Earl Hess - Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (Norths Civil War, No 3)
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Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (Norths Civil War, No 3)
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Concentrating on ideology and cultural values, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress explores the motivations that casued Northerners to fight Americas Civil War. Arguing for the primary significance of ideals and cultural values in defining a war, the book examines the opinions of both the Northern soldier and civilian about the meaning of the Civil War in terms of defining American nationalism, the character of the American people, and the future of free government. The book addresses the intellectual and social elites of Northern society, but gives a new emphasis to the opinions of the common man on the subject and ideology of the war. In addition to identifying and discussing the ideas and cultural values that played a role in motivation, Hess looks at how the experience of war (battlefield death and suffering) interacted with that ideology. Contrary to the commonly held belief that war is disruptive to pre-war ideals, Hess argues that Northern soldiers and civilians made a conscious effort to use ideology as a tool with which to retain their faith in ideas. Liberty, Virtue, and Progress is based on extensive research in both published and unpublished sources.
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Liberty, Virtue, and Progress : Northerners and Their War for the Union North's Civil War ; No. 3
author
:
Hess, Earl J.
publisher
:
Fordham University Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0823217981
print isbn13
:
9780823217984
ebook isbn13
:
9780585195643
language
:
English
subject
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Social aspects, United States--Politics and government--1861-1865.
publication date
:
1997
lcc
:
E468.9.H57 1997eb
ddc
:
973.7
subject
:
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Social aspects, United States--Politics and government--1861-1865.
Page iii
Liberty, Virtue, and Progress
Northerners and Their War for the Union Second Edition
Earl J. Hess
Page iv
Copyright 1997 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. LC 9715035 ISBN 0-8232-1798-1 (hardcover)
ISSN 10898719 The North's Civil War, No. 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hess, Earl J. Liberty, virtue, and progress : Northerners and their war for the Union / Earl J. Hess. 2nd ed. p. cm. (The North's Civil War ; no. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-1798-1 (hardcover : alk. paper). 1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Social aspects. 2. United StatesPolitics and government18611865. I. Title. II. Series. E468.8 H57 1997 973.7dc21 97-15035 CIP
Printed in the United States of America
Page v
Contents
Introduction to the Second Edition
vii
Acknowledgments
xix
Introduction
1
1. Freedom and Self-Government
4
2. The Nation's Crisis
18
3. Coming to Terms
32
4. Liberty and War
56
5. White Dissent, Black Freedom
81
6. Continuity and Change
103
Notes
129
Index
151
Page vii
Introduction to the Second Edition
The passing of nearly a decade gives an author a great deal of time to second-guess what he has done. Now that Liberty, Virtue, and Progress is about to enter its second edition, it seems necessary to rethink and reinforce what I attempted to accomplish when I wrote it in the mid-1980s. The book was, to put it simply, an effort to understand the ideological foundations of the Northern effort in the Civil War. The primary ideas that made up Northern ideology were illuminated by republicanism. The existence of republican rhetoric, to some degree or other, was widespread in the personal writings of Northern soldiers and civilians alike. When they resorted to ideals or values to make sense of the war, it was to republicanism that they came.
Ironically, republicanism had long passed its heyday in American political discourse. Even as the nation was being established by the Founding Fathers some eighty years before the firing on Fort Sumter, the validity of republican ideology was being questioned. The republican's emphasis on public virtue as a safeguard of political liberty and his desire to balance the welfare of society with the urge to accumulate wealth seemed increasingly nave to many people. The American constitution was written so as to safeguard liberty through law, a system of checks and balances, rather than to rely on the virtuous impulses of the voters and the politicians. Throughout the early nineteenth century republicanism continued to weaken as increasingly large fortunes were
Page viii
made in manufacturing, commerce, or cotton planting across America. It was gradually replaced by a more modern, liberal ideology that emphasized individual achievement rather than moralism.
Yet the personal writings of many Northerners in the Civil War was suffused with republican rhetoric. One may be tempted to assume that this was just a convenient holdover from a bygone age, that only the language of republicanism, and not its ideas, were used by people desperately searching for a way to understand why the South had seceded and then fired the first shot in the bloodiest war in American history. This national trauma was a great shock to the Northern people, and they needed answers to explain why the slave states, which had peacefully coexisted with the free states for eight decades, had seemingly gone mad. The words of republicanism alone might hold enough residual meaning in American society to offer explanations.
Yet, I resist the notion that only the rhetoric was important to the Northerners who used it. I am convinced that the ideas were still important to a wide range of that heroic population which chose to make war on what they called the Slave Power and thereby reunited the nation. They made use of republican rhetoric to provide meaning for their war effort, but there is no reason to believe that they failed to take the content of that meaning seriously. The Union provided solid, important advantages to its citizens, making them free and independent. They often noted in their writings about the war how valuable the Union was in securing their enjoyment of free institutions such as a representative form of democracy, free public education, governmental protection of private property, and support for individual achievement. In the words of some Northerners, the rhetoric of republicanism seems to have been blended with liberalism. But in many others, the language was taken right out of the past and applied to a national crisis few of the Founding Fathers could have foreseen. Whether they stressed the economic advantages of the Union or the morality of a virtuous people bravely safeguarding liberty, they were using ideas to justify their war on the South.
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