Fergus M. Bordewich - How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America

Mr. Lincoln, his cabinet, and the 37th Congress were elected to do anything, everything, except what fell to them to dofight the greatest civil war of history. It came upon them as an utter surprise. So wrote Rep. Albert Gallatin Riddle, a Republican Radical, in a late-life memoir. Few of the consequences of the coming war were foreseen in the blustery postelection autumn of 1860, and none were foreordained. Many Southerners thought secession could be accomplished peacefully, while many Northerners believed that a little saber-rattling would deflate the rebels. Of course, they were both wrong. As the nation hurtled toward war, Congress faced existential challenges greater than any that the nation had encountered: How could the North be mobilized for a war that as late as the spring of 1861 it never expected to fight? Was Congress or the president responsible for the waging of the war? Could the untried Republicans manage to govern? Should war be fought with respect for the sanctity of Southern propertyincluding slavesor with a ruthlessness that would bring the seceded states more quickly to their knees? Could the Constitution survive the suspension of fundamental civil rights in the name of national security? How would the war be paid for? Would its financial burden break the Northern economy? What should white Americans do about slavery? Could they prevent their party from splitting between antislavery Radicals and those who were willing to tolerate slavery as long as it was contained in the South? Should Negroes be recruited to serve in the army? Would white soldiers refuse to fight alongside them? After the war was wonassuming that the North triumphedshould the Southern states be broken up? Should ex-Confederates be prosecuted as war criminals?

No consensus existed on any of these questions and many others. The challenges were daunting. Suspicion of central government in general, distrust of a strong executive in particular, and embedded traditions of states rightsin the North as well as the Souththreatened to undermine the countrys war-making ability. The nations tiny sixteen-thousand-man army, scattered among Indian-fighting posts on the western frontier, was ill-prepared to suppress a rebellion that stretched from the Atlantic Coast to Texas. Deep-seated racism threatened any attempt to emancipate slaves. As James Bayard of Delaware told his Senate colleagues, Antagonism between the races is a primary law of nature. Many, especially from the border states, also regarded any kind of tampering with slavery as a threat to basic property rights. If you take from us today our right to hold slaves, how long will it be before you will take from us some other constitutional right, worried John W. Crisfield, a proslavery Unionist from Maryland.

Close allies often diverged sharply on some issues, and on others followed different trajectories toward a common goal, as many did on how to end slavery. Fear of failurelosing the war on the battlefield, financial collapse, weakness in the White Housestalked the halls of Congress virtually without respite. Idealism collided with ruthless pragmatism. Friends became enemies, and onetime enemies friends. Careers were made and ruined. Some men soared from obscurity to greatness. Others, famous in their day, sank beneath the quicksand of a changing political landscape.

With Southerners gone, the Republicans for the first time held decisive majorities in both houses of Congress, having won about three-fifths of the seats in each chamber in the 1860 elections, along with the presidency. By the spring of 1861, one-third of the seats in both chambers stood empty, abandoned by members who had defected to the Confederacy. Their absence opened the gates to one of the most dynamic eras of legislative activism in American history, one that would change American society beyond recognition. During the next four years Congress would help win the war, craft a peace, reinvent the nations financial system, and enact a raft of forward-looking legislation that had long been blocked by Southern intransigence. In the course of doing so, Congress also laid the foundation for the strong activist central government that came fully into being in the twentieth century, permanently altered the relationship between the states and the federal government, and enshrined protection of civil rights as the responsibility of the federal government, initiating a racial and economic revolution that would overthrow the Souths cotton economy and transform four million slaves from pieces of property into soldiers, free women and men, and eventually citizens. In short, as the historian Leonard P. Curry put it, It was the members of this Congresssometimes by accident and sometimes by designwho drew the blueprint for modern America.