Antebellum Republicans and their Whig predecessors might have wished for a more active government, while their Democratic rivals might have feared one, but in practical terms, for most of the antebellum era, Washington had rarely intruded into the people’s lives, neither overburdening them with taxation nor providing assistance for them in their personal times of trouble.1 Businessmen and community boosters understood the need for federal action in matters of tariffs, public land sales, and protection of contracts and for federal financial support for transportation improvements. The average citizen might come into contact with the national government through the postal service and land purchases; in some areas, they might observe the government at work in the presence of lighthouses, courts, customs houses, land title offices, armories, or naval establishments. Perhaps they were aware of other military installations, but the small army, hardly visible to most Americans, had the majority of its forts and barracks on the West Coast and the interior frontier. Nevertheless, few Americans worked for the federal government.2 Consequently, the men and women who went to war in 1861 were neither connected to nor familiar with the national government of the country they hoped to preserve.
Before the war, politicians funded their work in various ways that encouraged people to expect the light touch of government on their pocket books, especially in a direct way. The federal government generally relied on the sale of land and on import duties to cover its operating expenses. Indeed, in 1861, tariffs made up over 90 percent of the government’s income, with land sales making up much of the rest of its revenues. In fact, for over half a century before secession, the federal government had not tapped into an internal revenue source, except for some select excise taxes. It did not even tax liquor anymore.3
States were equally adept at limiting direct taxation. New Jersey simply avoided it by relying on money paid to the state by railroad and canal companies.4 Tax revenues tended to stay close to those who paid, with local governments keeping the majority of the money collected. In Wisconsin, this meant that local governments held on to over 80 percent of the tax revenue collected. Residents there paid taxes on real estate and also at the county level on personal property.5
Towns, such as Springfield, Massachusetts, offered limited services that did not require broader revenue sources. They therefore could rely on local government’s traditional tax on property, which property owners did their best to keep low.6 If special needs arose, municipalities often borrowed money. Jacksonville, Illinois, for example, relied on private subscriptions or county and town bonds to pay for transportation improvements.7 While individuals might prefer such an approach to funding government, they could suffer inconvenience or worse from the consequences. In Connecticut, Hartford’s antebellum water system, built in the mid-1850s, delivered an inadequate supply of river water through its undersized pipes to the city’s residents. Neither New Haven nor Hartford, the dual state capital cities of Connecticut, had a system of paved streets; wartime taxes for wartime concerns kept it that way for the duration.8 In Wisconsin, no municipality had a system for delivering fresh, clean water to its residents, who generally depended on private wells. And no town in that Midwestern state, including Milwaukee, had a sewage system. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, such poor sanitation arrangements led to regular cholera epidemics across the state.9
The government as stranger did not last long once the sectional crisis turned into war, but it did influence the initial reaction to war’s outbreak. Northerners eventually saw the federal government asserting greater control over raising troops when it implemented a military draft. The government raised taxes on many products and, aided with a new Internal Revenue Bureau, put a levy on a man’s hard-earned income.10 During the war, the people felt the government intrude into the economy and their lives in other ways as it sold bonds and printed paper money, exerted power over the judicial process as it suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and used military necessity to justify its attack on the constitutionally sanctioned institution of slavery.
By the end of the war, some Northerners came to expect more of their government, if only in limited ways for a limited time, when they considered how to deal with wounded veterans, war widows, and ex-slaves. The war’s long-lasting effects, however, did not include a much more powerful or intrusive federal government beyond the efforts at reconstructing the erstwhile Confederacy. While most Northerners abhorred secession, they also continued to hold on to notions of federalism and states’ rights. It was in fact upon the belief in the power of states within this governmental arrangement that had provided the rationalization for the passage of personal liberty laws that undermined the federal fugitive slave legislation of 1850.11 It also was upon federalism and the power of the state governments that the states began to build the nation’s Civil War army.12
Despite the dynamics of the war, Northerners, used to minimal contact with their national government, remained very much rooted in the personal connections of their localities and their states.13 The circumstances of war could reinforce those loyalties. Military companies were recruited among neighbors, thus allowing their men to take a local identity with them to war. Regiments carried states’ names and flags with them into battle, helping to nurture feelings of loyalty and affection even for home folk who did not have loved ones in their ranks as they closely followed their progress through the war.
