GDG- Fwd: REV: Huebner on Engs and Miller_The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation_

[Dennis Lawrence]

Hello,


  Members of the GDG Fringe may remember the discussion of 
Reconstruction joined by Eric Foner.

Take Care

Dennis


>REVIEW:
>
>H-NET BOOK REVIEW
>Published by H-CivWar at h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)
>
>Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller, eds. _The Birth of the Grand 
>Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation_. Philadelphia: 
>University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. x + 202 pp.  Illustrations, 
>notes, select bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 
>0-8122-3674-2; $21.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8122-1820-5.
>
>Reviewed for H-CivWar by Timothy S. Huebner, Department of History, 
>Rhodes College
>
>Republicans Reconsidered
>
> From the time of Abraham Lincoln's taking of the presidential oath 
> of office on the steps of the unfinished national Capitol in March 
> 1861 to the Democrats' return to power in the halls of Congress in 
> January 1875, the Republican Party reigned supreme in American 
> politics. It was the Republicans who decided that the secession of 
> the South justified a war to preserve the Union, who concluded that 
> liberating slaves would hasten the demise of the Confederacy, and 
> who ratified three post-war constitutional amendments that 
> permanently freed four million enslaved people and forever altered 
> the relationship between the national government and the states. 
> While scholars have spilled plenty of ink on all of these subjects, 
> historians still have much to learn about the formation, 
> motivations, behavior, and composition of the Republican Party. In 
> this insightful book of essays, a half dozen of the most important 
> historians of the Civil War era assess the first generation of 
> Republicans. Composed of six papers initially presented at a 2000 
> symposium and exhibition at the Library Company in Philadelphia, 
> this collection illustrates the tensions and transitions that the 
> Republicans experienced during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
>
>In an overview of the Republicans' early history, Eric Foner traces 
>changes in party ideology between the 1850s and the end of 
>Reconstruction. The notion of free labor, he familiarly argues, lay 
>at the heart of Republicans' thinking. With faith in the inherent 
>dignity of labor, Republicans of the 1850s believed that if 
>individuals worked hard they could climb the social ladder and 
>eventually become property owners or entrepreneurs. Republicans 
>contrasted free society in the North with slave society in the 
>South, which they viewed as socially stagnant and economically 
>retrograde. This free labor vision helped prompt emancipation in 
>wartime and eventually caused party members to embrace national 
>power as a means of furthering freedom. Linking "the progress of 
>freedom directly to the power of the national state," Foner argues, 
>proved to be the war's most significant legacy (p. 14). But the war 
>also changed Republican thinking in other ways. During 
>Reconstruction, nearly all party leaders severed the ideological 
>connection between freedom and property-holding, as few embraced 
>land reform for the South's four million freedpeople. This 
>development, Foner contends, marked a decisive shift in free labor 
>ideology, "fixing the dominant understanding of economic freedom as 
>self-ownership and the right to compete in the labor market, rather 
>than propertied independence" (p. 22). Foner's essay reminds us of 
>the fluid nature of free labor ideology during the Civil War era.
>
>Michael F. Holt takes a different approach. Focusing on the 
>Republicans' rise to power and Lincoln's victory in 1860, Holt 
>argues that the party's appeal had less to do with slavery and its 
>extension that it did with northern whites' concerns about the 
>protection of their own liberties. Republicans built a "polygot 
>coalition" that united disparate groups with a common enemy--the 
>southern slave power. According to Holt neither slavery nor its 
>potential of spreading to the West resonated with northern voters. 
>Rather, northerners feared the threat to liberty posed by the 
>southern slave power, as evident in three incidents in 1856: the 
>sack of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces; the caning of 
>Charles Sumner by South Carolinian Preston Brooks; and a 
>little-known episode involving a Democratic California congressman 
>who killed a Washington waiter in a dispute. (The congressman, it 
>was discovered, was originally from a slaveholding family in 
>Alabama, and Republicans viewed the affair as demonstrating 
>southerners' contempt for northern free laborers.) Combined with 
>targeted appeals to young voters, German Protestants, and northern 
>moderates, these events helped Republicans cobble together a loose 
>and fragile coalition that eked out an electoral-college victory 
>with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Holt challenges 
>readers to see the precarious position of the Republicans during an 
>era when new political parties arose and declined with frequency. 
>Nothing about the Republicans' victory in 1860, Holt concludes, 
>necessarily indicated that the party would play a lasting role in 
>American political history.
>
>The late Phillip Shaw Paludan's essay examines wartime Republicans, 
>particularly in Congress. If Holt emphasizes the fragility of the 
>Republican coalition in 1860, Paludan observes that "civil war 
>produced the best environment possible to unite a diverse party" (p. 
>64). Patronage played a key role in this regard, as did Republicans' 
>common commitment to emancipation. Although they downplayed the 
>issue in the 1864 election to avoid stirring up northern racism, the 
>Republicans were still the party of freedom, and, according to 
>Paludan, "the most effective nineteenth-century champions of racial 
>justice" (p. 66). In Paludan's view, though, the Republicans also 
>produced Gilded Age America, with its privileged robber barons and 
>oppressed workers. Picking up where Foner's essay leaves off, 
>Paludan shows how the Republicans' antebellum commitment to small 
>producers gave way to an alliance with business elites. "Republicans 
>went to bed with capitalists," he bluntly states, "because they 
>needed them to win the war" (p. 67). Although most historians 
