Reconfiguring the Union

Civil War Transformations

I. Morgan, P. Davies, I. Morgan, P. Davies, I. Morgan, P. Davies

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137336484
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

From the perspective of the North, the Civil War began as a war to restore the Union and ended as a war to make a more perfect Union. The Civil War not only changed the moral meaning of the Union, it changed what the Union stood for in political, economic, and transnational terms. This volume examines the transformations the Civil War brought to the American Union as a politico-constitutional, social, and economic system. It explores how the war changed the meaning of the Union with regard to the supremacy of the federal government over the states, the right of secession, the rights of citizenship, and the political balance between the union's various sections. It further considers the effect of the war on international and transnational perceptions of the United States. Finally, it considers how historical memory has shaped the legacy of the Civil War in the last 150 years.

Chapter 1

Reconfiguring the Union: A Long History of Civil War Transformations

Iwan W. Morgan

The Civil War is the greatest crisis ever faced by the United States. Had the Union not been victorious, the consequences would have been immense—both for America and for the wider world. Even had an independent Confederacy eventually embraced emancipation of its own volition, slavery would still have continued therein for years and what might have replaced it is unclear. It is unlikely that the truncated United States of America or the newly formed Confederate States of America would have become major economic powers by the end of the nineteenth century. It is equally unlikely that either would have become the major actor in global politics in the twentieth century and beyond. At the very least, the balance of power between the Union and the Confederacy on the North American continent would have limited their freedom of maneuver to intervene in Europe and Asia. In essence, therefore, the Union that the Civil War preserved became the foundation for modern America’s power, prosperity, and national identity of exceptionalism.

To set the scene for the essays that follow, this chapter offers a “long” history of the Civil War transformations that produced a reconfigured Union. To do this, it assesses the changes in what the Union stood for in relation to the broad span of America’s political development before and after the conflict.

From the North’s perspective, the Civil War began as a war to save the Union and ended as a war to make a better Union. On Independence Day, 1861, Abraham Lincoln declared that the conflict would decide “whether a constitutional republic or a democracy . . . can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its domestic foes.” The meaning of the war changed, however, with the issue on September 22, 1862, of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declaring free all slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion against the United States from January 1, 1863, onward. Recognizing this in his December 1862 message to Congress, Lincoln avowed: “We know how to save the Union. The world knows that we do know how to save it . . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of mankind.”¹

Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens later remarked that the Union was elevated “to the level of religious mysticism” in Lincoln’s thinking.² In reality, the sixteenth president always had a clear-eyed understanding that its preservation as the embodiment of a democratic government of free men was the moral purpose of the Civil War. To this end, his Emancipation Proclamation was based on a calculation of its advantages for the suppression of the Southern rebellion. In this regard, it effectively extinguished the possibility of British or French recognition of the Confederacy, paved the way for the enlistment of an eventual 179,000 black troops—a massive resource for Union forces, and legitimized the North’s escalation of the war in place of its ineffective limited-war strategy of 1861–62. In linking the preservation of the Union with the abolition of slavery in the rebel states, however, the Emancipation Proclamation ended any possibility of reconciliation with the South on the basis of preserving its peculiar institution. Since the Union could henceforth prevail only through the destruction of the Slave Power, the meaning of the Civil War had changed for the North. As one historian put it, “What was now at stake was the reconstruction of society on principles claimed as traditional but revolutionary in their consequences.”³

Scholars dispute whether most Northern whites wanted a new kind of Union. David Donald, for example, considered the Emancipation Proclamation “a species of shibboleth” that had dramatic significance for the popular mind. “It came to be pretty generally assumed,” he asserted, “that in September of 1862 the war somehow took a new turn, and that thenceforward it was being prosecuted as a war against slavery.”⁴ From the contrary perspective, Gary Gallagher contends that the Civil War was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” In his assessment, most Northerners remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves, accepted Emancipation only in order to win the war, and fought for the supreme purpose of saving the Union as the bulwark of a uniquely democratic nation built on free labor, economic opportunity, and a broad political franchise for whites. They wanted to make the United States safe from malign Southern “aristocrats” who defiled the meaning of American freedom and threatened to plunge North America into anarchy and endless wars if the Confederacy was allowed to survive.⁵

Regardless of whether all the changes were popularly embraced or not, the Union that emerged from the Civil War was undeniably different in many ways from that of 1861. The Radical Republican leader, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, correctly foresaw this as inevitable in a speech to Congress in December 1862. “This Union,” he avowed, “can never be restored as it was. There are many things which render such an event impossible.”⁶

This volume of essays characterizes the transformations that took place as a reconfiguration. It has eschewed the descriptor of “revolution” that many contemporaries and some historians applied to the political and social changes the conflict engendered.⁷ Such a term is arguably too sweeping when applied specifically to the Civil War–related changes in the nature of the Union. Some of these were clarifications of issues debated and disputed since the creation of the republic; others predated the war but were accentuated by it; and still others had revolutionary potential but their full implications were neither understood nor embraced. Accordingly, reconfiguration, with its connotations of rearranging and reshaping, is a more appropriate conceptualization of how the Union changed as a result of the Civil War.

