Arguing that the Civil War ought to be acknowledged and studied as a “genuinely constitutional moment” (p. 1), the editors of this volume of valuable essays, Alan Levine, Thomas W. Merrill, and James R. Stoner, introduce the reader to the unfinished work of political self-reflection that Americans can advance farther than we have. In their introduction to The Political Thought of the Civil War, appropriately entitled “The Civil War as a Regime Question,” they recognize that at that time in the nation’s history, intelligent “participants and onlookers” had “to face up to the fundamental question of the soundness or unsoundness of the American regime itself” (p. 1). The volume examines the answers given by those participants. Prompted by what they see as signs of instability today, the editors also aim at reacquainting Americans with the life and nature of their political regime through a wide-ranging series of contributions, in the hope that they will thereby be better able to meet current challenges and govern the country well.
The volume is divided into three parts and 14 essays. Each part focuses on one weighty problem that particularly strained the Republic in the prewar, war, and postwar years, respectively, and which may be restated as follows: 1) How did slavery fit into the American political regime after the founding? 2) What was the tension between fidelity to constitutional government and fidelity to anti-slavery and pro-slavery positions? 3) Can government protect both popular liberty and equality without sacrificing either?
The contributors comprise an impressive list, and they deliver. The first author, Thomas Merrill, and one of the last, Phillip Lyons, explain how antirepublican conditions limited the further establishment of natural rights republicanism. The former reinterprets the Missouri Crisis and the latter, Reconstruction. The key to Merrill’s reinterpretation is Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of the slaveholders’ dilemma (p. 32). According to Merrill, Jefferson recognized natural rights to both self-preservation and liberty. But inherited slaveholding was a state of war already commenced in which the slaveholders held the advantage, and the slaves’ right to liberty threatened the slaveholders’ right to self-preservation. The northern effort to keep slavery hemmed into its southeastern corner and to force ultimate abolition from the outside threatened to tip the scales of that war against the slaveholder and for the slaves. How could a republic committed to the protection of natural rights peacefully resolve a conflict perceived as natural rights versus natural rights?
It could not. After violently resolving that conflict, the Republic encountered another dilemma studied by Lyons. The prejudice of southern whites opposed equal citizenship for freed slaves. From the former’s point of view, the imposition of full equality from an outside power, the radical Republicans, against the consent of southern whites violated the republican principle of self-government. But President Andrew Johnson’s accommodation of white supremacy violated the republican principle of equality. The model that would have achieved the Republicans’ aims, Lyons argues, was briefly pursued in Louisiana and had been worked out by President Abraham Lincoln and Governor Michael Hahn: to admit educated black Americans and black veterans into the franchise (p. 324). Lincoln calculated that these black voters would be acceptable to moderate southern whites. Together they could form a durable, biracial coalition that would develop into a genuinely republican citizenry, eventually, we infer, incorporating everyone. This account suggests that a compromise of principle is sometimes necessary for successful regime change, that is, for a final and earlier victory of principle.
What strengthened that prejudice? Alan Levine traces the development of scientific racism pioneered by Samuel Morton in the early 1800s and known to Europeans as “the American School” (p. 98). Levine’s particular concern is to show how dominant moral opinion influences scientific paradigms and vice versa, despite science’s claim to be “value neutral” (p. 123). Thus, perverted science stood by rising prejudice at the same time that Lincoln’s political career was taking flight. How did Lincoln meet that prejudice? A magnificent reading by Diana Schaub of Lincoln’s Peoria Address and Dred Scott speech reveals how he acknowledged prejudice without becoming a party to it, and then, how he evoked his audience’s sympathy in order to instruct public opinion. His object was to “reattach self-interest to moral sense” (p. 194).
Launched into office by a reformed northern public, President Lincoln at first seemed to believe that secession was a bluff, Stephen Smith shows. But when faced with determined rebellion, he grounded his justification of the use of force in the Constitution. In sum, Lincoln’s position was that “[i]f the Constitution requires the executive to provide for the execution of all the laws, it follows that he or she must also be equipped with the constitutional means to do so” (p. 217). He could have resorted to the exercise of “Lockean prerogative power” on the grounds of necessity, Caleb Verbois argues (p. 239). Instead, Lincoln chose to carefully explain the constitutionality of his most controversial acts, because he understood that the survival of republicanism depended upon following the Constitution “at all costs” (p. 242). William Allen reveals Lincoln’s uncanny appreciation of the high stakes in the problem posed by “contraband” slaves streaming into Union lines. To win the war and preserve its soul, the Union had to end slavery (p. 251). But the seizure of contraband slaves by the Second Confiscation Act portended that the government would become a slaveholder in law. Allen’s explanation of Lincoln’s response, which followed old federal precedent and included the Emancipation Proclamation, is nothing short of marvelous.
A concise account of the strands of the secessionists by James Read proves that Calhoun’s reinterpretation of constitutional government lay at the foundation of them all. Did their constitutionalism break from the Founders? Quite the contrary, says James Stoner in a provocative essay that extends the work of George Rable. Stoner argues that the Confederate constitution attempted to restore a kind of antiparty republicanism intended by the Founders but that was confounded by the democratic genie unexpectedly unleashed by the American Revolution. From Appomattox forward, Johnathan O’Neill picks up the thread of constitutional thought in the South, showing that efforts by southern intellectuals to thrust the democratic genie back into its bottle continued unabated, well into the twentieth century. Due to the taint of racism in assertions of states’ rights and localism, “well-founded Southern criticisms of the nation’s drift into ever more centralized government, crass consumerism, and leveling egalitarianism” have not received adequate attention (p. 377). From the other side, Michael Zuckert argues that the amended Constitution of the United States better approximated the plan that James Madison originally had in mind. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments provided a check against injustice originating in the states that Madison had hoped a congressional veto on state legislation would be (pp. 295–97).
Prior to those amendments, the Supreme Court had to decide cases touching slavery, permitted by the existing constitutional order. In his analysis of some of these cases, Keith Whittington points out that judges appealed to liberal values but also sometimes to other values—white supremacy, Union, and the rule of law—to justify their opinions. Does Whittington’s new evidence stack the deck higher in favor of the “multiple traditions” thesis of Rogers Smith and against Louis Hartz’s “liberal consensus”? Yes, but Hartz had argued that feudalism produced heterodox ideas, and that “slavery was a feudal remnant trapped within a young liberal nation” (p. 68). The influence of that element of feudalism was perhaps stronger than Hartz reckoned. Yet not stronger than antebellum liberalism, Daniel Malachuk counters. We do not see that the many strands of the antebellum antislavery movement all appealed to natural right, the first principle of antebellum liberalism, because modern political liberals have shifted the moral foundation of liberalism from natural right to pluralism, “championing human rights without really believing in them” (p. 92). Hence, the strength of antebellum liberalism is obscured by the looking glass of modern political liberalism.
On the other hand, Peter Myers contends, the weakness of the “liberal consensus” in the antislavery North constrained Frederick Douglass to appeal to the self-interest of the northern public, as well as to liberal principle in order to rally them to the liberal cause (pp. 352–54). And then there was the war’s aftermath. Rejecting tribalism of all types and holding up a vision of a unified citizenry, Douglass foresaw both struggle and eventual triumph of that vision. The greatest enemy of that project was forgetfulness—that we would become forgetful of our national struggles and of our principles that heralded our nation’s birth (pp. 349, 368–71).
Researchers and teachers in multiple disciplines will find ample material in The Political Thought of the Civil War to ponder and to use in undergraduate and graduate courses. Amid the perennially accruing mass of publications on the Civil War, this one stands out and should stand so for a long time.
