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

4. The Region:Class, Ethnicity,and Political Allegiance1840-60

4 The Region: Class, Ethnicity, and Political Allegiance 1840-60 "What is our duty as patriotic men-as sons descended from Revolutionary ancestors?" Charles Albright asked delegates to Carbon County's Peoples Convention inJuly 1862. For Albright the answer was clear: to close solidly and firmly around Abraham Lincoln. Although men might differ on "minor matters" or "political details," the exigencies of war left little room for party politics or partisan debates. "There is but one way of saving the country," Albright insisted, "and that is by supporting the President." 1 Democrats, who considered themselves patriotic men despite their differences with the administration, disputed this claim. From their point of view, it was Republicans who had put party before nation and Republicans whose war policies had weakened the northern will to fight. Supporters of the administration, one Democratic editor complained, not only "avowed themselves bent upon emancipation, though the road should lead through blood bridle deep," but abandoned constitutional restraints whenever such restraints "stand in the way of their schemes." Democrats, this editor suggested, were concerned with the restoration , not the reconstruction, of the Union. "Let us not allow a faction at the North to accomplish without a struggle," he implored, "that very overthrow of our government which southern rebels have attempted with force of arms."2 From the Democrats' point of view, both parties contested the means, and not the ends, of this war for Union. Congres70 Class, Ethnicity, and Political Allegiance 71 sional Democrats, even so-called peace Democrats, for example, voted financial support for war measures, despite their belief that war could have been averted. "This is no time for us to be fiddling," Democratic senator Henry Rice of Minnesota explained . "It is no time for us to be swapping jack-knives when the ship is sinking." Democrats, only a very small number of whom favored peace at any price, believed that the Union should be preserved and the Constitution defended; they did not concede , however, that slavery need necessarily be destroyed or civil liberties temporarily suspended in the process.3 Neither did they acknowledge any contradictions inherent in this position. The Democratic party's essential racism, its conservative belief in a "natural" social order, and its conviction that compromise might still reconcile North and South-no matter how abhorrent to modern-day critics-attracted significant numbers of northern voters. Although Pennsylvania had elected a Republican governor and cast its electoral ballots for Lincoln in 1860 and 1864, some 25 percent of the state's electorate favored a nonmilitary resolution of the struggle.4 These Democratsmany of whom resided in the anthracite regions-supported local autonomy over what they called Republican despotism and measured national issues in terms of local consequences. When Democrats in Luzerne County, for example, debated the issue of slavery, they viewed it as a regional, not a national issue, and certainly not as a moral question. "Had our puritanical cousins minded their own business, instead of interfering with the concerns of the South," the Luzerne Union lamented, "we should have had no war."5 The social structure, social relations, and even social geography of the anthracite regions very much shaped the provincialism that defined the region's politics. Miners more readily recognized their employers, and not the slaveholders of the South, as the real threat to the republic, and the miners' economic struggles, even in the midst of civil war, proved their primary concern. Practical circumstances, local conflicts, and hard-fought struggles for economic survival tempered the miners ' parochial political vision-and shaped their political alliances . The structure of the industry and the ethnic-based, working -class communities that evolved in the newer coal regions 72 ANOTHER CIVIL WAR encouraged miners to depend on each other to improve their living and working conditions as a class and to stand together in political, as well as economic, fights. But if their preference for local autonomy and their rejection of centralizing war measures demonstrated a well-developed distrust of the Republican party's economic vision, especially among Irish miners, their tendency to cast a bloc vote alarmed their opponents. Although the roots of this political behavior were grounded in ethnic and class-related conflicts older than the war itself,6 opponents nevertheless interpreted evidence of the miners' dissatisfaction with the industrial system as evidence oftheir sympathy for the South. "Schuylkill is a great county-," Benjamin Bannan boasted in the summer of 1863, "she...