Civil War America

Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction

Mark Wahlgren Summers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781469610405
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Reconstruction policy after the Civil War, observes Mark Wahlgren Summers, was shaped not simply by politics, principles, and prejudices. Also at work were fears--often unreasonable fears of renewed civil war and a widespread sense that four years of war had thrown the normal constitutional process so dangerously out of kilter that the republic itself remained in peril. To understand Reconstruction, Summers contends, one must understand that the purpose of the North's war was--first and foremost--to save the Union with its republican institutions intact. During Reconstruction there were always fears in the mix--that the Civil War had settled nothing, that the Union was still in peril, and that its enemies and the enemies of republican government were more resilient and cunning than normal mortals. Many factors shaped the reintegration of the former Confederate states and the North's commitment to Reconstruction, Summers agrees, but the fears of war reigniting, plots against liberty, and a president prepared to father a coup d'etat ranked higher among them than historians have recognized. Both a dramatic narrative of the events of Reconstruction and a groundbreaking new look at what drove these events, A Dangerous Stir is also a valuable look at the role of fear in the politics of the time--and in politics in general.

Chapter 1
Paranoid Politics, 1789–1861

“It looks to me,” said Mr. Hinnissy, “as though this country was goin’ to th’ divvle.”

“Put down that magazine,” said Mr. Dooley.

“Now d’ye feel betther? I thought so.”

—Finley Peter Dunne, “National Housecleaning”

In 1801, the country went to the devil—as usual. It was always doing that, only perhaps not so literally as in the cartoons about Thomas Jefferson. Few though they were, they all had the same message. Americans had put themselves into the clutches of the political Antichrist. Here he knelt, at the altar of Gallic despotism, preparing to burn the charter of America’s liberty. And here he clutched at the carriage of government, doing his best to keep patriots from turning back the invasion of French cannibals. But a third artist caught his truest essence in “Mad Tom in a Rage.” Fired up with brandy, the wild-haired Jacobin struggles to pull down the pillar of the republic, with help from his best friend, the Black Man, the Prince of Darkness. “Mad Tom,” as it happened, was that old soak and infidel Thomas Paine. It was Jefferson who played Satan.¹

Learning history from political cartoons is as risky as learning barbering from attending regular performances of “Sweeny Todd.” Symbols were crude. Cartoons had to make points so simply that even political illiterates could understand them: Tories marching into the mouth of Hell, Congress about to sail down a waterfall into Satan’s claws, His Unholiness with a crown on his head casting a vote for the antiwar Hartford Convention or handing the employer a Democratic ticket to “grind the workies” or, looking suspiciously like Andrew Jackson, pulling the strings with tempting baits for office seekers.² True believers have a talent for spying false deceivers everywhere. For that matter, as scholars have pointed out, the further from the political center a group happened to be, the wilder its fantasies about who really tugged the wires and how policy was made.³ Every society has visionaries, who are as likely to imagine a new heaven on earth as they are a new Hell already under construction.

All the cautions hold true. Yet, in the end, they fail to cover the whole ground. For people in mainstream politics really did believe that Thomas Jefferson was doing the devil’s work. Paranoia reached all the way to the center of political discourse. It was there before the two-party system formed, and it remained a distinct flavoring in every group’s political concoctions.⁴ It did not exist because partisans forced it on their audiences but because it was the easiest way to make sense of the world around them—and it was all the easier to accept because polemicists had been inspiring it for so long. Liberty and Union were not just inseparable; they were in danger—now and forever. All of the machinery of a partisan press, all the whipped-up excitement of participatory politics and stump speaking, made sure that when the war was over the same forces that had operated in the past would operate still, appealing to voters’ worst fears and setting the opposition in the worst, the most subversive, light.

None of these forces were at all new. Paranoid politics stretches back as far as people have had a voice in what their rulers do. Fears of secret plots by Catholics or the Crown’s servants—to bring an army from Ireland, to reenact the massacre of the innocents, or to blow the parliamentary system higher than Guy Fawkes’s barrels of gunpowder would have blown Westminster Hall—sent crowds into the London streets and hurtled England closer to revolution and civil war.⁵ What seemed to be conspiracies against liberty or against order hardened Whigs and Tories into treason snuffers and persecutors. “Popish plots” nearly kept the king’s brother off the throne and ten years later drove him into exile.⁶ Even in piping times of peace, English politics seethed with explanations that fastened on backstairs intrigues, hidden motives, the long-term plan not yet divulged or whispered only to the trusty few, and, on the extremes of both parties, the language of conspiracy.⁷

What made them think this way? Rounding up the usual suspects is almost too easy. Everyone knew that evil results must come from evil intents, that political devils could quote Scripture, that fair appearance often hid vile reality. In a day when everything of moment happened at court, politics necessarily became personal, the working not of forces but of strong-willed men who knew exactly what they wanted. Easy explanations were also comfortably conservative. The system itself needed no tinkering. Remove the man, and troubles would end. A conspiratorial mind-set also was fostered by the outlook that scholars have dubbed classical republican thought. As it happens, that one ideology included a whole snarling pack of dogmas, not all of them purebred. Many who shared the assumptions would have shrunk from founding a republic and would have called instead for a patriot king, a protector of precedents and cherished traditions. Self-professed republicans would have come to blows over what government could be trusted to do and how far the people themselves ought to be trusted.⁸ But among the most useful essentials of republicanism was an idea tested by history, that liberties were fragile and that a government of mingled, shared authority was unstable. One branch of government or another would encroach on the prerogatives of the other.