Other wartime events also confirmed community loyalties as the nation endured its most serious crisis since the founding. When her husband William left for the war, Iowan Mary Vermilion went to reside with her in-laws in Indiana for some time, but grew homesick. Living with Democrats in a region rife with what she considered disloyal sentiment had an impact on the patriotic woman and she longed to return “to our brave, loyal Iowa.”14 After she fulfilled that wish, she expressed her satisfaction with her home state and made it clear to her husband that she did not “want to live anywhere else.” At the close of one spring day in 1863, she wrote to William about the beauty of the area that reinforced her sense of place. “I sat in the west door this evening and watched the sun sink to rest in a bed of gold and purple clouds,” she told him. “I looked over the landscape and thought what a goodly prospect it was. What a beautiful country!”15 Yet, after the war, Northern families did not hesitate to leave similar settings to seek out new opportunities and transfer their loyalties to new communities.
Loyalty to or affection for a community was less and more than loyalty to a particular place, and both were eminently transferable by choice. Northerners might have already been members of several communities before the war began, suggesting that what a community might provide for them was at least as important as any particular community. They moved about, especially from east to west, either out of necessity or by inclination to find a place and a life that suited them. A decade before the Civil War, only 25 percent of the population of the frontier territory of Minnesota, which entered the Union in 1858, claimed it as their state of nativity.16 Most residents there shared the experiences of the Caleff family, whose daughter Lizzie Caleff Bowler would long remember her rugged youthful experience of “leaving behind the eastern home with all of its comforts” to settle in Minnesota, where her family “built a new home on the raw prairie.”17 Minnesota experienced a town-building boom during the latter part of the 1850s as settlers came together in new communities, but when pressed by the economic hardships caused by the Panic of 1857, many new residents pulled up stakes and looked elsewhere for their prosperity.18 The opportunity provided by land free of slavery gave these seekers an equal chance to become prosperous, even if it meant hard work, disappointment, and renewed effort, and upon these multiple successes, American democracy would endure.19
Thus it was for many antebellum Northerners. Ulysses S. Grant launched his Civil War career from Illinois. He had attempted to make his way in Missouri after leaving the antebellum army before he finally took up employment at the family store in Galena.20 William Vermilion, another future Civil War officer, had a facility for moving to where he thought he could best make a life. He came to his antebellum Iowa community, where he farmed and practiced medicine, after having lived in Indiana and Illinois.21 As a young man, Madison Bowler, also a future Union officer, traveled from Maine to Minnesota. He ended up teaching in a school in the new town of Nininger City, where he met Lizzie Caleff, his future wife, who happened to be a student in his classroom.22 Thus it was for many Americans, sojourners who sought opportunity where they could in the years before the war. The Caleffs and the Vermilions along with most Midwesterners would not have been surprised to find that they had neighbors originally from Vermont, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, as it had been a common practice before the war for Easterners to sell their property and seek opportunities in the newer states and territories farther west.23
What was important for both peripatetic Northerners who settled in new communities and those with deep-seated roots in old ones was that individuals could find in those communities across the region the institutions that brought stability and a sense of belonging. If schools, churches, and other indications of Northern civilization were not yet present on the frontier’s edge, the settlers recreated them.24 Normally, the federal government, after convincing or forcing Native Americans to cede their territories, would survey the land and give some land to the state or to railroad and canal companies, which could then sell the property to settlers. Otherwise, the government would auction or sell off the remaining land, all of which would have titles properly registered. Before the war, Wisconsin, which became a state in 1848, was never lacking in federal land for sale and settlement, in part because disappointment or events such as the California gold rush convinced people to move on and in part because there was so much of it.25
The orderly progression of surveyors to settlers and title registration often had to catch up with the individuals hungry for property who ran ahead of the process. Iowa drew settlers eager for fresh lands even before a territorial government was organized. The earliest of the settlers lived through the harsh winter of 1833–1834 but came together to help one another build shelter and then celebrate the community effort. Despite the absence of officials to regulate and register their land claims, they continued to stake out farms and to form community associations to protect their claims, ready to resist any late arrivals and speculators who intruded on their legally illegitimate holdings. In doing so, they had little need for the federal government.26
This pattern was similar to what people had done back east, especially where New England settlers spread out and built new communities in villages and towns, nurtured relationships along common ethnic and religious ties, and guaranteed the continuation of their values in the schools they supported. During the early 19th century, in the Nanticoke Valley region of New York, homesteads grew into full-fledged communities. Churches drew people together through religious and other social events. Town government provided order, and growing businesses aided by the antebellum transportation revolution developed commercial connections beyond the region. In the Nanticoke Valley in the half-century before the Civil War, the people created the community connections that most of them desired.27
Just as important, if not more so, the institutions nurtured by old and new communities were critical in shaping a commonly held set of values, ideas shared by a majority of Northerners by the time the war came. Beyond the family, Northerners cherished schools, churches, political parties, town meetings, civic celebrations, voluntary organizations, and other associations not only because they helped to anchor them in a community, but also because they recognized them as the “free institutions” that provided the foundation for their liberties. As young people matured and participated in these institutions, they learned the importance of individualism, self-control, personal sacrifice, discipline, hard work, democracy, moral righteousness, and the manifest destiny of their nation.
