If, as William Faulkner insisted, the high-water mark of the Confederacy can be found partway up the slope of Cemetery Ridge, a low rise a few miles south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, just before two o’clock on the afternoon of July 3, 1863—a moment when, speaking for “every Southern boy fourteen years old,” Faulkner wrote, “it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet,” meaning that some fifteen thousand charging Confederates, led by Major General George Pickett, had not yet been flanked and cut to pieces by, among others, two regiments of the Second Vermont Brigade, ending Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North—the fullest flourishing of the Lincoln Republic is harder to specify.
Lincoln himself remains a complex, largely unknowable figure whose brooding dominance over our history still manages to leave room in the popular imagination for everything from the fanciful adventures of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to controversy over whether the sixteenth president had, as his biographer Carl Sandburg (and many others since) have claimed, a “streak of lavender.”55 Instead we have Lincoln’s rhetoric, itself encompassing not only the patient exposition of the Peoria speech and the Cooper Union address (which helped win him the Republican nomination) and the peerless concision of the Gettysburg Address but also the prophetic reckoning—and promised reconciliation—of the second inaugural.
The Lincoln Republic is another thing. Though named for the man who both enunciated its highest ideals and whose calculating response to the exigencies of warfare brought it into being, the Lincoln Republic owed no more—and no less—to Lincoln himself than a child owes to a parent who dies before its birth. The struggles for workers’ rights, racial justice, and economic equity in America existed before Abraham Lincoln, and carry on today. But the fusing together of those battles into a great national mobilization enlisting not only millions of Americans, but the vast power of the federal government—though largely forgotten today—is as much Lincoln’s legacy as any speech or statue. As we find ourselves, yet again, in a time when the arrogance of wealth seems restrained neither by law nor custom, it may be useful to recall how our ancestors confronted and overcame the dominant oligarchy of their day—and how, at the very moment of victory, they were cheated of their prize.
In the decades after the Whiskey Rebellion the questions of who, precisely, were the people, and who had the right to speak in their name, came to dominate American politics. The demise of Hamilton’s Federalists and the rise of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans saw not only a steady widening of the franchise—at least for whites; for free blacks the opposite was true––but the gradual transformation of informal political clubs into organized parties. The increasing influence of the people out-of-doors, climaxing in the election of Andrew Jackson, gave rise in turn to competing visions of the economy and the role of the government, with Jackson’s opponents, the Whig Party, favoring high tariffs for the protection of native industry, a national bank (which Jackson shut down), and a program of internal improvements funded by a national debt. The Jacksonians, on the other hand, were for westward expansion (and the removal of Native Americans), suspicious of banks and finance, and inclined to favor the presidency over the legislative branch.
With argument raging over everything from the financing of roads and canals to the price of bread—a meeting called by the Locofocos, a faction of the Democratic Party in New York City, led to a flour riot in February 1837—to states’ rights, immigration, and the role of the Catholic Church, neither Whigs nor Democrats were able to fully contain the debate. United in their hatred of Jackson and his works, the Whigs were vulnerable to raids by temperance crusaders and nativists. The Democrats, meanwhile, were riven by faction, with conservative Hunkers and radical Barnburners fighting for control in New York State and over Vice President John C. Calhoun’s theory that individual states had the right to “nullify” federal laws, pitting him against President Jackson. Yet amid all this discord, there was one issue both parties agreed was out of bounds.
As has often been noted, the words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear in the Constitution. In this the Framers were merely pioneering what would become common ground for their successors—deferral of the issue. Historians still differ over whether, by incorporating the three-fifths clause, which apportioned congressional representation according to the free population of a state and “three fifths of all other Persons,” and a further stipulation that a “Person held to Service or Labour in one State” who escapes into another must be returned (without specifying how this is to be enforced), the Framers were bowing to slaveholders, or merely buying time.56 Because at the turn of the nineteenth century, the belief that slavery was, as Lincoln would later put it, on “the course of ultimate extinction” was widespread. In Virginia, yields of tobacco kept falling due to depletion of the soil. By 1804, all the northern states had banned slavery; four years later, Congress outlawed the African slave trade. Though native-born slaves could still be bought and sold throughout the South, the market for their labor was shrinking fast—until the invention of the cotton gin.
Unlike the long staple cotton that grew only on the barrier islands of Georgia and South Carolina, upland or short staple cotton was full of seeds; it could take a slave a whole day to process, or “gin,” a single pound. By allowing two slaves to process fifty pounds of cotton a day, Eli Whitney transformed the American economy, turning the Plantation South into an export powerhouse that produced 75 percent of the world’s supply of cotton—most of it bound for the mills of Britain or New England.57 Growing demand fuelled by the Industrial Revolution saw cotton production double every decade between 1800 and 1850, setting off a boom in the price of both land and slaves. With a combined value of some $3.8 billion, slaves were by a considerable measure the largest asset class in the American economy, worth more than the total value of all the buildings and farmland in the South—or, for that matter, more than all manufacturing and railroads in the entire country.58 When James Hammond, the South Carolina planter, told his fellow senators in March 1858 that “Cotton is king” he was not exaggerating.59 Yet less than five years after he spoke, that kingdom would be in ruins.
