Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America by Fergus M. Bordewich published by Knopf, 480 pages (2020) $32.50 Hardcover $14.99 Kindle.
Too many Americans think of the political direction of the Civil War in simplistic terms of what Lincoln did, as though he was a dictator, but the structures of government in a republic never respond to the will of just one man. American republicanism was particularly mistrustful of an all-powerful chief executive. Congress was used to playing its Constitutionally defined roles as lawmaker and check on the powers of the president. Just a decade before the Civil War, the Senate triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had been the giants of American politics and the changing presidents were comparative dwarfs. This new book by Fergus Bordewich puts Congress on center stage as an important collective player in waging war and reconstructing America.
Until the fateful election of Abraham Lincoln, Southern white slaveowners held an outsized power in the the Federal system. Bordewich writes that:
Although the slave states represented barely one-fourth of the free people of the United States, they had controlled the government for generations. But demographics ate away glacially at the slave states’ grip. In the 1840s, they lost control of the House of Representatives, and after 1850 their dominance of the Senate, although with the support of Northern Democrats they continued to dominate government through the end of the decade. “You own the cabinet, you own the Senate, and you own the President of the United States as much as you own the servant on your own plantation,” Ben Wade caustically remarked on the Senate floor in December 1860.
The 1860 election marked the turning point in the composition of Congress, but the rapid departure of Congressmen and Senators as the Southern states seceded shifted power north even more decisively. The abandonment of Congress by the conservatives insured that not would the emerging legislative Left be given powers it had never before enjoyed during wartime, but also that it would remain strong enough to help shape Reconstruction and pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution thereby ending slavery, making non-white people citizens, and barring whites-only voting respectively.
Of course Bordewich can’t depict the actions of every member of the Civil War Congresses, so he focuses on Congressmen Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio and Senators William Pitt Fessenden of Maine and Benjamin Wade of Ohio.
Stevens and Wade went into the Civil War as Radicals, and they never abandoned their principles. Fear of Ben Wade becoming president may have been one factor in some Republicans voting against the Andrew Johnson impeachment in 1868. He was not just a Radical on race, but also on issues of class and gender whom many Republicans could not stomach. Stevens was thoroughgoing in his critique of American racism and he embraced racial equality personally as well as philosophically, even insisting on being buried in an integrated cemetery.
Fessenden began the war as a more establishment figure. Bordewich charts his movement leftward in response to the demands of war and his growing insights into the ways slavery underpinned the Slaveholders’ Rebellion of 1861 to 1865.
Clement Vallandigham is a different animal altogether from the other three central character. Intelligent and personally brave, Vallandingham opposed what he considered the North’s war of conquest against the South. As part of the declining Democratic minority, he wielded little power within the Capitol, but he used his considerable eloquence to try to sway popular opinion. An object of absolute hatred by many rank and file Republicans, including many armed soldiers, his life was on the line every time he addressed a crowd. While he was never killed, he was arrested by the military for encouraging draft evasion and Lincoln allowed him to be deported to the Confederacy.
In many ways Vallandingham stands in the ranks of great American dissidents, willing to pay the price for the principles that they believe in. Of course, no one today ranks him with political prisoners like the socialist Eugene Debs or Martin Luther King because of the very principles the Ohioan Vallandingham stood for; slavery and unrestrained white supremacy.
While Bordewich incorporates Vallandingham into the exciting story of the wartime Congress, it is Wade, Fessenden, and Stevens who work the legistive and political revolution that marked the beginnings of modern America. Congress at War explores the ways the Radicals used the levers of legislation to push Lincoln ever leftward in his approach to slavery and his response to the Black refugees flooding into the lines of the Union armies as they moved South. And, since Lincoln’s life was ended by a Confederate assassin at the close of the war, it was left to the Radicals to thwart Andrew Johnson’s desire to place whites firmly over Blacks in the postwar South. These men were able to wrest power away from a president they had likely voted for as Lincoln’s running mate, when they recognized him as a mentally unstable racist. Without them, the Constitutional framework for the Second Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s would not have existed.
If you are ready to look into the politics of the war years and the people who shaped some of the most progressive laws in United States history, this book is a great place to start.
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Nice review!
thanks