Even without formal education in newly settled lands, self-taught individuals such as Abraham Lincoln, whose experiences were far from being unusual, absorbed these ideals. German revolutionary and immigrant Dietrich Gerstein reported as much from his “Hinterwald” or backwoods Michigan farm in early 1860. “Thanks to the press and the most rational and liberal institutions in our counties and towns,” he wrote to his brother, “the republican way of life has taken hold of the people, and no comparison you care to make with France, Rome or a Greek republic fits the United States.”28 The people might not have thought much about the mechanics of the national government with its various bureaus and departments, but they did understand that the essence of their nation, their free institutions, would flourish only in an environment that recognized the importance of law and order provided by the Constitution. Thus, the potential for success in their lives was intimately connected to access to land free of slaves and the survival of what they considered to be the best government in the world. When a regressive oligarchy of duplicitous, traitorous slaveholders threatened that government, they rallied to defend it and the constitution that protected their way of life.29
Even many individuals on the fringes of Northern society, while not agreeing with those beliefs of free soil and free men, would accept the idea that secession was a challenge to their own liberty. Those settlers who had moved from slave states into the lower counties of the states made from the Old Northwest Territories were not likely to be sympathetic to the more reform-minded New England Protestants who had settled in the northern counties of their shared states. “Butternuts”—loyal to the Democratic Party, suspicious of Yankees and their ways, less likely to cherish education or practice more reformist types of Protestantism—feared emancipation might then spark a migration of freed blacks into the counties in which these former Southerners had settled and their families now lived.30 During the 1850s, in southern Indiana, the intrusion of railroads and the growth of towns did not shake the population’s conservative outlook. Those emigrants from Southern lands neither liked slavery as an institution nor blacks as individuals. Far from seeing the institution as absolutely wrong, they had no problem with watching it expand into western territories, just as long as slaves or free blacks did not become their neighbors. Yet when secession came, they voiced their loyalty to the Union, seeing danger to liberty and to the Democratic Party in the rash actions of Southerners while at the same time placing a good bit of the blame for the crisis on radical Republicans.31
The Northern states were growing much more rapidly than their slave state rivals, something that caused concern for white Southerners wary of the increased political power that went in tandem with those population numbers and a reality that would make it much more physically possible for the Union states to maintain an extensive and intensive war effort. In 1860, there were over31 million Americans, with about 4 million of them being enslaved African Americans living in the slave states. Of that total number, just over 19 million residents of the free states and territories were of white European descent, while only about 226,000 free blacks lived among them. A few states in the Northeast exceeded the 1.2 percent average of the larger free region, while Midwestern states with the exception of Ohio had even smaller percentages of African Americans living within their borders. Furthermore, black Northerners tended to congregate in urban areas, making the rest of the region even more predominantly white.32 Most white Northerners, therefore, went to war hardly knowing what free blacks let alone slaves experienced, but that reality did not stop them from developing personal prejudices and public policies that made black Northerners into disadvantaged residents of an ostensibly free region. Despite their small presence and because of these experiences, African Americans expected to see the war bring about positive changes in their lives.