At first, the only people who objected to slavery were the slaves themselves, and abolitionists, many on religious grounds. Rebellion is as old as slavery, but with most slaves dispersed on plantations, organized resistance was rare—indeed, two of the earliest American examples, Gabriel’s rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 and Denmark Vesey’s revolt in Charleston twenty years later, took place in cities. Both were quickly—and brutally—suppressed. As for the abolitionists, they saw slavery primarily as a moral issue—which of course it was. But however sincere their convictions, or eloquent their denunciations, they had little political influence.
In response to agitation by free blacks, the four New England states quickly abolished slavery,60 joined by Vermont (which never had it in the first place), Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.* But Kentucky and Tennessee entered the Union as slave states, balancing the total at eight each. From then onward states were typically admitted in pairs, maintaining a balance in the Senate—an arrangement formalized by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which also barred slavery from any other territory north of latitude 36° 30’ in the lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. (The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 already banned slavery in the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains and north of the Ohio River. That measure was uncontroversial—partly because southern tobacco planters were happy to avoid competition.) Despite the slaves’ misery, white indifference or fear for their fellow citizens—and the prevalence of racial prejudice even among many abolitionists—helped keep the “peculiar institution” off the political agenda.
In his diary, John Quincy Adams describes walking home with John C. Calhoun on the afternoon Congress voted through the Missouri Compromise. “Slavery,” the former president believed, was “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.” Calhoun was slavery’s most eloquent defender. Earlier in the week he’d told Adams that should slavery be threatened, the South would be prepared to leave the Union and form an alliance with Great Britain.
“I said that would be returning to the colonial state,” Adams recalled.
“Yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them,” Calhoun had replied.
After the vote the two men discussed their differing views of labor, with Adams arguing that the “confounding . . . of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery,” while Calhoun countered that on the contrary, having slaves to perform manual labor was “the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” Adams was appalled. “The discussion of this Missouri question,” he wrote, “has betrayed the secret of their souls.” Southerners “fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habits of overbearing . . . and cannot treat negroes like dogs.” If the “Union must be dissolved,” Adams decided, “slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.” Yet the two men parted amicably, since “for the present . . . this contest is laid asleep.”61 Keeping it asleep—excluding the desperate cry of the slave from the political arena—would be the glue that bound America’s political class through the next three decades.
What woke them up? The slaves themselves. By continuing to revolt, slaves demolished the myth of “the happy slave,” while Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), the Seminole Rebellion (1835), and above all the example of the Haitian Revolution showed what slaves could do—and would do, if given the means and opportunity. A growing body of allies was becoming increasingly militant. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator, demanding immediate emancipation and vowing to be “as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice . . . urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!”
Though three-quarters of the Liberator’s subscribers were black, the American Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison also led, attracted many whites, among them Theodore Weld. In 1834, Weld and a group of students at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati held a series of debates—participants included both former slaves and the sons of slave owners—culminating in a vote for immediate abolition, and a resolution to help free the 1,500 slaves residing just south of the Ohio River in Kentucky. When the school’s board of trustees† moved to ban abolitionist activity on campus, forty of the Lane rebels decamped for the new Oberlin College, making it the first racially integrated undergraduate institution in the country.
