The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era

The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era

The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures

in the Civil War Era William A. Blair, editor

The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era

Mark E. Neely Jr.

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2005

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arnhem and The Serif types

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Neely, Mark E.

The boundaries of American political culture in the

Civil War era / by Mark E. Neely, Jr.

   p. cm. — (The Steven and Janice Brose lectures in

the Civil War era)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2986-2 (alk. paper)

1. United States—Politics and government—1841– 1845. 2. United States—Politics and government— 1845–1861. 3. United States—Politics and government—1861–1865. 4. Political culture—United States—History—19th century. 5. Political participation—United States—History—19th century. 6. United States—Social conditions—To 1865. 7. Social classes—United States—History—19th century. 8. Material culture—United States—History—19th century. 9. Political clubs—United States—History— 19th century. 10. Minstrel shows—United States— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series.

E415.7.N44 2005

306.2′0973′09034—dc22     2005007817

09 08 07 06 05  5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Household Gods: Material Culture, the Home, and the Boundaries of Engagement with Politics

CHAPTER 2

A New and Profitable Branch of Trade: Beyond the Boundaries of Respectability?

CHAPTER 3

A Secret Fund: The Union League, Patriotism, and the Boundaries of Social Class

CHAPTER 4

Minstrelsy, Race, and the Boundaries of American Political Culture

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1. Mexican News 6

1.2. Grand National Whig Banner 11

1.3. Henry Clay 15

1.4. Wide-Awake blouse 22

2.1. The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved 32

2.2. The Union, the Constitution and the Enforcement of the Laws 34

2.3. Campaign ferrotype of 1860 38

2.4. Abe Lincoln’s Last Card; or, Rouge-et-Noir 44

2.5. The True Issue or Thats Whats the Matter 46

2.6. Miscegenation or the Millennium of Abolitionism 48

2.7. The Old General Ready for a Movement 50

2.8. While the Cat is away, the Mice will Play 51

2.9. All the Morality and All the Religion 54

2.10. The Great Republican Reform Party 56

3.1. Union League 1118 Chestnut 76

3.2. The Politics and Poetry of New England 87

4.1. National Clay Minstrel, and Frelinghuysen Melodist 104

4.2. An Heir to the Throne 108

4.3. Living Curiosities at Barnum’s 109

4.4. Progress of Honest Old Abe on His Way to the White House 114

4.5. Brutus and Caesar 121

4.6. Copperhead Minstrel 124

4.7. I Wish I Was in Dixie! 126

Preface

In March 2002 I gave the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures for the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. The three lectures made a case for the importance of politics in understanding the lives of ordinary Americans in the North during the Civil War era.

It may seem odd that I should have to make a case for the importance of political life in the middle of the nineteenth century, now famous as the period when Americans devised the mass political party and enthusiastic campaigning techniques. Many of the people who heard the lectures, however, knew their modern context well: the currently confused and beleaguered status of political history.

The introduction to a recent book of essays on American political history, for example, recalled the complaints of political historians expressed at a professional meeting in 1995: Their field was becoming marginalized in the profession, even excluded from it. Back in the 1970s, social history had passed political history as the subfield producing the most doctoral dissertations, so that political historians were now outnumbered in their own departments. More seriously, senior chairs were no longer being replaced, and graduate students could not get jobs.¹ Nine years later, at the annual meeting of the same association, a panel was convened to discuss why political history was dead and whether there were any signs it might recover. Apparently, many at the meeting thought recovery unlikely.²

A landmark of the demise of political history is Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin’s Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century, published in 2000. That book launched the most sweeping attack ever made on the importance of politics to the daily lives of nineteenth-century Americans. My Brose Lectures were originally conceived as an answer to it.

But in the course of revising the lectures for publication I came to see that circling the wagons was an inadequate response. I could not merely reassert the centrality of political life in nineteenth-century America, reminding readers that the national attic remains full of political ribbons, badges, cartoons, and posters from that era. In the first place, the authors of Rude Republic made generous exception for the Civil War era itself, saying that politics, though insignificant in the lives of most Americans throughout the century, did reach the apogee of their ability to engage people’s attention over the issues that led to civil war, especially slavery and related constitutional issues.³ And what I was most familiar with was the politics of the Civil War era.

Second, political historians who had never doubted the importance of politics in the nineteenth century had themselves done much to downgrade the political history of the Civil War itself. Surely no survey of the American political system in the nineteenth century had less to say about the Civil War than Joel H. Silbey’s American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (1991).⁴ Silbey’s interpretation of the important developments in the political parties of the century made a case for the insignificance of the Civil War. Third, it was true also that political historians, whatever their degree of emphasis on the importance of the four-year period of war at midcentury, had exaggerated the centrality of political concerns in the overall period: America was more than a "political nation." Its citizens were concerned, as Altschuler and Blumin were justifiably at pains to point out, about family and workplace and schools and religion and other private matters into the consideration of which partisan politics did not always intrude.

So the book resulting from those lectures is more concerned with locating the boundaries between the spheres of political and private life than with making imperialist assertions for one sphere or the other.