Black Northerners established noticeable communities in urban areas. Philadelphia was home to the largest number of African Americans, totaling over 22,000 in 1860, followed by New York City with over 12,000 that year. Cities such as Brooklyn, Cincinnati, and Boston had smaller black populations, but still significant enough to allow African Americans to establish communal institutions.33 Many of the better-off Northern blacks made themselves known to their white neighbors by their involvement in reform movements, especially abolitionism.34 Even more African Americans, however, lived quiet lives as urban workers in the Northeast and farmers or laborers in the Midwest who were primarily concerned with providing for themselves and their families. Some black mariners gained middle-class status during the antebellum era, were able to purchase property, and wore the mantle of respectability.35 By the time of the war, a small black professional class existed in Boston, but some laborers, such as porters, also enjoyed a privileged place in the black community because of their steady employment.36
Smaller Northern cities such as Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey, were home to middle-class blacks, but could boast only a few property holders among them. Landowning black farmers in New Jersey enjoyed a degree of prosperity, but farther west in Ohio, rural blacks were most likely to work the soil as laborers or tenants on someone else’s land.37 In fact, most Northern African Americans lived the hard lives of laborers primarily concerned with providing the basic needs for themselves and their families.38 Too many of them shared the circumstances of the black population of Trenton, New Jersey, where in 1844 the teacher Mary Ann Shadd, an African American from a free family, criticized them for failing to make her school a priority while they expended their resources on food, clothing, and shelter.39
Regardless of their economic situations, Northern blacks endured racial discrimination—both by custom and by law—that made their freedom something less than that claimed by their white neighbors. Most African Americans lived in states that kept them from exercising the franchise, and not long before the war Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin defeated efforts to change that situation within their borders.40 Some Northern states, such as Ohio, prohibited blacks from offering testimony in court cases involving whites, and all of the Northern states, except Massachusetts, barred blacks from jury service.41 Restrictions on the movement of African Americans into Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa made it clear that they were not welcome even in the ostensibly free states.42
Widespread discrimination frequently kept working African Americans from improving their stations in life. Furthermore, changing demographics imposed limitations. In antebellum New York City, the ever-increasing number of Irish immigrants led to the replacement of black domestic servants with Irish women, while Irish men dominated the carting trade to the exclusion of blacks until a small number of African Americans began entering the occupation in the mid-1850s.43 In 1860, African American abolitionist, teacher, and physician John Rock believed even in Boston prejudice hurt black economic security. “Colored men in business here receive more respect and less patronage than in any other place I know,” he declaimed.44 “I am free to confess that I have strong attachments here, in this my native country,” he also admitted, but frustrated by the circumstances of African American life, he proclaimed “American liberty” to be “a name without a meaning— a shadow without substance.”45
If state restrictions and local prejudices were not enough, the federal government with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 reinforced the fact that being an African American resident of a free state did not make one a free person if a slave catcher could imply a tie to past slavery. Also the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which said that blacks were not eligible for citizenship and its commensurate rights, made it clear that the federal government would not support the notion of racial equality.46 In 1860, some Republican Party politicians insisted that wanting to keep slavery out of the territories did not mean that they wanted free blacks as their neighbors. Despite such sentiment, black Northerners such as William Anderson, a Connecticut abolitionist, could still muster the resolution to argue, “It is of no use for the Republican Party to smother the uprising of liberty by declaring that they want free territory for white men.”47
Thus, on the eve of a conflict prompted by slavery and its spread, the Northern states were not particularly hospitable places for black Americans. No wonder there were tens of thousands of African Americans who sought true liberty north of the Canadian border where black refugee settlements flourished before the war.48 There were also African American advocates of emigration to less familiar regions of the world, but areas where there might be a chance to establish black communities free from the control of white men. Throughout the 1850s, black physician Martin Delany was a leading proponent of emigration to South America and then later to Africa. He once informed the abolitionist Frederick Douglass that African Americans had to be independent of white men and their ways if they ever were to elevate themselves. “I am weary of our miserable condition,” he wrote, “and [am] heartily sick of whimpering, whining and sniveling at the feet of white men, begging for their refuse and offals [sic] existing by mere sufferance.”49
