Download Mark E. Neely, Jr. The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War

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Reviews of Books
war affected, and was affected by, the home front" (p.
ix). I am not sure that the essays in this book are
exactly what social historians have in mind when they
make such calls, as they do repeatedly these days. But
what is present generally makes very good and stimulating reading.
MARK E. NEELY, JR.
Pennsylvania State University
MARK E. NEELY, JR. The Union Divided: Party Conflict
in the Civil War North. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 257. $24.95.
In this insightful and thought-provoking book, Mark E.
Neely, Jr., challenges the widely held belief that the
persistence of a two-party political system in the North
during the Civil War helped bring about the Union
victory. The argument that party competition invigorated the North, while a lack of partisan rivalry hurt
the South, was made famous by Eric L. McKitrick in
1967. The many historians who have subsequently
propounded this "two-party thesis" argue that party
competition aided the Union by helping to draw
talented men into government, giving state political
leaders an incentive to cooperate with the federal
government due to their mutual desire to promote
party success, and keeping the opposition responsible
and manageable by forcing it to present an alternative
set of policies to those pursued by the party in power.
Neely finds none of these arguments persuasive. He
contends instead that political parties did real harm to
the Union cause. "The party system itself," he concludes, "made no marked contribution to Union victory" (p. 201).
Several facets of this book are especially impressive.
It is full of erudite insights into both the military and
political history of the Civil War, insights that even
experts on the subject will find new and stimulating.
Chapter one, for example, contains a nuanced reading
of customhouse politics in New York City. Neely
provides the best and clearest explanation yet of why
the New York customs collector, Hiram Barney, was so
universally hated, and why Abraham Lincoln nonetheless maintained him in office for so long. Chapter three
likewise provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime
debates concerning the merits of "strategy" versus
blind valor and overwhelming force. Union General
George B. McClellan justified his slow prosecution of
the war on the grounds that he was developing an
overall strategy that would ultimately succeed. Once
McClellan was relieved of his command and had
become the Democratic presidential nominee, the
Republican press launched an all-out offensive against
both McClellan and strategy. Neely's analysis of the
attacks on strategy leave the reader with a much better
understanding of how politics can influence military
thinking.
Neely concludes that partisan competition, rather
than helping the Union, nearly cost it the war by
AMERICAN HISTOR [CAL REVIEW fomenting discontent, provoking wasteful and disruptive partisan quarrels, and undermining morale. He
argues that the only political factors that helped the
North were the manner in which the Constitution
empowered the president during times of war, the
Republican Party's domination of the North (which
gave opponents of the war little power to prevent its
vigorous prosecution), and the radicalization of the
Republican Party that resulted from the unexpectedly
fierce resistance mustered by the Confederacy.
Although Neely's argument is refreshingly original,
it does have some liabilities. One could compile a list
of patronage squabbles in the Confederacy just as long
as that which Neely presents for the North, suggesting
that parties themselves are not necessarily the cause of
distracting battles over spoils. Furthermore, comtemporaries' statements do not make compelling evidence
that partisan competition is of no value. Republican
claims made during the Civil War that partisanship
hurt the northern cause are no more credible than
nearly identical statements made by John Ashcroft and
Donald Rumsfeld during the recent Iraq War.
There are other instances in which Neely's choice of
evidence is problematic. His section on how patronage
politics hurt the war effort, for example, focuses on a
single case, the New York customhouse. Yet as Neely
himself admits, the New York case was atypical. Its
customs collector was reviled because he pursued a
nonpartisan appointment policy and thus refused to
replace most of the incumbent Democratic placeholders. Perhaps the customhouses were better operated
(and therefore did not hinder the war effort) in other
major cities where Lincoln's more partisan collectors
removed most Democrats from office. In any event, a
more thorough look at customhouse politics across the
North would have allowed Neely to make a more
compelling case for his thesis.
Another small qualm about Neely's book involves
the manner in which it is organized. Most of the book
is devoted to tearing down McKitrick's two-party
thesis; each chapter presents a different flaw in his
interpretation, and some readers may find this overwhelmingly negative approach a bit tiresome. Only at
the very end does Neely present his alternative point of
view. Others will find it hard to believe that there is no
value in providing opponents of war a political forum
through which to voice their dissent. The effort that
some northerners expended organizing antiwar political demonstrations and writing antiwar propaganda
might have been devoted instead to blowing up bridges
or spying for the enemy had the political system not
offered an outlet for dissent. Neely's argument would
be more convincing if he at least acknowledged and
discussed such possibilities.
These are small quibbles when contrasted with the
impressive insights that abound in Neely's book. It is
one of the most important works on Civil War politics
to appear in many years, and no one who reads it will
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Canada and the United States
be able to think about the connections between war
and polities in quite the same way again.