Garrison was a revolutionary, who believed, as he said in an oration on July 4, 1837, that American society was built on “slavery and the slave trade.” Branding the Constitution a “covenant with death,” Garrison and his followers shunned electoral politics.62 But the influence of abolitionist movement culture soon spread far beyond the bounds of the movement itself. In contrast with other reform movements, which tended to be organized from the top down by a genteel elite who, in Garrison’s words, “have little sympathy with the common people,” abolitionism had “a republican character” welcoming “persons of both sexes, and of all classes and complexions—farmers, mechanics, workingmen, ‘niggers,’ women, and all.”63
Garrison’s determination to “go for the whole people” wasn’t just a figure of speech. Most of the women who signed the feminist Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 got their introduction to politics through the abolitionist movement. Two of them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who drafted the declaration, and Lucretia Mott, first met when they were both excluded, because they were women, from the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, prompting Garrison, the leader of the American delegation, to sit with the women in the gallery at Freemasons’ Hall, where he was joined by Nathaniel Rogers, editor of the New Hampshire abolitionist paper the Herald of Freedom.64
It was Rogers, with his firsthand knowledge of working conditions in the mill towns along the Merrimac, who, reflecting on abolitionism’s failures, concluded they had been addressing the wrong audience. Instead of preaching to the gentry, he wrote, “We got to look to the working people of the North, to sustain and carry on the Anti-Slavery Movement. The people who work and are disrespected here, and who disrespect labor themselves, and disrespect themselves because they labor—they have got to abolish slavery. And in order to do this, they must be emancipated themselves first.”65
Rogers’s linkage of southern bondsmen and northern workers, whom he called “the slaves of Capital,” won him few friends among the wealthy Quakers and northern industrialists who supplied the bulk of the funds—if not the rank and file—for the movement. In the very first issue of the Liberator, Garrison himself warned against what he described as an attempt “to inflame the minds of our working classes against the more opulent, and to persuade men that they are contemned and oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy.” As Eric Foner points out, while “both abolitionists and labor leaders spoke of the alliance between the Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash—the textile manufacturers of New England and slave owners of the South . . . each drew from it a different conclusion. To the labor movement, factory owner and slave owner were both non-producers who fattened on the fruits of the labor of others; to the abolitionists what was objectionable in the factory owners was precisely their proslavery political stance, not their treatment of their employees.”66 Yet as Foner also notes, “the American anti-slavery movement, which began as a moral crusade, eventually found it would have to turn to politics to achieve its goals.”67 To do that, it would need to find a way to make working men and women see they had a stake in the fight.
When Abraham Lincoln told the crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair in September 1859 that “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor,” he wasn’t quoting Karl Marx, whose own variation on the labor theory of value wouldn’t appear until his 1865 speech “Value, Price and Profit.” (Marx himself was happy to credit “the famous” Ben Franklin for the view that labor was the source and measure of all value.)68
Lincoln’s use of this “producerist” language was deliberate and self-conscious. It allowed him to appeal to the widest possible audience—as he remarked in Milwaukee, though farmers “are neither better nor worse than any other class . . . [they are, however,] the most numerous class”—while also assembling a coalition which, though perhaps inured to slavery where it existed, had a common interest in opposing the encroachments of slavery’s defenders on their own lives. By the 1850s, he had a rich stock of incident and anecdote to draw upon.
The repeated failure to pass the Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from any territories acquired as a result of the war with Mexico, split the Democratic Party, with Northern Democrats rallying instead to the new Free Soil Party, many of whose leaders, like David Wilmot himself, professed indifference or outright hostility to blacks, but viewed the spread of slavery as a bar to the settlement of white farmers and workers. Their opponents, too, were divided between “Conscience Whigs” and “Cotton Whigs.” The Compromise of 1850—brokered by Kentucky Whig Henry Clay and Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas, which theoretically allowed slavery in the Southwest, and more concretely made the rendition of fugitive slaves a federal responsibility—represented a last, doomed attempt to keep slavery out of politics. Doomed because even as southerners became convinced that unless slavery were free to expand it would ultimately collapse, northerners—and a growing number of non-slave-owning southern whites—had become increasingly conscious of their own peril.
From the very first, slavery had imposed limits on Americans’ freedom of debate—through the dominance the three-fifths clause gave to southern strength in the House of Representatives and in presidential elections, and then through an actual “gag rule” forbidding the House from even considering anti-slavery petitions.69 The murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an Illinois printer, by a pro-slavery mob, and the brutal beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate showed how far abolitionism’s opponents were prepared to go to maintain their power. Numbering fifteen states by 1850, the “Slave Power” balked at tariffs or taxes, saw no need for publicly financed schools or roads, and seemed ever-alert for new lands to conquer, from Kansas to Cuba. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, forced into law by a Democratic Party that controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House, set off a bloody battle for Kansas with free-soil settlers subject to repeated violence while the Pierce administration took the pro-slavery side.
In 1856 a new party, the Republicans, finally made slavery into an electoral issue. Turnout in the North reached 83 percent, with supporters of nominee John C. Frémont forming “Wide Awake” clubs and parading through nighttime streets by torchlight chanting “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!” Republican rallies frequently mobilized crowds of twenty to fifty thousand, with one in Philadelphia attracting a majority of the city’s voting age population.70 But former president Millard Fillmore, running on the nativist American Party as a “moderate,” drew enough votes to give Democrat James Buchanan the presidency. Just two days after administering the oath of office, Chief Justice Roger Taney handed down his decision in the case of Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken by his master into a free state. By a 7–2 majority the court barred Congress from any interference with slavery; Taney also declared that even free blacks were not American citizens, as blacks had “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” If the 1856 Republican campaign had been a dress rehearsal for revolution, inspiring but ultimately abortive, the Dred Scott decision insured that next time the revolution would not be denied.
