The Union as It Was

When the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, Catholic northerners rallied to save the Union from its greatest threat. Some hoped that immigrant and Catholic bravery and sacrifice on the battlefield would forever end anti-Catholic nativism in America. As conservatives and Democrats, they also strongly resisted attempts to enlarge the purpose of the war, especially on the issue of emancipating southern slaves. Remembering the connections between antislavery politics and anti-Catholic nativism in the antebellum North, they feared Republicans’ attacks on slavery might be followed by assaults on their rights as naturalized citizens and Catholics. The most prominent pro-Union leaders in the North were the Irish Americans Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864) of New York and the Bostonian Patrick Donahoe (1811–1901), owner of the widely published newspaper the Boston Pilot. Together these two men led Catholic conservatives’ fight to restore the Union as it was before the outbreak of war.

To Save the Union “in Behalf of Conservative Men”

Horatio Seymour was the Civil War’s most successful Democrat, securing the governorship of New York in 1862. This chapter analyses his election as a means to reconsider the record of the Democratic Party during the Civil War. Republicans at the time constantly questioned the loyalty of their partisan opponents. Scholarly discussion ever since has tended to reflect this, with historians explaining Democratic victories as the result of people voting against Republicans rather than for Democrats, who supposedly relied on race prejudice and antiwar sentiment to secure votes. I argue that Seymour offered an alternative vision of the Union war that Democrats and many swing voters deliberately endorsed. Reevaluating Seymour’s campaign on its own terms provides a clearer explanation of what the Union war meant for Democrats and why their party continued to receive support from upwards of 45 percent of the northern electorate during the conflict.

Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War

This essay shows what the Union meant from the perspective of an African American woman. Elizabeth Keckly is most famous as Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and confidant, as a memoirist, and as a leader in Washington’s African American community. The essay places Keckly’s life and words into a broader historiographic context and argues that Keckly envisioned a Union of politicized African American men and women.

Building a Union of Banks

This essay discusses the relationship between the Republicans’ antebellum economic agenda and the events of the Civil War. The essay appears to begin aligned with the big argument that the Republicans were intent on changing the national economy, and the war provided a useful opportunity to do so.

“Certain Ill-Considered Phrases”

Edward Bates joined Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet hoping to act as a bulwark against radicalism in the administration. Though Bates believed that Lincoln was fundamentally conservative, he also feared that Lincoln was susceptible to radical antislavery arguments. Lincoln sometimes indulged in the rhetorical excesses that Bates associated with abolitionist political culture, and Bates worried that such radical words might eventually lead Lincoln to more radical action. Bates thus sought to steer Lincoln and his administration toward a more pragmatic and conciliatory policy toward the South—one more closely aligned with Bates’s own border state centrism and understanding of the dictates of restrained manhood. Though Bates would conclude that he had failed in his task by the time he resigned in late 1864, the triumph of immediate emancipation and—as Bates saw it—of radicalism seemed far from inevitable in 1860.

Waiting for the Perfect Moment

Unlike most abolitionists, Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster refused to support the Union war. This chapter locates their antiwar motivations in their idiosyncratic brand of nationalism. The Fosters, like all abolitionists, desired to create a more perfect Union bereft of slavery and moral prejudice. The couple, however, led a hard-line faction that also emphasized moral rigidity—the need for reformers to avoid compromise, lest they corrupt the antislavery mission. This radical vision led the Fosters to oppose the Union war as an imperfect—and therefore unacceptable—vehicle for antislavery reform. Abraham Lincoln, in their view, would never fulfill abolitionists’ desires for total emancipation and black rights. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the pair continued to oppose the Lincoln administration as an obstacle to true reform. This chapter thus opens a window onto the meanings of the Union war for those Northerners who never saw wartime emancipationist progress as inevitable.

“To Transmit and Perpetuate the Fruits of This Victory”

Taken as a genre, the regimental histories that appeared in immediate retrospect of the Civil War revealed much about how soldiers thought of themselves and the broader meaning of the conflict. Regimental histories served as a form of collaborative commemoration in literature that sought to convey the service and sacrifices of the soldiers to their home communities and thereby knit the two back together again. Overwhelmingly, regimental histories portrayed the soldiers' interpretation of the Civil War as an untroubled exhibition of patriotic duty and a mission accomplished. Insofar as the works touched upon the causes and outcomes of the Civil War, they pointed to a nefarious slave power as bringing the cataclysm upon the Union and emancipation as a wartime necessity as a way to carve the oligarchic cancer from the body politic.

“Responsible to One Another and to God”

Francis Lieber believed the war to save the Union must remain a justly waged war. He thought that if the Union military effort lapsed into indiscriminate violence, Federal armies would fail to truly preserve the Union—even if they were victorious on the battlefield. An unjustly prosecuted war would undercut the Union’s character as a beacon of enlightened civilization. Lieber worried Federals could lose their Union not only through Confederate military triumph but also through their own immoral conduct in war. Throughout the Civil War, Lieber tried to ensure Federal armies waged a just war, a quest that culminated with General Orders No. 100, a succinct guide to the laws of war. This essay considers what the Union meant to Lieber, how he defined a justly waged war, and why he insisted that the meaning of the Union necessitated a just war to save it.

Introduction

The introduction describes each of the essays and how they work together in the volume to argue for the importance of understanding different interpretations of what the Union meant to many northerners during the Civil War.