Civil War History

What did loyalty to the nation mean for Northerners during the American Civil War? Edited by Robert Sandow, Contested Loyalty joins recent attempts to complicate analyses of wartime nationalism. Scholars have traditionally focused on questions of loyalty in the Confederate side. The tendency emanates from the "Appomattox Syndrome," described in Gary Gallagher's phrasing in the volume's preface (x). In other words, the losing side, containing the losing narrative, was seen as the side whose willingness to fight needed an explanation. However, in recent years increasingly more studies have probed into the construction of modern nationalism in the North as well. The volume's ten essays follow this literature by examining contests over the meaning of national loyalty in various geographic, social, and ethnic contexts. [End Page 152]

Melinda Lawson's opening essay looks at the place the moral duty of loyalty played in the thought of three men: abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Radical Free Soiler (and later Republican) George Julian of Indiana, and Abraham Lincoln. The nontrivial decision to place men such as Phillips and Lincoln together to begin with is the essay's most intriguing aspect. Phillips had called for disunion, immediate abolition, and racial amalgamation for several decades. Conversely, Lincoln never publicly wavered from complete fidelity to the Union. His views on race and slavery also appear vastly different from Phillips's. Lawson's explanation for her initial choice is that all three believed that the American Revolution's egalitarian principles negated slavery, and all three faced the dilemma of the justification of war to preserve these ideals. While Phillips consciously used agitation as a political means to save the Republic, only war convinced Julian to accept general emancipation as synonymous with the goal of the Union's preservation. Most problematically, Lawson states that "there were limits to Lincoln's embracement of the Union" (39). She demonstrates these limits by pointing to Lincoln's firm opposition to slavery's expansion, shown in his stance on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and subsequent politics. However, limits imply a willingness to question the Union rather than simply present an opinion about its proper course. Is there evidence of such questioning by Lincoln? In Lawson's usage of the term, Daniel Webster could be regarded as an antislavery politician whose embracement to the Union had limits.

The volume's other essays move away from the national prism, and several of them demonstrate the degree to which the administration and its representatives identified loyalty exclusively with support for the war's aim of restoring the Union and punishing the rebels.

Matthew Warshauer's essay discusses the ideology of Peace Democrats in wartime Connecticut. According to Warshauer, the movement reflected the perseverance of a "deeply held party ideology, a Jeffersonian conservatism" that persisted throughout the Union, across temporal and geographical boundaries (57). The movement, Warshauer argues, defies a monolithic portrayal of war opponents as residents of the Lower North. Indeed, the party's Connecticut chapter remained competitive throughout the antebellum years and during the war itself. Warshauer identifies two main principles of Copperhead ideology: first, Peace Democrats opposed the war qua war, because of its damage to life and economy. In addition, they emphasized the constitutional principles at stake: the sovereignty of the Southern states, including that over their slaves, explicitly guaranteed by the Founders. Republican action and rhetoric, Peace Democrats argued, enhanced the risk of Federal despotism. Copperhead ideology persuaded many in Connecticut, whose electoral votes Lincoln carried by a narrow margin in 1864. More importantly, Warshauer states, Democrats throughout the Union had a lasting influence: [End Page 153] "Historians can ultimately judge the Democrats wrong in their views on race and humanity, but their views on constitutional authority and states' rights versus a powerful federal government have continued to rage in American society" (73).

Warshauer emphasizes that Peace Democrats were ultimately loyal to the Union, despite continued charges of treason...