The Republican Party of 1860 was still a movement party; slavery, at last, was the dominant issue. Yet the nominee was cautious. In his speech at Cooper Union in February he framed the question not as immediate abolition, but simply whether the Constitution prohibited the federal government from controlling the spread of slavery—as the Supreme Court had just ruled. The court, Lincoln declared, had been divided—and was mistaken. As for his critics, who derided “Black Republicans” for promoting not just abolition but social equality, Lincoln preferred ridicule to rebuttal, as he’d done in Springfield three years earlier, lampooning “that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife . . . In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”71
To overcome entrenched power he saw, and described, not in sectional terms but as a “political dynasty,” Lincoln assembled a majoritarian coalition of interests that, from a solidly abolitionist core, embraced not only the New England artisan and the western farmer, but urban immigrants in the Midwest and even female slaves. In Hartford in March 1860 he gave a speech linking the rights of workers to strike with the need to limit slavery—and set off a revival of the Wide Awake clubs that roused a young generation disgusted by the corrupt and compromised politics of the 1850s.72 That summer William Seward, campaigning in Detroit on behalf of the man who’d beaten him for the Republican nomination, found himself addressing fully a tenth of the city’s population at a single rally. “The reason we didn’t get an honest President in 1856,” Seward told the crowd, “was because the old men of the last generation were not Wide-Awake, and the young men of this generation hadn’t got their eyes open. Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep, and the young men throughout the land are Wide Awake.”73
If legions of “woke” activists in the streets wasn’t enough déjà vu, Republicans frequently described their opponents in terms that seem remarkably contemporary. “This Slave Power consists,” said Charles Francis Adams, “of about three hundred and fifty thousand active men,” which in a population of 31.4 million amounted to little more than . . . the top 1 percent. Yet this tiny minority was able to control fifteen states directly, influence the government of five or six more, and through its “numerous friends and dependents” elsewhere, determine the course of the federal government. While reformers argued among themselves, warned Adams, the Slave Power “never relaxes its vigilance over public events.”74
Though the South threatened to secede if Lincoln won the election, it is a mistake to see the dispute as primarily sectional, and an even bigger mistake to see the Republicans’ republican rhetoric—their resentment of the Slave Power’s economic as well as political coercion, Lincoln’s frequent endorsement of the view that labor creates value, and that labor is entitled to the full value of its products—as a mask for capitalist consolidation. Lincoln himself, who as a not-very-pious Kentucky-born lawyer should, on aggregate data, have been a pro-slavery Democrat, is sufficient warning against easy generalizations.75 What we can say is that once the South did secede, Lincoln pursued a course that led inexorably to full emancipation—and to greater interference in the rights of property than any administration before or since.
When the war broke out in April 1861, there were only 16,367 men in the whole US Army, including 1,100 officers—of whom about a fifth resigned to join the Confederate States Army. Lincoln’s initial call for 75,000 volunteers was easily met, and of the over two million men who eventually fought for the Union the vast majority—more than 94 percent—were volunteers.
In European armies, General Grant wrote in his memoirs, the majority of soldiers “are taken from a class of people who . . . have very little interest in the contest . . . Our armies were composed of men who were able to read, men who knew what they were fighting for.”76 They also knew what they were fighting against. In the same speech in which he’d proclaimed cotton’s dominion, South Carolina senator James Hammond laid out his view that “in all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” This class, said Hammond, “constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government.” Hammond argued that restricting that role to black slaves guaranteed southern whites were all social equals—making the Confederacy what would later be called a Herrenvolk (master race) democracy.
Some whites, North and South, eagerly accepted the “psychological wage”—as W. E. B. Du Bois described it—of racial privilege.77 Others realized that a society built on the backs of “mud-sills” had little claim to republican virtue. The soldier in the Ninety-Third Illinois who wrote to his parents that he and his two brothers—all farmers’ sons—were eager for the “chance to try our Enfields on some of their villainous hides and let a little of that high Blood out of them, which I think will increase their respect for the northern mud sills” was not very unusual.
Nor was Peter Welsh, an Irish-born private in the Twenty-Eighth Massachusetts, who angrily rebuked his wife back in Ireland for questioning his judgment fighting for the “Black Republican” Lincoln administration. “This is the first test of a modern free government in the act of sustaining itself against internal enemys,” he wrote in 1863. “[I]f it fail then the hopes of milions fall and the desighns and wishes of all tyrants will suceed the old cry will be sent forth from the aristocrats of europe that such is the comon lot of all republics.” Welsh, a carpenter, wrote to his father-in-law that “Irishmen and their descendants have . . . a stake in [this] nation . . . America is Irlands refuge Irlands last hope destroy this republic and her hopes are blasted.”78 After Appomattox, a fifty-one-year-old colonel from New Jersey told his wife that it had been his “privilege to live and take part in the struggle that has decided for all time to come that Republics are not a failure.”79
One need not agree with the historian Charles A. Beard that slavery “hardly deserved a footnote in the history of the Civil War” to see that the war was also—especially in the minds of the men who fought—a battle to save the republic.80 Or to recognize how profoundly Lincoln, both by mobilizing the nation to fight, and by acting to end slavery to win that fight, would change the nature of that republic.
