The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation

Afterword

From its first days in the troubled 1850s, the Republican party has been a contentious subject. The party drew together, in fits and starts, previously competing interests of free soilers, nativists, anti-nativists, antiNebraska Democrats, conscience Whigs, and others. Defining the party was no easy matter as events moved rapidly and Republicans organized to win elections and, once in power, to act on avowed principles and promised advantages. Then, too, those who opposed Republicans also defined them, forcing Republican responses to such charges as being “black abolitionists,” “disunionists,” nativists, friends of capital and enemies of labor, and so much more. The first generation of Republicans wrestled with winning a war and securing a peace, all the while bringing order to a party of many parts. Republicans argued among themselves on a host of issues and even on the direction the party should go in war and peace. Later, as the party had become a fixture on the American political landscape, Republicans still contended among themselves on such issues as tariffs, civil rights, sabbatarian laws, and the regulation and promotion of business. And in the emerging mythology about its origins the Grand Old Party even argued about its birthplace. This book on the genesis of Republicanism reflects the contentiousness of the first generation of the party and the age. Just as Republicans disagreed on many details and directions, so too scholars are not of one mind regarding the history and meaning of the party. This book brings together historians of various perspectives and interests with the expectation that they will contend among themselves and point to several different directions that discussion about the Republican party might go. The various perspectives on the early history of the Republican party Afterword James M. McPherson offered by the six essays in this book provide a dynamic, and sometimes contradictory, multidimensional portrait of the first generation of the “Grand Young Party” that by the 1880s was becoming the Grand Old Party. And it is good that it is so, for varied perspectives are the lifeblood of historical scholarship. Consensus among historians is rare indeed, and when it exists the result is often bland and uninteresting. These essays are neither bland nor uninteresting. Eric Foner and Mark Neely see the Republican party of the 1850s and 1860s as an agency of radical reform animated by a genuine antislavery ideology and an egalitarian impulse that achieved the greatest sociopolitical transformation in American history embodied in the Thirteenth , Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Foner views this credo as mainly secular, growing out of the antebellum freelabor ideology that he has done so much to elucidate. Neely emphasizes its religious origins in the “slavery as sin” creed of the abolitionists that broadened into radical emancipationism when the war opened the opportunity to end slavery. Jean Baker and, possibly, Brooks Simpson implicitly go part way with this interpretation. But Baker notes that Republican accomplishments fell short of equal rights for half the population, thus calling into question the genuine quality of Republican egalitarianism. Simpson appreciates the remarkable nature of Republican achievements, but finds the dominant theme after 1868 to be a tilt toward Hamiltonian economics that was temporarily delayed by southern violence in the 1870s until, after 1876, the party could “realize more fully its identity as the party of big business.” Phillip Shaw Paludan sees the party moving from “its small-producer, middle-class origins toward becoming the party of big business” as early as the war years. Nevertheless, writes Paludan, the war was “the Republican party’s finest hour” because it preserved the Union and freed four million slaves, “two of the nation’s greatest triumphs.” Michael Holt might agree, but his essay focuses less on the ideological or reform or even nationalist economic impulses of the party than on its political pragmatism. For Holt, political parties (especially in election years) define themselves more by what they are against than what they are for. Their main goal is to attain and retain power; policy achievements are byproducts of this goal. The principal variance of interpretations occurs between Foner and Neely on the one hand and Holt on the other. For Neely and Foner the 168 James M. McPherson main thrust of Republican ideology before the war was anti-slavery; for Holt it was anti-slave power. Once the war began, Foner and Neely emphasize the movement of...