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

Chapter 3 War Is the Health of the Party: Republicans in the American Civil War

Abraham Lincoln dominates discussion of Civil War Republicanism.1 Influenced, perhaps, by a modern world in which the presidency shapes party goals and rhetoric, historians have undervalued the significance of his party and concentrated on Lincoln’s actions as emancipator, master strategist, master diplomatist. Works that study Lincoln’s relationship to his party are entitled Lincoln and the Party Divided, Re-electing Lincoln, Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and the War Governors, and, most recently, in a study of the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder.2 Of course, Lincoln mattered profoundly in shaping the war and in- fluencing his party. His decisions moved armies, freed slaves, jailed opposition , protected and armed freedmen. Above all, his inspirational and well-calculated rhetoric led the nation toward its better angels.3 But in the long run, especially the run of the mid-nineteenth century when legislatures dominated government and politics, the Republican party was equally significant and at times more important. For one thing, getting right with Lincoln was not likely to be the number one priority with lawmakers. He didn’t have long coattails. In many states the party was more popular than the president. In the election of 1860, in eleven of the fourteen largest northern states, Lincoln got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than did congressional Republican candidates . Four years later it was a similar story. In 1864 in New York and Indiana, two of the larger northern states, party candidates for governor outpolled Lincoln. In most of the races congressional candidates in Iowa and Massachusetts outpaced Lincoln in 1864. In New York even the CHAPTER THREE War Is the Health of the Party: Republicans in the American Civil War Phillip Shaw Paludan Figure 3.1. “Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, President Elect of the United States of America, With Scenes and Incidents in his Life, Phot. by P. Butler, Springfield, Ill.,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 9, 1861 (Alexander Hesler’s photograph, misattributed to Preston Butler). The new president is portrayed as a free-soil exemplar, surrounded by vignettes showing his rise from laborer to middle-class professional to president of the United States. The Lincoln image and biography was ready-made to appeal to the laboring classes and farmers; it also served the interests of businessmen and others who preached self-willed independence as the way to wealth. lieutenant governor, canal commissioner, and inspector of prisons won more popular votes.4 Lincoln’s leadership mattered but, as he often said, events also controlled him, and the nation. Many of those events were the work of other Republicans. While Lincoln can take much of the credit for emancipation and for bringing the war to a successful end, Congress helped and at times led him in these efforts. The first official action taken by the United States against slavery was the First Confiscation Act, which Congress passed August 6, 1861. Seven months later, on March 6, 1862, Lincoln asked Congress to help states end slavery by compensating them for their loss of human property. After that the two branches of government leapfrogged each other with laws and proclamations attacking human bondage. And toward the end of the war, it was Congress’s Wade-Davis bill and not Lincoln ’s plan of reconstruction that promised the most protection of the former slaves from their masters. It would be a postwar Congress, without Lincoln’s help, that passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.5 Congress flexed its muscles in part because Lincoln was usually too busy to oversee events beyond his stated constitutional authority: to execute the laws, to act as commander in chief of the armed forces, to make treaties and appoint officials. The president focused his attention on choosing generals, suggesting strategy, negotiating with lawmakers about emancipation and Reconstruction. But Congress was the dominant body in gathering resources, creating an infrastructure that not only won the war but also reshaped the American economy for a century or more. It was thus the Republican party as much as Lincoln, and at times more than Lincoln, that (in a large sense) won the war. How did they do that? And what did they do? This was the Republicans’ war. Their campaigning had created it; by dividing the house their philosophy had demanded it. Of course they wanted a peaceful triumph for their...