“The Times.” 1799, artist unknown. “Triumph Government; perish all its enemies. Traitors be warned: justice though slow, is sure.” George Washington and the army ride to repel an invasion of French cannibals. Two traitors try to prevent him: Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania snarls, “Stop de wheels of de gouvernement,” and Thomas Jefferson stands, giving him aid. A patriotic dog expresses his opinion on the leading Republican newspaper.

Power, by its nature, grew and expanded, seeking new advantages for itself and new increments of power. It also concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In the process, it corrupted the holders. For those with authority, nothing was so tempting as political intrigue and backstairs plotting, as conspiracies and scheming. Given free rein, power almost assuredly meant corruption and tyranny, for there was no end except total and absolute control that it would accept.

American colonial politics shared in those political paranoias and panics only fitfully. Some colonies never really had the kind of factional fights that England had. But in the diverse Middle Colonies, in New York and Pennsylvania especially, where there were cities and a readier means of broadcasting political information through the weekly press, the fear of tyrants and usurpers at home became a staple of political rhetoric. It became one of the strongest forces pushing on American resistance to the Crown in the 1760s—not just the enormities that imperial authorities had committed but the ones that these were sure to lead to. Fearful colonists looked at the struggles in England and saw “a junto of courtiers and state-jobbers,” “instigated by the devil and led by their wicked and corrupt hearts,” out to subvert liberty in the freest nation in Europe—and, in every riot suppressed in gunfire, in every arrest for sedition, they saw a broader “passion for arbitrary dominion,” lubricated with the spoils, the pickings, the outright graft that a wealthy and powerful government had at its command. It was not just to protect liberty from the present “CUP OF ABOMINATIONS” but to protect from inevitable future encroachment that the colonists took up arms and in the end cut themselves loose from Britain.⁹

But there were endless enemies, and the same terrible way of thinking quickly infected the republic of the patriots. Before George Washington’s second term was completed, a party system had come into being of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. If the Democratic-Republicans, under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, took on the fears of classical republicanism, which feared any government encroachment and increase in power, and offered as one remedy for it the countervailing power and influence of the states, with their own separate rights, the Federalists took on the fears that Tories ever since Charles II’s time had held, that a breakdown in the established order would mean a breakup of all things and a society where all the passions and forces, unleashed, would undermine every institution on which ordered progress depended. If the Jeffersonians could look to England and its new sedition laws for an example of what might happen here—and what, to their eyes, did happen, with the Sedition Act of 1798—the Federalists looked to France, where the recalibration of the powers of king, lords, clergy, and Commons had brought short-lived constitutions, mob violence, terrorism, and, in the end, a directory of tyrants cloaked in the language of republicanism.¹⁰

No army of Federalists scoured the countryside putting Republicans to the sword, of course. What small rebellion did arise was handled bloodlessly. When Americans had their own “revolution,” it was in the 1800 presidential election, in which, by peaceful and customary process, the Jeffersonians came into power and the supposed tyrants accepted defeat without a struggle. No guillotine ever rose in Rittenhouse Square.

Indeed, by the 1840s, the permanency of a party system, if not of the specific parties, had forced those who liked to summon up republican nightmares to rethink some of their basic assumptions. The “baneful effects of the spirit of party” that George Washington’s Farewell Address had referred to had been a textbook case of the early distrust of party as a conspiracy against the people’s will. Now a fresh generation reversed the argument. Republicanism and party government were not just compatible; they might actually be inseparable. Against the threat of the ambitious man, the Napoleon or Caesar, parties could throw up all the barriers of an institutionalized and widely expressed opposition. Parties would not undermine the republic. They might slow its decline, by scouring out scoundrelry and exposing freedom’s secret enemies. What Catiline could escape the argus eyes of professional faultfinders?