In broad terms, there were five main transformations in the reconfiguration of the Union. These pertained to: the right of secession, the supremacy of the national government over the states, the recalibration of the regional balance of power within the Union, the ending of slavery and the extension of citizen rights to emancipated African Americans, and the emergence of a new American nationalism. Historian James McPherson summarized the changes succinctly: “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American one.”⁸ If this was broadly true, the extent and historical pace of change was far from uniform across these five elements of the reconfigured Union.

The most clear-cut transformation effected by the Civil War was to settle the legality of secession, a vexed issue since the Constitution’s formulation. Nationalist advocates, among them Chief Justice John Marshall, President Andrew Jackson, and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, had over the years insisted that the founding documents offered incontrovertible proof that the Union was perpetual, inviolable, and sovereign over the states. Articulating this perspective in his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln declared: “We find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’”⁹

Nevertheless, the same founding documents also supported those claiming that all states possessed the right of secession. In its conclusion, the Declaration of Independence spoke of “Free and Independent states” empowered to conduct any and all affairs to which sovereign states are entitled but made no mention of the Union possessing such authority as a singular, national entity. Article II of the Articles of Confederation stipulated that each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Secessionists similarly found support for their cause in the Constitution, particularly in Article X of the Bill of Rights, which stipulated that: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Secession theory had a pedigree that long predated the Civil War.¹⁰ The Kentucky Resolutions and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 (and the second Kentucky Resolutions of 1799), authored respectively by founding fathers and future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, protested the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that restricted freedom of speech and the press and the liberty of aliens. Both declared that the Constitution had arisen as a compact between the states, with the logical consequence that the states should assume the right to determine when the US Congress had exceeded its powers. In support of this theory, they advocated new doctrines of nullification and interposition. Reaffirming the states’ right to judge violations of the Constitution, the second Kentucky Resolutions declared that “a nullification of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.” The Virginia Resolutions, meanwhile, insisted that states “have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of evil.” According to historian Clement Eaton, these resolutions were “important documents in Southern political theory, for the compact theory of the Constitution that they expounded contained the germs of the South Carolina nullification movement and of the secession doctrines.”¹¹

Over the next 60 years, American history was peppered with threats of disunion that came to nothing but failure never extinguished the idea. In 1814, delegates from the New England states meeting at the Hartford Convention, held to protest the economic effects of the war with Britain on their region, briefly toyed with the idea of secession. In 1832, a South Carolina state convention adopted an ordinance of nullification repudiating the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 as unconstitutional and forbidding collection of the duties in the state, but its stand gained no substantive support from other Southern states, and a political compromise for gradual tariff reduction eventually defused the crisis. Discord over the right of slavery to expand into the new territories acquired in war from Mexico generated renewed sectional controversy in 1849–50. A convention of Southern slave states was scheduled to be held in Nash...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   Reconfiguring the Union: A Long History of Civil War Transformations
• Chapter 2   Lincoln and Emancipation: The Lessons of the Letter to Horace Greeley
• Chapter 3   Conservatism, Transformation, and the War for the Union
• Chapter 4   Freedpeople, Politics, and the State in Civil War America
• Chapter 5   The Military Significance of the 1864 Presidential Election
• Chapter 6   “In Union There Is Strength”: City-Building and Nation-Building in Civil War–Era Philadelphia, 1844–1865
• Chapter 7   “There Will Be Blood”: The Civil War and the Birth of the Oil Industry
• Chapter 8   “Faugh a Ballagh!” (Clear the Way): The Irish and the American Civil War
• Chapter 9   Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: A Propaganda Tool for the Enemy?
• Chapter 10   Ordeal of the Union: Allan Nevins, the Civil War Centennial, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1960s
• Chapter 11   Glory, Glory: Hollywood’s Consensus Memory of the American Civil War
• Notes on Contributors
• Index