservatives during Reconstruction, such as the determination to avoid questions of sectional conflict in favor of restoring the Union as quickly as possible, while simultaneously ensuring the fruits of the war—namely the destruction of slavery—remained intact.⁵ This essay uses Northern Democrats as a lens through which to understand conservatism and the politics of the center during the early years of Reconstruction, when efforts by some Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans to redefine the political center culminated with the ill-fated National Union Convention of 1866. It argues that, rather than constituting a specific policy agenda or ideology, conservatism often lacked a concrete definition. Rather, as a political identity in the mid-nineteenth century, the label conservative reflected the desire of political actors to occupy the center—what New York Democrat George Bancroft referred to in early 1865 as "the wisest counsel of conservatism."⁶

Part of the conundrum of defining conservatism in the postwar years is in squaring the meaning of conservative to actors like Dix in the mid-nineteenth century with our own modern conception of conservative as a political label. Conservative was a constant of the political lexicon of the mid-nineteenth century, invoked frequently by contemporaries and later historians alike, yet often without a delineation of its precise meaning. In modern parlance, political...