TYLER ANBINDER
George Washington University
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON. The Death of Reconstruc
tion: Race, Labor, and Polities in the Post-Civil War
North, 1865 1901. Cambridge: Harvard University
-
Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 312. $39.95.
Why did northerners abandon Reconstruction? After
years of pursuing a rough equality for the newly freed
slaves, why did they walk away and watch in silence as
Jim Crow descended on the South? Historians have
offered a number of explanations for this abandonment: partisan polities, racism, war weariness, corruption, class needs of planters. But Heather Cox Richardson argues that these explanations, while
compelling, are "disparate aspects" (p. xi) of the
northern experience. How, she asks, did they fit together? The answer can be found in northerners'
adherence to free labor ideology.
This is a big topic, and to make the job manageable,
Richardson focuses almost entirely on northern newspapers and opinion makers: she follows the trajectory
of the northern discourse about the nation's political
economy between 1865 and 1901. Having fought a war
for free labor, Republicans were committed to the
South's transformation into a free labor society and
were drawn to the newly emancipated slaves as ideal
free laborers: workmen who "worked hard and skillfully, lived frugally, saved their money, and planned to
rise as individuals through their own efforts" (pp. 7-8).
These "good" workers, who believed in the harmony of
interests between employees and employers, stood in
sharp contrast to bad workers: those who allied with
the Democratie Party, believed that "polarizing wealth
meant the creation of economic classes locked in
inevitable conflict" (p. 8), and looked to the federal
government for help in solving their problems.
When recalcitrant southern whites interfered with
the South's transition to a free labor society, Republicans concluded that the federal government would
have to assume an active role in the process. Republicans passed civil rights legislation and the Fourteenth
Amendment and then fought for universal male suffrage, all to ensure the protection of the freedmen's
economic rights. But Republicans' commitment to
black male suffrage evoked Democratie complaints of
corruption and empire building, and the freedmen's
political activism, viewed in the context of increasing
labor unrest in the North, engendered Republican
worries that enfranchising black men would "harness
the government to the service of disaffected workers,
who hoped to confiscate the wealth of others rather
than to work their own way to economic success" (p.
82). In South Carolina, a convention attended by
ex-Confederates protested new taxes and accused
black legislators of plundering property holders, fueling northern concerns. In 1871, Horace Greeley chided
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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"lazy" blacks (p. 99) who were unwilling to work,
drawing a parallel between the Paris Commune and
the South Carolina freedmen.
Though not all blacks fit this category—Republicans
praised those blacks who achieved success in an individualistic fashion—an image of "an uneducated mass
of African-American voters pillaging society was one
of the most powerful ones of the postwar years" (p.
118). Increasingly, Republicans "read the Northern
struggle over political economy into the racial struggles of the South" (p. 94)—including the campaign for
a civil rights bill and the 1879 black exodus—and the
debate over Reconstruction was recast as a debate
over state action, individualism, and the American way
of life. By the 1890s, it was clear to northerners that
their faith in the freedmen as free laborers had been
misplaced, and virtually all black activism had come to
symbolize the threat that European-style class conflict
posed to American individualism. Thus northerners
who hoped to preserve traditional American values
accepted black disenfranchisement and came to believe that blacks were "bound by race into permanent
semi-barbarism" (p. 224).
On one level, the story that Richardson tells is
original and insightful. Setting out to explain how race
and class worked together to undermine the northern
commitment to Reconstruction, at times—especially
in the chapter on South Carolina—she succeeds admirably. The book identifies an important tendency
among northerners—the conflation of southern blacks'
political activism with northern working-class activism.
But in focusing on the Northern discourse about free
labor—or, more accurately, the liberal individualism
that evolved from that discourse (other strands of free
labor followed different trajectories—one strand, for
example, informed the labor movement)—this book
too often examines that debate independent of its
social and political setting. Richardson decontextualizes her subject, and the result is a sometimes skewed
or incomplete picture of Reconstruction.
Richardson focuses almost entirely on northern
moderates—for whom free labor was the driving force
behind Reconstruction—and pays little attention to
the radicals, whose vision centered on a national
citizenship devoted to equal rights. The reader is left
with the impression that Reconstruction was a moderate affair throughout. Racism and southern class interests, which so clearly shaped the dynamic she
examines, are also slighted. For example, by the end of
the Civil War, a racism informed by economie need
had convinced planters in the South that blacks were
bom servants. During Reconstruction, planters needed
the freedmen to work their plantations or the plantation economy would collapse. In fact, along with
politically active blacks, the main targets of the Ku
Klux Klan were those blacks who achieved even moderate amounts of success. Thus a central component of
free labor ideology—social mobility—was largely absent for blacks in the South, and the accusations of
indolence that Richardson cites applied to any black
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