It was the war, more than the man himself, that gave birth to the Lincoln Republic. At least since his speech in Peoria in 1854, Lincoln had been clear in his view that civic equality was “the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” Slavery, he’d said then, was not just wrong, it was “monstrous . . . because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” Yet as he admitted Lincoln saw no way to end actually existing slavery by legislative fiat—a view he repeated in his first inaugural.
Once again it was the slaves themselves that forced the issue, fleeing plantations in their thousands for Union lines, and gradually making the administration realize that they—their bodies, their labor, their eagerness to fight for freedom—were the hinge on which the fortunes of war would swing. In that sense, at least, the Emancipation Proclamation was the Lincoln Republic’s founding document. Not just for what it did—which, in practical terms, wasn’t all that much, since the writ of the federal government on January 1, 1863, didn’t actually run to the states “in rebellion.” But for what it promised: when the war was won, the Confederacy’s slaves would be “forever free.”
As he’d intended, Lincoln’s Proclamation put paid to Gladstone’s campaign to have Britain recognize the Confederacy. It also meant that abolition in America would follow a very different course than it had in Britain’s colonies. When the British abolished slavery in 1833, the government had paid slave owners £20 million in compensation—an enormous sum amounting to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual budget. (Gladstone’s father, John, received £106,769 for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations—the equivalent of about £80 million today.)81 Before the war even most American abolitionists balked at the cost of “buying out” slavery. With Lincoln’s promise, and its fulfillment in the Thirteenth Amendment three years later, the government had simply expropriated and liquidated assets worth nearly fifty times the entire $78 million federal budget for 1860.82 Imposing a total ban on the use of fossil fuels today would be a small step in comparison.‡
Other wartime economic measures were almost as significant—and as radical. In order to finance the war the government issued over a billion dollars worth of bonds, many of them sold to investors overseas, and imposed the country’s first federal income tax—a flat 3 percent on incomes of over $800 a year—and a property tax. (Since only the top 3 percent of the population earned enough to have to pay it, the income tax was widely popular, but also ineffective; in 1862 the measure was revised to make the tax progressive, with a 3 percent rate on incomes above $600 and 5 percent on incomes over $10,000, and on the income of Americans who lived abroad.) The Legal Tender Act of 1862 allowed the government to issue “fiat currency”—paper money not convertible to gold or silver—printing hundreds of millions of dollars in “greenbacks” to pay for goods and services.
At the same time, the absence of Southern Democratic legislators let the Republican Congress act both on infrastructure projects long favored by former Whigs and the homesteading agenda of the former Free Soil Democrats. The Morrill Tariff not only raised revenue to fight the war, but also shielded American industry from European competition; the Homestead Act and the Land-Grant College Act provided free land, public education, and the agricultural development of the West; the Pacific Railroad Act launched a continental railroad that led to the creation of a national market and accelerated the settlement of the frontier.83
Although Marx himself§ wrote to Lincoln that “the working classes of Europe understood at once . . . that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor,” and that “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes,”84 the Republican program fell well short of socialism. J. & W. Seligman (which got its start selling US government bonds in Europe), Lehman Brothers (Alabama cotton brokers who moved to New York City just before the war), Citibank (the underwriter on $50 million in Union war bonds) and the Morgan bank (J. Pierpont Morgan sold defective carbines to the Union army) all grew fat on war profits.85 John D. Rockefeller, who like many wealthy men paid a substitute $300 to take his place in the army, kept the family’s shipping business going on government contracts until his new venture—a Cleveland oil refinery—took off. Philip Armour made millions supplying meat to the Union army. The railroads gorged on 155 million acres of land grants from the public domain.86
But for every baby robber baron, there were thousands like the lieutenant in the Second Minnesota who, though bitterly opposed to emancipation, enlisted to save the Union, and by 1863 had come to the view that “Slavery and Aristocracy go hand in hand. An Aristocracy brought on this war—that Aristocracy must be broken up.”87
Or August Willich. A Prussian immigrant who during the Palatine uprising of 1848 had the young Friedrich Engels as his aide-de-camp, and later led the left opposition to Marx in the Communist League, Willich edited a German-language newspaper in Cincinnati before enlisting in the Union Army. Elected as colonel of the Thirty-Second Indiana Volunteers,¶ Willich was in command of the regiment at Shiloh where, on the second day, his men began to fire wildly. Riding to the front of his troops he commanded the regimental band to play “La Marseillaise,” anthem of all republican movements, and then led his men in a bayonet charge which broke the Confederate line.
