Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-1868

Preface to the Fordham Edition

Preface to the Fordham Edition How do we measure the meaning of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history? Was it a war to emancipate the slaves? A courageous test of minority versus majority rights? A second American Revolution? Was the Northern victory part of an inevitable process of modernization or could the South have avoided defeat? For over one hundred years historians have debated these questions, always looking for new avenues of research to support their point of view. And they have had no trouble finding an audience for their work. By the turn of the twenty-first century , Civil War historians had published more than 60,000 books, most of them focused on soldiers and campaign strategies , or military, legal, and political leaders.1 Civil War enthusiasts -be they buffs, reenactors, or members of the Civil War Round Table-are captivated by dramatic tales of patriotic valor and military prowess. From their vantage point, a century and a half later, the war marked a passionate, heroic era, when strong leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis grappled with such crucial issues as emancipation, nationhood, and civil liberties, and courageous soldiers, North and South, black and white, bravely fought for what they believed was right. "We see ourselves and our concerns reflected in this history," Drew Gilpin Faust has noted. For we recognize the war as the "reason for the emergence of modern America" and all that went with it: a strong nation-state, a robust industrial economy, and new and enhanced meanings of freedom and citizenship.2 But what did the war mean to people at the time, especially to those on the Northern home front? How did they experiXl XII ANOTHER CIVIL WAR ence this "emergence of modern America"? Was the Civil War a second American revolution for industrial workers in the North as it was for enslaved workers in the South?3 Another Civil War attempts to answer these questions by focusing on the social and economic impact of the war on one group of workers who played a vital wartime role: anthracite miners in northeastern Pennsylvania. In the process, it reveals some important links between persistent ethnic, political, and class conflicts, the rise of a powerful, centralized government, and the decision to station military troops in the anthracite regions for a good part of the war. It also demonstrates in no uncertain terms vast and sometimes unbridgeable differences between local and national conceptions of duty, patriotism, and legitimate authority. For at the time, the Civil War did not always seem so heroic, nor the goals so worthy and clear-cut, as they look today. Even in the North there was no agreement that emancipation was worth the fight and no consensus on the value of a strong federal government. When President Lincoln called for 300,000 new recruits in the summer of 1862, Northerners did not rally to the cause. On the contrary, the response was so slow and so disappointing that the federal government authorized the states to impose a draft if necessary.4 But that only strengthened opposition to Republican war measures. In fact, it took military troops to enforce the order, and even then an enrollment could not be made in certain parts of the country. The men who were called to fight, and the people who loved them, tended to view the great issues at stake-freedom, duty, and government authority-through a local lens, which meant that survival, family welfare, and local autonomy sometimes came first, war or no war. In rural Pennsylvania, for instance, where Democrats prevailed , farmers were willing to support the war, but only on their own terms: They would fight to preserve the Union, but not to free the slaves, and they would provide their fair share of soldiers, but only as long as they were not needed to tend the crops. As far as these farmers were concerned, they were not shirking their patriotic duty, and few in the state disagreed. In Pennsylvania's mining regions and remote mountain towns, Preface to the Fordham Edition XIII residents also evaded or resisted draft enrollers whenever they thought their rights were being trampled, and friends and neighbors had no qualms about protecting them. No wonder the Lincoln administration and its supporters in Congress enacted a federal conscription law in 1863. "I want everybody to feel that this is a necessity forced upon us...