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  • “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War by Paul Taylor
  • Adam W. Dean
“The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War. Paul Taylor. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-60635-353-0. 336 pp., cloth, $45.00.

Paul Taylor, a well-known historian of the North during the Civil War, has produced the most complete study of the United States’ Union and Loyal Leagues during and immediately after the conflict. While most scholars of the Civil War era are vaguely familiar with the leagues, Taylor corrects a number of common misconceptions and shows they were indispensable to securing public support for the Union war effort.

Taylor traces the origins of the Union Leagues to two prewar phenomena. First, there was a longstanding tradition of gentlemen’s social clubs in Northern cities that served as blueprints for the elite leagues that existed in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston during the war. Second, during the election of 1860 and ensuing [End Page 59] secession crisis, secretive political groups like the Wide Awakes formed to back the Republican Party.

Once the war proved longer and more difficult than most in the North had imagined, union supporters in the Upper Midwest established Union Leagues. Taylor makes a valuable point by noting that people formed these organizations because they feared pro-Confederate societies like the Knights of the Golden Circle and faced hostility from the Copperheads—Northern Democrats opposed to the war and emancipation. These middle-class and grassroots organizations coalesced first in Illinois and then acquired a national headquarters in Washington, DC, in 1863 as the Union League of America. Taylor points out that the more famous Union League Clubs in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were separate. These groups also backed the Union war effort and the Republican Party but were much more elite, featuring the powerful and wealthy. Here, Taylor makes good use of Sidney George Fisher’s excellent diary.

While ostensibly nonpartisan, both the elite and grassroots Union Leagues worked hand-in-glove with the Republican Party to support the war and, after 1863, emancipation. They labeled Copperhead and Democratic opponents as traitors but were somewhat open to war Democrats like Andrew Johnson, whom they invited to speak at a national rally in March 1863. The leagues produced literature and pamphlets during elections to support Republican candidates and Abraham Lincoln. In 1864, this took the form of a whopping 470,000 copies of “its thirty-three . . . works” (224). While Taylor examines some of these pamphlets, including one by Francis Lieber, I wanted more analysis of these appeals. A few leagues also provided the funding for USCT regiments. Yet another function of the league was ostracism of Copperheads and those labeled as such, to provide social penalties for opposing the war and emancipation.

The last chapter touches on the Union Leagues during Reconstruction. In the South, African Americans provided the bulk of league membership, due to the Southern “white workingmen’s inability to fully grasp the League’s mission” and racism (233). Paramilitary violence by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also prevented the groups from being more successful in the South. By 1872, with the goal of union achieved, most of the clubs in the North evaporated, with the exception of the elite clubs in big cities.

Overall, there is much in this book to appreciate. The writing is clear and engaging. The research is careful and thorough. Any future assessment of the election of 1864, so critical to US victory, will have to include Taylor’s work on the Union Leagues. I had only two quibbles. First, Taylor makes constant references to contemporary American politics. Some of these are a stretch, and in years to come may date the book. Second, perhaps in response to recent scholarship grossly overselling [End Page 60] emancipationist sentiment in the prewar Republican Party, Taylor gives frequent asides that during Reconstruction even radicals “cared little for black equality” and only wanted black votes (239). This is an overcorrection; radicals such as Benjamin Butler were tenacious in advocating for black...

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