Was Willich deluded in believing the Civil War was a revolutionary struggle? His old sectarian adversary didn’t think so. “In the Civil War in North America,” Marx wrote, “Willich showed that he is more than a visionary.”88 In December 1863 the War Department worried that, just as General Grant was gearing up for a spring offensive, half the volunteer regiments were about to go out of existence. With their three-year enlistments about to expire, none of these men were subject to the draft. Yet 136,000 of these volunteers, who’d seen some of the hardest fighting in the war, re-enlisted. In Georgia, on the front lines of the transformation wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation, whole regiments of Sherman’s army signed up en masse.89
Those men, too, knew what they were fighting for. So did the thirty-eight-year-old black barber from Philadelphia, who after fighting through the war with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts decided that mere freedom was not enough. “If we fight to maintain a Republican Government, we want Republican privileges,” he declared. “All we ask is the proper enjoyment of the rights of citizenship.”90
His view found its strongest expression in a new publication, launched by Radical Republicans, as the most aggressive campaigners for racial justice called themselves, within weeks of the surrender at Appomattox. Declaring the Union victory a triumph of “democratic principles everywhere,” the editors of the Nation were jubilant: “We utter no idle boast when we say that if the conflict of the ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword, was not closed on the day on which Lee threw down his arms, the issue was placed beyond doubt.”91
If it was the war that made the Lincoln Republic possible—necessary, even—it was Reconstruction that made it real. The Confederate army had been defeated, but the passage of “Black Codes” in many Southern states, aimed at keeping freed slaves on the land and obliged to work for their former masters, and race riots in Memphis in 1866 and New Orleans the same year indicated that winning the peace was going to be at least as difficult. Under the Louisiana code, blacks were required to have a labor contract by the tenth of January—and not allowed to leave until the following year. Refusal to work or absence from work was defined as vagrancy, which, upon conviction, meant being rented out as convict labor for private or public projects. South Carolina required blacks to pass an examination and pay a fee ranging from ten dollars to one hundred dollars in order to hold any job other than farm laborer or domestic servant.92
For Radical Republicans, who emerged from the 1866 elections dominant in both houses of Congress, such intransigence could only be countered by the active exercise of federal power—and by the complete integration of the freedmen into political and civil life. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania congressman who, along with Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, provided the Radicals’ ideological leadership, said in the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, one of the cornerstones of Reconstruction, that he had been waiting his whole life for “any fortunate chance” to remodel “all our institutions” in such a way as to free them from “every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich . . . [N]o distinction would be tolerated in this purified Republic but what arose from merit and conduct.”93
Radicalism “united the Jacksonian Democratic belief in the unlimited rule of the majority with the Whiggist conception of an active state.” If Southern Democrats bitterly resented the changes wrought by the war, and moderate Republicans viewed them as temporary emergency measures—and favored scaling back the state’s influence over the economy and private property at the earliest opportunity—“Radicals . . . welcomed” such developments unequivocally.94
Like Lenin’s quip that Communism was simply rural electrification plus all power to the Soviets, it sometimes seemed that Radical Republicanism was just black suffrage and equal citizenship—which, after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, left equal citizenship as the sole ground of contention. Radicals, drawing on free labor ideology, believed that “economic independence, gained through the ownership of real property or the possession of a skill” were the only guarantees of genuine equality.95 Stephens in particular argued forcefully for confiscation of rebel land and redistribution to the slaves: “No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless. Small independent landholders are the support and guardians of republican liberty.”96 But as the New York Times, the voice of Northern plutocracy, warned, “if Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital . . . there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South.”97
Still, so long as the arguments were restricted to the rights of freed blacks, Republicans held firm, winning the presidency in 1868. As commander of Union forces in the West, Ulysses Grant had welcomed black “contrabands” into his camps, paying them for their labor. A supporter of the Reconstruction Acts passed by Radicals over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, Grant took office determined that black lives, and votes, would be protected, sending three bills to Congress allowing the president to call out federal troops to enforce voting rights and federal prosecutors to pursue the Ku Klux Klan when state law enforcement failed to act.