Whigs and Democrats expressed it differently, to be sure. Whigs railed at party government as “a moral pestilence.” They reminded voters that lockstep loyalty endangered liberty. Many Whigs detested it so deeply that they would never have dreamed of voting anything but a Whig ticket. But, then, they liked to claim that their party was not really a party at all—not in the many deplorable senses that the idea of party had come to have. Members responded to their own consciences, not to party discipline. They were not in it for spoils. Indeed, in many elections they were not in it at all: Whigs, more than Democrats, had to have living issues to motivate them to attend the polls, and in many off-year elections a decisive share of them stayed home. They saw themselves as members of the antiparty party led by the antipolitical politicians. Democrats, for their own part, described parties as the protectors of liberty, against the moneyed men who, otherwise, would have everything their own way. Only political discipline could keep the forces together in defense of republican freedom.¹¹

The Whigs’ ambivalence, though, should give historians pause. Long after party government became the norm, it still took some explaining away. An antiparty tradition survived. Mainstream politicians needed to absorb it and apply it in new ways, not dismiss it as outmoded. The idea persisted that one party was more legitimate than the other. Whig and Democrat were willing to grant their organization the exclusive role of the people’s one true watchman in the night. They lagged badly in extending the same courtesy to the opposition. If “our friend, the enemy” had gone out of existence completely, only the disgruntled on the outskirts of the surviving organization would have called for setting up a new opposition party, just to keep the winners from eating the very paint off the walls of public offices. Parties so ached for the day that their enemy was eliminated, removed forever, that they kept crowing over the dawn that never came.

Given the opportunity, each side made the case that really there was no legitimate opposition party at all. The Whigs were no Whigs. They were Federalists—Tories once removed—who had toasted success to America’s enemies in one war and, true to tradition, spoken on behalf of Mexico in another: “Mexican Whigs—British Whigs—aid & comfort to the enemy—Federal Whigs—moral treason party—abolition party—black tariff party—unpatriotic party.” The Democrats, for their part, never got the respect that went with their name. Whigs called them “Locofocos,” after the brand of matches that one radical sect in the Democratic Party had used to light their convention hall with, after conservatives had departed, shutting off the gas. They were not really democrats with big or small d, and Whigs on many occasions declared themselves the true democrats, and the real republican party.¹²

Alongside the fealty of so many eligible voters to one particular party, too, we must set the wide distrust of “politicians” and the low reputation of politics. Any government was sure to raise “weak men and scamps” to power, an Ohioan wrote sourly. “Go not to the sword of Caesar to find out the cause of the destruction of Roman liberty; seek it not in the camp; but go to the forum thronged with inflammatory orators and aspiring demagogues, with souls dead to their country’s honor and spotted with corruption.” (Whigs had plenty of ammunition to fire against Caesar, too; their fear of Andrew Jackson’s readiness to ignore the law whenever it served his own ends and to stretch those constitutional provisions broadening a president’s power was the strongest reason why they called themselves Whigs in the first place.)¹³ That distrust, even detestation, helped explain why so few congressmen remained around for more than a single term. Parties played on it, by associating all the evils of the politician’s trade with their opponents. Every coalition became a “bargain and sale” and, needless to say, was always the most shameless and corrupt bargain and sale in history, “equal only in enormity to that which attended the treason of Arnold.” Every deserter was a disappointed politician, a broken-down hack whose ambition could only be satisfied now by going with whatever party was willing to pluck him off the trash heap to which he had been so properly consigned. These were not exceptions; these were the standard characteristics associated with the “politician”: avarice, cupidity, ambition, unscrupulousness. It was for this reason that parties often found it easiest to elect politicians by pretending that they were something else and that their opponents were nothing but.¹⁴ Power corrupted, tainted, distanced the holder from those he was meant to serve. To make sure that power reflected the people’s will or the people’s best interests, the electorate must change commanders constantly and share authority widely. It was not simply to make politics more effective but to give it the veneer of being the people’s will that impelled politicians to take on the trappings of a rank and file duly consulted, by replacing the caucuses that had chosen candidates with conventions, elected by meetings of the party faithful at the local level.

The two-party system therefore had to shape its language to fit those suspicions and, every so often, take advantage of them, and this was easier because Whigs and Democrats saw themselves as members of a special, exclusive kind of party, a party of the people. Always the search for subversive conspiracies, for Catilines and Caesars, went on. Party tub-thumpers really did love to make voters’ flesh creep, but they had good practical reasons for doing so. Americans were always on the move. Ten years’ time, and every community would be made largely from strangers. Many settlers hardly stayed around in a community long enough to fulfill the residency requirements for voting—which in some places was about as long as the time it took to deposit a ballot in the box. Consequently, party papers had to drill home the issues every day and on every occasion, to whip up the most ardent passions on the least occasion, and to give partisans the most passionate of reasons for supporting the good cause—whatever that happened to be. Fear worked perfectly ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Dangerous Stir
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Paranoid Politics, 1789–1861
• Chapter 2 Copperheads and Consolidationists, 1861–1865
• Chapter 3 Black Scare
• Chapter 4 Have We a Constitution?
• Chapter 5 Do They Want Still More Blood?
• Chapter 6 Horrors on Horrors Accumulate
• Chapter 7 Do You Want Andrew Johnson for President or King?
• Chapter 8 A Dangerous Stir in Maryland
• Chapter 9 Impeachment Fevers, 1867
• Chapter 10 If You Don’t Kill the Beast
• Chapter 11 Let us Have Peace
• Chapter 12 The Wolf Who Cried Wolf
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index