The evidence that first seemed to me to call Rude Republic’s conclusions into question came from material culture. In the first lecture, Household Gods, popular prints provided a link between home and public political concerns that Rude Republic had overlooked. But material culture soon caused me to reexamine other important arguments about political experience in the period. The second lecture, A New Branch of Trade, recovered innovations in political technique and in the production of campaign souvenirs based on photography, which in turn suggested an image of political life so vibrant and dynamic as to call seriously into question the dismissive attitude toward Civil War politics taken in The American Political Nation. In the third lecture, A Secret Fund, the production and distribution of forward-looking campaign posters and persuasive political pamphlets by the Union League Clubs during the Civil War provoked a reexamination of the class-bound and hidebound image of these clubs given influential expression in Iver Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (1990).⁵ Finally, the chapter on Manhood and Minstrelsy, which is entirely new and was not a part of the original lectures, developed from encounters in rare book rooms with tiny and ephemeral presidential campaign songsters. These necessitated a reassessment of the relationship between political parties and popular race prejudice described in Jean H. Baker’s Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983).⁶

Finally, I am continually surprised by the insight on American society that can be derived by diligent reading of nineteenth-century newspapers. They were so different from the modern press as almost to constitute a class of artifact alongside popular prints, songsters, and old campaign buttons. They were so eagerly and one-sidedly partisan and so completely absorbed in political life that over the years they had fallen out of favor as historical sources. My time in graduate school thirty-five years ago coincided with a low point in the reputation of newspapers as sources. They were regarded as hopelessly partisan and elitist, and I was left for years thereafter with little inclination to pore over the numerous dailies and weeklies of the century. Rude Republic helped point the way to rediscovering nineteenth-century newspapers as essential sources, though its authors derived very different lessons from reading them. I have relied heavily on old newspapers for the evidence in this book.

In the end, material culture and the return to reading the popular press of the nineteenth century had caused me to reexamine critically the arguments in four key works of great influence on the writing of political history.

Rude Republic attacked the whole idea of the importance of politics in the daily lives of nineteenth-century Americans. That idea will be closely examined in the first chapter. The American Political Nation, in many ways the polar opposite of Rude Republic, nevertheless argued for the insignificance of the Civil War to American political development in the nineteenth century—while Rude Republic made allowance for intensified interest in politics in that era alone. The dismissive view of American Civil War politics will be put under the microscope in the second chapter.

The New York City Draft Riots may seem a work of such tight geographical and chronological focus as to be in strange company with the other two books, which have great chronological sweep. But Bernstein’s arguments transcended the five days of violence in New York City in the summer of 1863 so that his book has been taken as a model of integrating political and social history—in a way, offering a method for bringing together the two different views of American politics we read about in Rude Republic and The American Political Nation.⁷

In truth, The New York City Draft Riots stands as much more a work of social than political history. The index to the book has but one entry for elections, and that an incidental one to the New York City election riot of 1834, an event that occurred a generation before the draft riots. The book offers more class analysis than focus on elections and electioneering, an approach that needs to be examined in detail and will be in the third chapter of this book.

Finally, Baker’s Affairs of Party stood as an eye-opening attempt to use the idea of political culture to bring new life to the political history of the nineteenth century. Like Bernstein’s influential work, it sought common ground for political and social history. It similarly diverted the gaze from election results and voting returns. The results of this anthropologically sweeping approach to American politics are examined in the fourth chapter.

It is crucial to remember that all four of these books are excellent and thought-provoking. Only very good books stimulate debate and send us back to the sources to look further into historical questions. Even as I argue with their conclusions, I mean to show respect for their importance and achievement. But ultimately history written in the academy is more an argument than a story. This book began life in the academy, and animated dialogue with other historians is a sure way to advance historical understanding.

The first chapter will focus on the surprising range of political material that might be found in the nineteenth-century home: popular lithographs on the walls, newspapers on the parlor table, statuary in nooks, and collectible photographs of celebrities in albums. The second chapter examines materials found in more public areas: political cartoons in poster format, most notably. It also calls attention to underappreciated developments in political campaign ephemera in the Civil War era, capitalizing on photography in a period that exploded with advertising novelty in politics. All of these materials required talent and money to produce, and the third chapter deals with the rise of a Civil War institution, the Union League Clubs, that adroitly brought money and talent to the spread of mass political culture. In some areas they virtually covered the walls of public buildings with posters, and hardly any part of the Union escaped the reach of their cheap pamphlets. The materials mass-produced for electioneering seasons naturally relied on familiar stereotypes and melodies—embodied literally in the smallest and perhaps the most neglected of printed campaign ephemera, songbooks. The fourth chapter explores the indebtedness of these musical materials to the popular entertainment genre of the nineteenth century, the minstrel show. Throughout, the real focus of this book is not on the materials themselves—this is not a book for collectors—but on their meaning for the era and their utility in giving historians a better description of American political culture.

Whatever means historians use to describe American political culture in the period, the effort seems worthwhile, for the real theme of such work is American people, great masses of them who did not leave historians systematic written records in letters, diaries, or memoirs, as the political elites often did. The study of political culture, like voting analysis, is a way to reach those people indirectly through the symbols, devices, literature, and institutions that engaged their attention.

Many of my views on material culture had their origins in interpretations of prints and photographs used in nineteenth-century politics that Harold Holzer, Gabor Boritt, and I formulated in several works published between 1984 and 2000.⁸ Association with Professors Edmund Sullivan and Roger Fischer, true pioneers in the study of material political culture, in their efforts years ago to bring life to the Museum of American Political Life at the University of Hartford also gave me some acquaintance with other kinds of political ephemera and their vital meanings.

My familiarity with prints and material culture, generally unfamiliar materials for most academic historians, stemmed from my career before university teaching, when I labored in a museum and rare book library devoted to materials on Abraham Lincoln. Then I could handle such items daily and not merely on brief research trips to reading rooms where these materials can be called up and studied only by painstakingly slow and difficult process. Also because of the two decades I spent at the Lincoln Museum, this book has a special reliance on Lincoln-related sources.

Steven and Janice Brose made these lectures possible by generous funding and made them better by patient personal support, attending the lectures themselves, asking probing questions from the audience, and keeping in touch in the time that has passed since the public presentation, while I have been rewriting and reconsidering my arguments. Harold Holzer, the senior vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and my coauthor in previous books, read the manuscript at a crucial stage and provided the sort of advice and criticism