Resistance to Radical Reconstruction wasn’t confined to the South. Northern investors, many of them former abolitionists, who’d looked forward to the resumption of the cotton boom under wage labor—and enlightened Yankee tutelage—were distressed to discover that, left to their own devices, former slaves didn’t want to plant cotton. From the Port Royal experiment on the Carolina coast during the war to the few plantations that were divided and sold to former slaves, “black landowners and renters preferred to farm much in the manner of ante-bellum upcountry white yeomen, concentrating on food crops as a first priority.” And while the investors were disappointed, Southern landowners were desperate, since even if only “a few black farmers succeeded economically . . . all the others will be dissatisfied with their wage.”98
The glimpse into the future afforded by the Lincoln Republic was simply too dangerous. What did this future look like? On December 17, 1871, the International Workingmen’s Association held a parade in New York City to commemorate the martyrs of the Paris Commune. The front rank—the place of honor—was assigned to the Skidmore Guards, an armed militia of black veterans. The seventy thousand marchers that followed included delegations from the Cuban independence movement (marching under a Cuban flag), an array of trade unions, an Irish band, and both the German-language Section 1 and the English-language Section 12 of the IWA. (Section 12 was led by the feminist campaigner and free-love advocate Victoria Wood-hull,# who in 1872 became the first woman to run for president as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party.)100
By far the largest cohort, however, were supporters of the eighthour movement. A goal of social reformers like the utopian Robert Owen, who limited the workday to eight hours in his experimental communities in Scotland and the US, the American eight-hour movement initially struggled to escape the shadow of slavery’s more salient horror. Emancipation changed all that, and in 1865 the Eight Hour movement spread rapidly from Boston—where it was immediately endorsed by Wendell Phillips, who’d displaced his mentor William Lloyd Garrison as head of the American Anti-Slavery Society**—to Illinois, where in March 1867 the legislature enacted the country’s first eight-hour law. Marx hailed it as “the first fruit of the American Civil War.”
Until they marched south, many Union volunteers had never seen a slave. Having risked their lives to end one form of degradation, many came home determined to continue the fight. For such men, the war had been a nightmare, with greenback-fuelled inflation compounding the misery of combat, illness, and privation. Ira Steward, a Boston machinist, spoke for many when he warned that “while we will bear with patient endurance the burden of the public debt, we yet want it to be known that the workingmen of America will in future claim a more equal share in the wealth their industry creates in peace and a more equal participation in the privileges and blessings of those free institutions, defended by their manhood on many a bloody field of battle . . .”101
Making explicit the link between workers’ rights and republican principles, a submission to the Massachusetts commission on working hours argued that current arrangements left workers no time “to comply with the public duties which we are having thrust upon us, or for the exercise of any personal gifts or longings for refined pleasures.”102
Faced with such demands, a group calling themselves Liberal Republicans began to reconsider their allegiance to the priority of labor over capital. Horace White, co-owner of the Chicago Tribune, warned: “Capital moves the world and keeps the hammer, the engine and the spindle at work, but it must be handled judiciously, and receive its remuneration, else its motive power ceases and it flies away to countries which appreciate it more highly.”103
Fear of what might happen if power currently wielded by the “best men” wound up in the hands of workingmen and women even prompted some Republicans to waver in their devotion to the tariff. “Protectionism,” warned Nation editor E. L. Godkin, “contains the germ of communism; what may be in the hands of the sober, thoughtful capitalist a means of stimulating a useful industry, becomes in the hands of ignorant and fanatical socialists a justification of an equal division of goods.”104
Though these former Radicals now described themselves as “liberals,” and their new views as laissez-faire—implying a detached, Olympian attitude to the struggle between capital and labor—Wendell Phillips vowed that so long as the privileges of capital were sheltered by the state, labor would defend itself. “Labor comes up, and says, ‘They have shotted their cannon to the lips; they have roughground their swords as in battle; they have adopted every new method; they have invented every dangerous machine; and it is all planted like a great park of artillery against us. They have incorporated wealth; they have hidden behind banks; they have concealed themselves in currency; they have sheltered themselves in taxation; they have passed rules to govern us: and we will improve upon the lesson they have taught us. When they disarm, we will—not before.’”105
The eight-hour movement, not racial prejudice alone, was the rock that broke Radical Reconstruction. “Filtered through the ballot-box comes the will of the people, and statesmen bow to it,” said Phillips. It was that specter of a mass movement—terrifying even in defeat—that led E. L. Godkin’s Nation, a journal founded to champion the freedmen’s cause, to greet the fall of the Paris Commune with a denunciation of governments led by “trashy whites and ignorant negroes” in the American South.106 Like the protagonist of Brecht’s “The Solution,” who suggests “the government . . . dissolve the people / And elect another,” Godkin even co-authored a proposal with New York governor Samuel Tilden recommending the vote in large cities be restricted to taxpayers.107
