Subscribers to this magazine are likely fascinated by the spectacle of military combat. But they must know, too, that political will is a prerequisite for fighting a war. This welcome book shows how loyal state governments defined the purposes of the Civil War when calling upon their citizens to sacrifice for the Union cause.
Much modern historiography might lead its readers to expect a righteous commitment to emancipation. Furniss finds, however, that Black freedom got scant support from the bipartisan Union Parties that sustained the war effort in several key northern states. At best, these politically dominant elements tolerated emancipation as a subsidiary war aim, designed to punish rebels and foreclose the danger of future wars. Instead, Union was paramount for white Americans. They cherished its benefits—”an unprecedented level of religious toleration, personal and political freedom, economic opportunity, and social mobility”—and they lionized its founders (148).
Often, Union Party governors were former Democrats who never championed Black rights (David Tod and John Brough in Ohio, Horatio Seymour in New York). “To assert that the object of the war is to secure the freedom of negroes, is false,” Brough insisted in a widely circulated 1863 speech. “There is no such object” (167). Pennsylvania’s Andrew Curtin, ostensibly a Republican, always distanced himself from the antislavery movement. Even Massachusetts’ John Andrew, a quasi-abolitionist who was “an ideological outlier even within his state,” took pains to reach out to Union Democrats and conservative former Whigs (120).
When wartime abrasion sapped the underpinnings of the slave system, border state Unionists insisted that their human property was untouchable. Furniss looks especially at Kentucky, officially exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. Its proslavery Union Party provided a particularly dubious ally for the Union Parties in the free states.
Furniss rejects the views of Adam Goodheart and James Oakes, who insist that Republicans stood united from the start in making freedom a key war objective. Of course, some exasperated Yankees, who resented the South’s undeserved power in national councils, foresaw and welcomed a war against slavery. Jill Lepore’s brilliant brief essay on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow demonstrates conclusively that he (and likely many of his readers) hoped a new Paul Revere might spark a second American Revolution.
The state-by-state approach here sets the stage for an assessment of Abraham Lincoln that will surprise many of his admirers. Throughout his presidency, and most especially during the hard-fought re-election campaign when he ran as the candidate of the National Union Party, Lincoln recognized that most white Northerners gave far higher priority to Union than to Black freedom. Lincoln occasionally feinted toward those who thought slavery posed a grave moral problem. But he repeatedly tried to appeal to a broader cross section of Unionists. This sort of calculation led to the disastrous selection of Union Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate in 1864. Johnson’s “centrist message” appeared to be just what the ticket needed; only after he became president did it become apparent that Johnson was a rigid ideologue who lacked his predecessor’s deft touch (218). Lincoln’s “political genius,” to use Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memorable phrase, lay in holding together a sprawling coalition determined to restore the Union but ready to downplay or look away from the plight of the enslaved or the recently freed.
The pressures and momentum of wartime, coupled with Lincoln’s astute instincts, redefined the political center. Emancipation and the recruitment of Black soldiers—radical measures by the standard of 1861—became politically mainstream, the means for securing a common end. But the Union cause, as Frank Cirillo also demonstrates in an important recent book, failed to include a commitment to equality. Accordingly, the “egalitarian promise” of Reconstruction was stillborn, Furniss writes; “there is scant evidence to imagine that a more progressive outcome was feasible” (258).
Furniss now stands tall among those scholars in the U.K. who study the great convulsion in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. He came from Oxford to the History Department at the University of Virginia, where he wrote the dissertation on which this book is based. He more than corroborates the insights of his mentor Gary W. Gallagher, who has long labored to remind us why the men and women of that era cared so deeply about the Union.
Daniel W. Crofts, Professor Emeritus of History at The College of New Jersey, has long studied the North-South sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. His 2016 book, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (University of North Carolina Press), was awarded the University of Virginia’s Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History.