>sidestep the issue of the role of wartime Republicans in creating 
>the industrial order that followed, Paludan argues that Republican 
>policies--the Homestead Act, a protective tariff, a national 
>currency--played a key role in forging the economy of late 
>nineteenth-century America.
>
>Mark E. Neely Jr. also explores the Republicans during wartime, 
>specifically the triumph of the radical wing of the party. Neely 
>connects the success of the radical position to shifts in northern 
>public opinion. "Republicans could not have moved from the 
>Crittenden Resolution to the Thirteenth Amendment in three years if 
>the increasingly dominant ideas in the North undermined 
>humanitarianism and democracy," he writes (p. 108-109). Therefore, 
>Neely sets out to explain how Republicans--particularly 
>Lincoln--made the transition from fighting a war for the Union to a 
>war for emancipation. Neely examines seventy-six sets of resolutions 
>from religious organizations, heretofore ignored by historians, in 
>the Lincoln Papers. Most represented meetings of state 
>denominations, although some came from individual congregations. 
>Nearly all of these resolutions urged a policy of emancipation. 
>Neely concludes that such resolutions--retained among the countless 
>letters received by the White House--provided Lincoln with clues 
>about the attitudes of the northern public. The religious sentiment 
>that they displayed, Neely asserts, constituted a significant 
>element of the Republican Party in wartime and certainly helps to 
>explain Lincoln's tilt toward emancipation. Because of its use of 
>denominational resolutions, Neely's is the most original essay in the book.
>
>Jean H. Baker examines the Republicans' efforts to redefine 
>citizenship in the aftermath of the war, with regard to both African 
>Americans and women. Baker notes the variety of motivations that 
>affected the drafting and the implementation of the Civil Rights Act 
>of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly the framers' 
>sensitivity to traditional notions of federalism.  The language of 
>the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that the national government would 
>enforce some rights of citizenship, but the amendment clearly did 
>not nationalize all rights--a fact that became obvious once the 
>Supreme Court began to interpret the new amendment. Still, like 
>Palludan, Baker portrays the expansion of citizenship and voting 
>rights to African American men as a substantial achievement of the 
>first generation of Republicans, even if the partisan desire to win 
>African American votes played an important part in the attainment of 
>black suffrage.  Republicans proved less far-sighted when it came to 
>women, as they seemed unable to break with nineteenth-century 
>conventions about gender roles.
>
>The last essay, by Brooks D. Simpson, examines the party during 
>Reconstruction, during which time Republicans attempted to 
>reestablish the majority they had formed during the late 1850s. 
>Simpson notes that newly elected president Ulysses S. Grant came 
>into office in 1869 under precarious circumstances, as the majority 
>of white men had cast their ballots for his opponent. Although Grant 
>hoped to "promote reconciliation, racial justice, and Republican 
>interests," his efforts foundered (p. 153). Conflicts over the 
>readmission of southern states and a plan to annex the Dominican 
>Republic split party ranks, and, although the Liberal Republican 
>campaign failed to unseat Grant in 1872, only the waving of 
>the  bloody shirt ensured Grant's victory. Reminding voters of the 
>experience of war, in other words, "touched party allegiance at the 
>core" (p. 166). Simpson concludes that, for much of its early 
>history, the Republican Party proved to be, more than anything else, 
>the party of Union victory.
>
>As a whole, these essays make two general points. First, Holt's and 
>Foner's papers in particular but others by implication, show the 
>tenuous nature of the Republican coalition in 1860. Placed within 
>the context of mid-nineteenth century American politics, the 
>Republicans could very well have risen and fallen within a few 
>years, much like the other failed attempts at party organization 
>during the time. Even the change in the name of the party during the 
>1864 presidential campaign--Lincoln and Johnson ran on the Union 
>Party ticket--shows that allegiance to a "Republican Party" was 
>relatively weak. Second, the authors almost all emphasize the 
>experience of wartime in helping to shape--and solidify--the 
>identity of the Republicans. For Foner, Paludan, Neely, and Baker, 
>the commitment to freedom emerged during wartime, although Neely 
>alone places the emphasis on the religious origins of the party's 
>emancipation policy. For Simpson it was the war itself--the quashing 
>of the rebellion, rather than the emancipationist impulse--that 
>defined Republicanism and made party members rally around their 
>standard-bearer in 1872. Although Paludan and others indicate that 
>the Republicans might also have forged a pro-business identity in 
>wartime, James McPherson's brief but trenchant comment in the 
>afterward reminds us that the Republicans' transition away from a 
>commitment to civil rights did not occur overnight. (He notes, for 
>example, how Democrats blocked Republican bills that would have 
>established large-scale federal aid to education and black voting 
>rights in the 1880s and 1890s.) McPherson indicates, moreover, that 
>Republicans continued to attract the votes of American laborers 
>during the  late nineteenth century--a fact which perhaps shows the 
>enduring appeal of free labor ideology.
>
>This collection of insightful papers offers a compact compendium of 
>recent scholarship on the Republicans. Generally synthetic and 
>interpretive in nature, these essays nicely summarize the major 
>developments of the period at the same time that they demonstrate 
>the major lines of debate among historians. For this reason, _The 
>Birth of the Grand Old Party_ is sure to be of use to scholars, 
>teachers, and students alike.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>Charles D. Grear, Ph.D.
>Assistant Professor of History
>Prairie View A & M University
>Division of Social Work, Behavioral, and Political Sciences
>P.O. Box 519; MS 2203
>Woolfolk Bidg., Suite 317
>Prairie View, Texas 77446
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>(936) 261-3203
>
>H-CivWar Book Review Editor
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