If the battles of Reconstruction were too recent to tamper with the franchise—at least on economic grounds—race was another matter. Liberal Republicans joined Democrats in 1872 on a fusion ticket calling for an end to Reconstruction. And though Grant won reelection by a 12 percent margin of the popular vote, and an even wider margin in the Electoral College,†† elite support for enforcing black civil rights was exhausted. Reconstruction, declared the Nation, was “simply a cover for robbery.”108 When a mob of white Democrats and Confederate veterans murdered 150 freedmen in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, the Nation depicted the massacre as a battle between a government composed of “ignorant negroes and white rogues” and the more able citizens “who find their civilized and complex society . . . suddenly taken possession of by a large body of people sunk in barbarism.” If only Southern blacks would stop clamoring for their rights. “To those who say the negroes cannot trust the whites to govern them,” the Nation replied: “Where they are forced to trust them, all goes well.”109
Far more “intersectional” in their thinking than their opponents, the turncoat Radicals abandoned both the freedmen and democracy, replacing republican citizens with economic man. Recognizing the difficulty of convincing a majority not to vote in their own economic interest, they moved first to restrict the scope for intervention—in the economy, by replacing greenbacks with hard currency, and in the workplace, by denying the legitimacy of laws regulating working hours and conditions. By 1873, when Justice Stephen Field wrote his influential dissent in the Slaughter-House Cases, the Fourteenth Amendment itself, written to protect the rights of freedmen in the South, was already being reinterpreted to protect corporations and private property from state regulation.110
But laissez-faire alone didn’t go far enough. Since prosperity now depended on the unimpeded reign of capital, liberals soon demanded a state with the capacity and will to use coercive power against its own citizens. Turning former slaves into a potential Southern proletariat precisely when Northern workers were becoming increasingly assertive, the Lincoln Republic had forced the issue of economic democracy. It was a short step from applauding the “redeemers” who restored racial order in the South to cheering on the coal operators who used Pinkertons to break the “Molly Maguires” strike in the Pennsylvania coalfields in 1875 to using federal troops against striking railway workers.
In March 1877 Rutherford B. Hayes became president despite having lost both the popular and electoral vote—to Democrat Samuel Tilden. (After months of wrangling, Hayes was allowed to take office in return for pledging to end the military occupation of the South.) That July, workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad walked out after having their wages cut for the third time in a year; within a week the strike had spread to all of the major railroad lines. Thomas Alexander Scott, head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, suggested strikers should be given “a rifle diet for a few days.” In Pittsburgh, the state militia fired on strikers, killing forty people. In St. Louis, white railwaymen and black stevedores and boatmen walked out together in the nation’s first general strike. Reading and Scranton, where the city’s workers also called a general strike, were placed under martial law. In Illinois the governor called out the National Guard and the army.
Baltimore, which in 1861 had rioted against federal troops marching through to defend Washington, now frantically requested President Hayes deploy the army inside the city.111 On July 21, with the Maryland National Guard trapped inside Camden Yards, Hayes sent in the marines to put down the strike. The same federal force that had only recently been withdrawn from the fight against racial terror in the South was now enlisted on the side of the robber barons.
From the Emancipation Proclamation to the Compromise of 1877, the life of the Lincoln Republic was barely fourteen years. Yet through the Gilded Age that followed, and the Progressive Era that followed that, the ghost of the lost republic would not lie still. The Big Money might be in the driving seat, Jim Crow the law of the land, but the dream of equality did not die. Broken by guns and bayonets, labor would rise again. So would the descendants of slaves. Like waves in the open ocean, from tiny disturbances and imperceptible ripples their gathering swell would grow and subside, retreat and recur, from Michigan to Mississippi, from that day to this, sustained not just by hope but by the memory of what the Lincoln Republic had been—and done. It happened once. It can happen again.
* “Gradual emancipation” laws in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut meant some slaves remained in bondage for decades. In New Jersey slavery didn’t end until the state legislature ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865.
† The board’s response was endorsed by Lane’s president, Lyman Beecher, who lived on campus with his family including his daughter, Harriet, the future author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
‡ For perspective, the current federal budget is $3.8 trillion. Estimates of the cost of buying out $3.8 billion worth of slaves in today’s money range from $44 billion to $6.5 trillion—more than the combined market capitalization of the world’s ten largest oil companies.
§ A frequent contributor to the New York Tribune, and a longtime friend of its editor, Charles A. Dana, Marx had apparently once considered immigrating to Texas. Marx admired the president he described as “Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class,” and remained in touch with Dana, who during the war became the White House’s intermediary with General Grant.
¶ In most volunteer regiments the men elected their company officers.
# Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, the newspaper Woodhull edited with her sister Tennessee Claflin, published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto in the United States.
** Unlike Garrison, who greeted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by declaring “my vocation as an Abolitionist, thank God, is ended,” Phillips agreed with Frederick Douglass that without a guarantee of suffrage and redistribution of land to the freedmen, emancipation by itself would prove a hollow promise. Garrison’s motion to disband the AASS in the summer of 1865 was rejected by a vote of 118–48, leaving Phillips in charge of the organization.
†† The Liberal Republican-Democrat nominee, Horace Greeley, died before the Electoral College voted; his electors were scattered among four other candidates.