Other Northern blacks, however, made it clear that they were Americans and wanted their white neighbors to see them as such. In October 1853, at a convention held in Chicago, African Americans in attendance demanded equal treatment because “We are Americans by birth, and we assure you that we are Americans in feeling.” And these sentiments remained, the authors continued, “in spite of all the wrongs which we have long and silently endured in this country.” These men demanded “no special privileges or peculiar favors” but simply wished for equal treatment before the law.50
Immigrants added fresh ethnic diversity to the Northern states, contributing to the growth of industry, the expansion of the population, and an increase in the number of voters. In the decade before secession, almost 2.6 million immigrants entered the United States, with most of them settling in the Northern states and with the overwhelming majority of them being German and Irish.51 Attracted by better wages and living conditions than those offered in Europe, they came in great numbers in the years before the war and gravitated to new homes where the economy did not require them to compete with slavery.52 St. Paul, Minnesota, attracted Irish immigrants from across the Atlantic as did the Eastern cities, where they then found unskilled work in town; Irish and Scots Canadians fortunate enough to possess clerical skills or some education found employment in shops and offices there.53 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, benefited greatly from the large German population that made the city its home; by the outbreak of the war, Germans not only dominated the laboring classes there, but also occupied numerous positions among the professional and merchant classes.54 Textile factories in the Mid-Atlantic states provided work for Irish and English immigrants, but even New England mills, noted for their early use of female employees, began to turn to such workers before the war. During the 1850s, for example, immigrant workers settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, where they built canals, hired on as day labor, and by 1860 came to dominate the labor force in the textile mills.55 Given such demographics, it should not have been surprising that when Union recruits from the textile town of Rockville, Connecticut, said their farewells, soldier Benjamin Hirst later recalled, it was “in almost every language spoken in Europe.”56
Reform organizations, especially temperance groups, aimed their attention at immigrants and especially the almost universally Catholic Irish, whom they considered at the root of so much of America’s troubles.57 Anti-immigration Americans, fearful of the impact new arrivals would have on their communities, subjected immigrants to various expressions of prejudice, including violence and scurrilous literature often filled with fear of some sort of Vatican conquest.58 Irish immigrants were poor, and nativists blamed them for their poverty. Suspicious Protestants also identified the Irish and German Catholics as the source of all of urban America’s ills, especially because of how the immigrants concentrated in Northeastern and Midwestern cities. In 1834 a Boston mob attacked a convent, while in 1844 Philadelphia Protestants burned two Irish Catholic churches, razed their homes, and murdered many of their neighbors.59 Consequently, the new ethnic Americans tended to shy away from the Republican Party because of its evangelical Protestant reformer connections and association with the moribund nativist American Party.60
German immigrants were more diverse, with the liberals among them leaning to humanitarian reform and the Republican Party, and others, especially Catholics and Lutherans, having more in common with poorer Irish immigrants and the ideals of the Democratic Party.61 The Protestant liberals among them had no difficulty assigning the basest attributes to Catholic immigrants, arguing along the same lines as the nativists. “[E]ven the Catholics who want nothing to do with the Bible are wild for slavery,” wrote German immigrant and former revolutionary Dietrich Gerstein in February 1860, “especially that dumbest and most beastly of all nations, the Irish.” The Vatican was, according to Gerstein, encouraging Catholic immigration to the United States because “the republic is a thorn in Rome’s flesh, and if they send all the religious riffraff in the whole world over here, then when the next revolution comes . . . there will be a good chance of subjugating the North as well.” However, Gerstein, probably aware of how nativist Know-Nothings migrated into the new Republican Party, had faith that the Republicans would be “on the alert because they know what to expect from the spread of Catholicism.”62
