Fear on the Campaign Trail

This chapter discusses the campaign strategies of the two main presidential candidates in the free states in the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Both appealed to voters’ desire to contain the Slave Power and assure access to the West for free white settlers. The core difference between Douglasites and Lincolnites was over the role of the Federal government in resolving the crisis: Republicans wanted to take control in Washington to prevent the nationalisation of slavery; Democrats continued to believe that the most effective solution was decentralisation.

An Engine for Freedom

This chapter shows how the doctrine of popular sovereignty retained political appeal even after the Kansas Nebraska Act. It provided the basis for a possible resolution of the national crisis by offering a path to a free soil West which the South would be compelled to accept. The enduring appeal of popular sovereignty helps explain the survival of the Democrats in the North, notwithstanding the underlying antislavery presumptions of most Northern voters.

Barricades on Broadway

This chapter uses the Astor Place theatre riot of 1849 to illuminate the tensions within American political culture over majoritarianism, political legitimacy and citizenship. It argues that the lethal confrontation between the militia and the mob was a crisis moment that formed the imagined enemies and the alliances that frame political choices. Those who supported the New York City mayor’s decision to call in the militia believed that violence was sometimes necessary to ensure that democracy was compatible with order. Their emphasis on the need for restraints on unfettered freedom provided the intellectual underpinning of the case against the Slave Power and secession.

Conclusion

The book concludes by emphasising the underlying theme of continuity and preservation in Northerners’ celebration of the defeat of the rebellion. Even so, fears of national instability continued for at least a decade after Appomattox. To some Northerners, the war had resolved one source of instability, slavery, only for another—the problem of mobs, ignorance and recklessness—to assume an even greater significance. The fight of conservatism against fanaticism continued.

How a Conservative People Conducted a Long War

Had Richmond fallen in the spring of 1862, the Union might have been secured without emancipation and a majority of Northerners would have been entirely satisfied with that outcome, including Lincoln and most Republicans. But that did not happen, and this chapter describes how political positions that previously had been regarded by most Northerners as dangerously radical became normalised in wartime. As a conservative movement, driven above all by a desire to vindicate and preserve the Union, the Republican Party drove forward revolutionary change.

The Essence of Anarchy

This chapter explains how the firing on Fort Sumter resolved Northerners’ dilemma about how to respond to secession. Many in the North felt a profound sense of betrayal, having tried until the last moment to believe in the good faith of the South. Nonetheless the war quickly generated a new set of tensions within the North about whether the Republican administration was abusing its power to force through revolutionary change that went far beyond what was needed to suppress the rebellion.

Order and the Problem of Law

This chapter describes the impact of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It argues that the legal and moral demands being made by the Slave Power severed the relationship between law, on the one hand, and order on the other. Before 1850 it was antiabolitionists who were prone to use violence in Northern cities to break up antislavery meetings; afterwards the militancy was on the side of those, as in the notorious Anthony Burns case in Boston, who opposed slave catchers, even though the latter had the law on their side. Even Northerners who disdained antislavery agitation were driven to see slavery as an active threat to order and stability.

Introduction

The book opens with the claim that the great majority of Americans living in the free states in the Civil War era thought of themselves as “conservative”, even as they embraced change. Conservatism in the sense in which it was used in this period was not a political ideology but a disposition, a way of signalling a mature, measured approach to the problems of the nineteenth century. This self-defined “conservative” political culture embraced both an underlying antislavery consensus and a powerful devotion to the Union. The interplay of these two impulses—antislavery and nationalism—shaped Northerners’ political choices. In the face of each successive moment of crisis, most Northerners—whether Republicans or Democrats—sought the “conservative” solution that would reconcile the survival of the nation with their dislike of slavery.

Storm over Kansas

This chapter describes the impact of the Kansas Nebraska Act on Northerner’s political assumptions. The violence in the Kansas Territory that resulted from the imposition of popular sovereignty drove Northerners to make difficult choices about the best path to securing political stability. The 1856 presidential election was therefore essentially a contest among candidates each of whom posed as a conservative.