Politics Overview

Politics was fundamental to the Civil War. Politics had been the way Americans expressed and dealt with their differences before the Rebels had, in Lincoln's phrase, appealed "from the ballot to the bullet." Even during the war itself, most of the goals the two sides sought were political objectives—the maintenance or the establishment of national sovereignty, preserving or revoking the legal status of slavery. The Prussian militarist Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, "War is politics carried on by other means," was never more apt than during the American Civil War.

During the decades leading up to the war, Americans had expressed their growing sectional differences through national politics. Antislavery Northerners strove to gain enough political power to limit the spread of slavery and make at least that very small start toward a time in the distant future when the "peculiar institution" might be rolled back and finally abolished. On the contrary, proslavery Southerners made it the cornerstone and chief goal of their own politics to protect slavery not only in the states where it already existed, but throughout all the territories of the United States. By prevailing politically, they hoped to make slavery safe from all attempts to abolish it, and also to demonstrate that it was above moral reproach, the accepted and universal policy of the United States. When they failed to achieve these goals politically—when in the presidential election of 1860 they suffered a severe setback in the election of a president pledged to halt the further spread of slavery in the territories—proslavery Southerners waged a successful political campaign within the South aimed at persuading a majority of their fellow Southerners to declare their states no longer part of the United States, and to organize a new slaveholding republic, the Confederate States of America.

The average American in the mid-nineteenth century paid more attention to politics than does his counterpart of the early twenty-first. Much of the energy and excitement that modern Americans derive from, for example, spectator sports, their predecessors in the nineteenth century put into politics. They turned out in large numbers to hear political speeches and cheered vociferously for their candidates. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, crowds stood to listen to the contending politicians for well over two hours at a stretch, and the debates were not unusual in that respect. The spectators reacted intensely to political speeches, and heckling of speakers was not uncommon.

During the Civil War the North continued to have a functioning two-party system. The Republicans and Democrats had contended for power in the region before the conflict started, and continued to do so throughout its course. The Democrats were in some ways helped by their temporary separation from the Southern wing of the party, which for years had been the tail that had wagged the Democratic dog. Yet, without the voting strength of the South, the Democrats were unable to win national elections or to gain control of Congress, and even though the proslavery fire-eaters of the South were absent from the party during the war years, the Democrats remained divided. War Democrats, as their name implied, favored a vigorous prosecution of the war, and some of them, such as Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), came to support the Lincoln administration.

Peace Democrats, in contrast, labeled the war both wicked and a failure. Americans ought not to fight other Americans—presumably even if the other Americans had started the shooting—and no one, as far as the Peace Democrats were concerned, ought to fight for the freedom of blacks, whom they preferred to see continue as slaves. In any case, they maintained, the North would never succeed in subduing the South, and therefore the continuance of the conflict was nothing but a waste of life. The government should at once suspend hostilities and open negotiations to make the best deal possible, even if it meant recognizing Confederate independence. Peace Democrats and War Democrats polarized the wartime Democratic Party, and yet members of the party during those years did not always fit neatly into one camp or the other. The views of Civil War Democrats ran the gamut from the Peace to the War camps of their party.

The Republican Party also had its internal divisions. The Radical Republicans, who tended to dominate the party's contingent in Congress, favored abolition of slavery and the passage of laws tending to protect the civil rights of the former slaves and even to establish racial equality. They demanded vigorous and ruthless prosecution of the war and appropriate punishment of the traitors who had launched and supported the rebellion. The Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which the Radicals controlled, kept a wary eye on generals who did not seem to display sufficient zeal for the causes of victory and abolition, or who betrayed an undue tenderness for the rights or property of guilty traitors who, as far as the Radicals were concerned, had forfeited both. Conservative or moderate Republicans were no less committed to winning the war, but were more willing to be magnanimous with Rebels who laid down their arms, and more ready to accept at least some measure of gradualism in the changing status of African Americans. Lincoln, who was himself a moderate, balanced precariously throughout the war between that faction and the hard-liners in Congress. He was as skillful a politician as ever occupied the White House, and he used—and needed—all of his political skill in order to keep Northerners politically unified enough to keep fighting the Rebels and not each other.

The Confederacy, in contrast, was, as historian George Rable calls it, "a revolution against politics" (Rable 1994). As most white Southerners saw it, politics had failed them, had not secured them their rights, and had allowed them to be outvoted in a nation that had less and less sympathy with their "peculiar institution." What was needed, they maintained as they founded the new Confederacy, was a government that would not be moved by political forces, but instead would be governed by men who acted solely on the basis of principle, without regard to the tawdry concerns of politics. The irony that secessionist political leaders had used every political trick in the book to bring their states out of the Union and into the new slaveholders' Confederacy was apparently lost on practically all of them.

No one embodied the new Confederate ideal of the principled leader who disdained politics any more than the man they selected as their first and, as it turned out, only president. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi prided himself on those very qualities. Northern senators who had had to contend with him during the years leading up to the war complained that he was self-righteous, proud, and rigid, and the war had not reached its midpoint before many of his fellow Confederates were making the same accusations. Making matters worse was the fact that from the day he was elected Confederate president, Davis was a lame duck. Hoping to insulate the presidency from politics, the writers of the Confederate constitution had specified that the president was to be elected to a nonrenewable six-year term. As is the case with any lame-duck president, Davis's political clout was weakened by the fact that everyone knew he would never head a party's ticket in any future election.

As a further bulwark against the evils of party politics—and because all good Southerners should be united as one in their determination to repel the "invaders"—politicians of the new Confederacy gloried in the fact that their republic possessed no political parties, and throughout its history the Confederacy never developed a two-party system. Yet this feature, which Southerners at first touted as another of their many advantages over the despised Yankees, turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Political parties can serve to channel political disagreement into constructive—or at least survivable—courses. The disintegration of the two-party system in the United States during the 1850s had been a harbinger of the impending crisis of the Union. Within the Confederacy, the absence of political parties actually led to increased acrimony in political debate. Without party loyalties to hold them in line, Confederate politicians resorted to bitter personal rhetoric and gauged their support of legislation according to their personal loyalty to—or hatred of—Jefferson Davis. By the latter years of the war, the supporters and opponents of the Confederate president were on their way to becoming a two-party system of their own, but the added rancor lent by the personal nature of their debates had compounded the Confederacy's difficulties.

Despite the problems caused by the Confederacy's unintentionally chaotic political system and the further problems caused by his own stubborn and undiplomatic nature, Davis succeeded in securing passage of every piece of major legislation he sought, and blocking every one he opposed, up until the closing months of the war. Nonetheless, he could have secured heartier cooperation throughout the Confederate system if he, and it, had used more effectively the methods of politics, distasteful as they could sometimes be. Less than 100 miles north of his capital, Lincoln was even then demonstrating how it could be done.

Steven E. Woodworth