No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (review)

It is often said that it is hard to imagine anything new being written about the American Civil War. With the two hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's birth upon us, accompanied by the predictable flood of new books covering every facet of his presidency, one might also fear that there is nothing new left to say about Northern wartime politics. But with No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North, Adam I. P. Smith shows that much remains to be learned about the nuances of Northern partisanship during the sectional conflict, even though the same themes have been covered recently by Mark Voss-Hubbard in Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics Before the Civil War (2002) and by Mark Neely in The Divided Union: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (2002). No Party Now is an engaging book that brings many new insights to this oft-told story.

In No Party Now, Smith makes several interrelated arguments that lead to a unique depiction of politics in the wartime North. First, he argues convincingly that calls for the dropping of partisanship at the start of the war were not insincere lip service meant to yield partisan advantage. Instead, proposals for subsuming party for the sake of preserving the Union grew out of a sincere belief that the war might provide the means to reverse the intense electoral strife that had characterized the 1850s. This was an age, contends Smith, when "the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats . . . was not yet securely in place" (6). Antiparty sentiment was far more widespread than we tend to think, according to Smith, and was not merely a wartime measure. Despite Richard Hofstadter's argument to the contrary, concludes Smith, the idea of a party system as a positive good was not firmly in place by the start of the Civil War.

A second thesis of Smith's book is that while the antiparty movement of the Civil War years did not originate primarily with Republicans, battlefield setbacks and resistance to the Emancipation Proclamation convinced them that they needed to energetically embrace the antiparty idea if they were to generate the political support required to bring about military success and a permanent end to slavery. Smith reminds us of all-but-forgotten events of the war years that pushed Republicans to focus on antiparty patriotism to distract the public from unpopular policies. One of these incidents was the army's settlement of "contraband" freedmen in Illinois in 1862 despite the state law that forbid free blacks from settling there. Another was Lincoln's "To Whom It May Concern" letter of 1864, in which he stated that he would not stop the war unless Southerners accepted "the abandonment of slavery," a condition that pro-peace Northerners believed would prolong the conflict.

Smith's sees the election of 1864 as a pivotal event in his story. Lincoln's come-from-behind victory in that contest resulted not merely because of Union military success in Georgia, but because his supporters so thoroughly embraced "anti-party nationalism," which "provided the organizational and ideological context in which the North could continue to support the war even after the escalation of war aims and the military reversals of 1862" (161). Smith ends his thought-provoking study with a novel reassessment of the Eric McKitrick's influential 1967 article on the impact of partisan politics on the Union and Confederate war efforts. McKitrick argued that party politics in the North had strengthened the Union because partisanship served as a means to air but ultimately contain dissent. This thesis has recently come under attack, most notably in The Divided Union by Neely, who contends that party warfare was a drag on the Union effort to prosecute the war. Smith thinks that both McKitrick and Neely are wrong, because, he concludes, "there simply was no clear-cut two-party system in most of the North, throughout most of the...