Immigrants, along with the Protestant natives who voted Republican, accepted the core idea of that party’s free-labor ideology that hard work and self-discipline could make better lives for themselves, a concept that flourished in the intellectual and economic environment of the free states. German immigrant Emile Dupré had been a businessman without resources, unable to strike out on his own back home, but in November 1860, he was in New York happily working long hours because “I know what goal I am working toward.” Furthermore, he told his mother, “It is the first job where I earn more than I actually need and which would allow me to get married.”63 German immigrant Otto Albrecht, who was living in Philadelphia at the time of the November 1860 presidential election, also saw good prospects in America, especially in the person of the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln. “This man shows how far you can get here: his father was a farmer and he himself used to build fences around the fields,” he reported. However, the president-elect went on to study and practice law, revealed his talent and good character, and became involved in politics “and now he’s arrived at the position of the greatest honor here or anywhere else in the whole world.”64
These individuals proved their commitment to their new homes with their hard work, whether it was in a factory or on a farm. Irish railroad workers took on jobs as dangerous as the men who worked on India’s early rail lines.65 Factory workers spent on average 11 hours a day on their feet, regulated by the requirements of their machines and not by their own rhythms.66 Farm laborers found their days consumed from sun up to sun down with breaking sod, digging wells, planting, and harvesting during the growing cycle, while they spent the rest of the year engaged in other kinds of hard labor, such as logging.67 At the outset of the war, 18-year-old English immigrant William R. Oake did this sort of work for a farmer near his family’s Iowa home making a fair $12 a month before he joined the army.68 There was always the chance that the hard factory work of the men in the Rockville, Connecticut, mills, along with the wages of other family members including their children might earn them enough to buy land or enter into business. They expected the factory floor to provide temporary employment before they took advantage of free labor’s promise of economic independence.69
In 1861, the communities in which Northerners lived were still primarily rural and agricultural, but the region as a whole was evolving into something new, modern, and more dynamic than that of their Southern opponents. In 1820, only 10 percent of the population of the free states was living in towns of 2,500 or more, but in 1860 that number had climbed to 26 percent. At the beginning of the century, 68 percent of people in the free states were involved in agricultural labor; in 1860 that number had declined to 40 percent. In New Jersey, for example, farm workers began to migrate to urban areas where they found better paying jobs in factories. In the process, internal migrants helped to boost the populations of cities in the state, whose farms continued to provide produce for Trenton, Jersey City, and other urban areas, including nearby New York City and Philadelphia. The greater use of technology on the farm and in the factory as well as the development of an efficient railroad transportation network and a capitalist financial system all contributed to these changes.70
With the coming of war, some Confederates took comfort in their belief that the soft life supposedly lived by Yankee clerks and shopkeepers who would make up the invading Northern armies would cause them to cower before the rugged young men raised on the countryside of the rural South. This assessment of their enemy’s capabilities was based on an erroneous demographic assumption. Urban populations certainly had grown by the time of the Civil War, and during the 1850s, smaller towns in places such as the frontier state of Minnesota were attracting their fair share of residents. But the North remained primarily a rural region and in some places demanded more frontier determination than the settled areas of Virginia and Georgia.
Michael H. Fitch discovered as much when he recruited in northwestern Wisconsin. He traveled through a “sparsely settled” region, which made “raising a volunteer company for service, an arduous task.” Undiscouraged, Fitch rode “across the prairie and through the woods for several days” visiting towns and farms, traveling on roads in “wretched condition” turned into muddy tracks when it rained. Along the way, he discovered that “Every rugged backwoodsman, whether American, German or Norwegian, was full of patriotism.” By the time Fitch had completed his task, he had a company made up of small-town boys, farmers, and “lumbermen and loggers.” “There were no better soldiers in the army than many of these backwoods farmer boys,” he later judged.71 Far from being stiff-collared clerks, many of the initial officers and recruits of the First Michigan Engineers had worked with their hands before the war, cleared forests for farms, and tilled the land.72
Factory workers did not share in these frontier experiences, but they endured difficult work lives of a different sort. In 1861, the Rockville mill workers in the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry and factory workers in other comparable regiments probably had developed an understanding of collective effort and discipline of army life thanks to their long hours at work, exchanging obedience to the orders of managers and foremen for the orders of commissioned and noncommissioned company officers.73 Consequently, life in many areas of the Northern states had its unanticipated benefits for future soldiers. The hard outdoor toil of the frontier logger or the farm hand and the routines of the factory worker might very well have made the men who had engaged in such activities better suited to the rough, regimented, disciplined life of the army than their Southern counterparts would have allowed.