Abstract
In 1863, a young Pennsylvanian soldier named Caldwell worried that fighting for mere political unity would appear selfish, and would not be understood by the world at large. The addition of “the magic word freedom,” he thought, would raise the cause to an altogether different and higher level. 1 For Caldwell, it was the Emancipation Proclamation that transformed what would have been a mere nationalist struggle to a crusade with meaning for what Abraham Lincoln called “the whole family of man.” Caldwell’s words are immediately intelligible to us because his conception of the Civil War as having been ennobled by a struggle for the very tangible freedom of enslaved African Americans matches our dominant narrative of the war as one in which the American nation passed through a “fiery trial” and emerged a better place.
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Notes
Quoted in Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue and Progress: Northerners and their War for the Union (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 29
Abraham Lincoln, “Message to Congress in Special Session,” July 4, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press,1953–1955), 4: 421–441; Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address”, March 4, 1865, Collected Works, 8: 332–333.
James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). McPherson’s interpretation of the war is explained at greatest length in his masterful and hugely influential Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Critiques of McPherson’s interpretation include:
Michael Johnson, “Battle Cry of Freedom?”, Reviews in American History 17 (June 1989)
Edward L. Ayers’much-cited essay “Worrying About the Civil War” in his What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009).
Peter J. Parish, “Conflict by Consent” in Adam I. P. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant, eds., The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 149–170.
George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1861–1865, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 474.
Quoted in John David Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 6.
There has been comparatively little scholarship on conservatism in nineteenth-century America. Most of the existing literature focuses on the South. See, for example: Eugene Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992)
Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)
Masahiro Nakamura, Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms: Southern Conservatism and the Other American Romance (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009)
Michael O’Brien, “Conservative Thought in the Old South: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (July 1992): 566–576. The classic texts on American conservatism are Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (London: Faber, 1954); and Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Random House, 1955). For a modern overview of conservatism in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century, see Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). This is also the implicit assumption made by much of the recent work on twentieth-century conservatism, the lineage of which is rarely traced back to before the New Deal.
Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 169.
Allan Nevins, ed. Diary of Phillip Hone (New York, 1927), 876.
This was not, however, the first time that the militia had been called in to deal with a civil crisis in New York City—the Seventh Regiment had been issued with live ammunition during the race riots of 1834—but a direct confrontation had been avoided. See Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 162–170.
H. M. Ranney, “Account of the terrific and fatal riot,” New York Herald, May 11, 12, and 13, 1849.
Henry W. Bellows, A Sermon, occasioned by the late riot in New York, preached in the Church of the Divine Unity, on Sunday, May 13, 1849 (New York, 1849), 14.
An anti-Jacobin “sensibility,” Cleves suggests, led Abolitionists to use imagery of the reign of terror both to condemn the violence of slavery and to condone the prospect of a violent end to slavery. See Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). For a similar argument, see also
Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 209–239.
On the Know-Nothings, see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Know Nothing Party and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002). For alternative views about the role of Know Nothings in building the Republican Party, see
Dale Baum, “Know-Nothingism and the Republican Majority in Massachusetts: The Political Realignment of the 1850s,” Journal of American History 64 (March 1978): 959–986
William E. Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War” Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 529–559.
Henry W. Bellows, Historical Sketch of the Union League Club of New York (New York: Putnam, 1879), 5.
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Smith, A.I.P. (2013). Conservatism, Transformation, and the War for the Union. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_3
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