Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known , livre ebook

“The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”
·   CIVIL WAR IN THE NORTH   ·
Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union · John M. Belohlavek
Banners South: A Northern Community at War · Edmund J. Raus
“ Circumstances are destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to DeWne Sphere · Tina Stewart Brakebill
More Than a Contest between Armies: Essays on the Civil War · Edited by James Marten and A. Kristen Foster
August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman · Edited by David W. Lowe
Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861–1888 · Edited by Glen N. Wiche
The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians · Mark A. Lause
Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer · Paul Taylor
Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front · J. Matthew Gallman
A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
“ They Have Left Us Here to Die”: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry · Edited by Glenn Robins
The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union, from August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865 · Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Peter C. Luebke
The Election of 1860 Reconsidered · Edited by A. James Fuller
“ A Punishment on the Nation”: An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War · Edited by Brian Craig Miller
Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family · Edited by Patricia A. Donohoe
Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry · Edited by Eric R. Faust
Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers · Roger Pickenpaugh
Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War—for Better and for Worse · Candice Shy Hooper
For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops · Kelly D. Mezurek
Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union · William F. Quigley Jr.
“ The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War · Paul Taylor
“The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”
The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War

Paul Taylor
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-353-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
22  21  20  19  18        5  4  3  2  1
“There are wars of opinion not fought out with the musket.”
—William T. Sherman
“In such wars those who win are loyal, the defeated ones the traitors.”
—Caldéron
“Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?
Why if it prospers none dare call it treason.”
—John Harrington ,
sixteenth or early seventeenth century
Contents

Foreword
by Jonathan W. White
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Questions of Patriotic Loyalty versus Treason
Chapter 1
“Quiet Men Are Dangerous”: Civilian Antecedents of the Union Leagues
Chapter 2
“There Can Be No Neutrals in This War; Only Patriots or Traitors”: The Demand for Public Loyalty
Chapter 3
“A Fire of Liberty Burning Upon the Altar”: The Union Leagues Arise amidst Despair and Disillusionment
Chapter 4
“A Refuge Rather Than a Resort for Loyalty”: Philadelphia, New York, and Boston Lead the Way
Chapter 5
“We Are Learning to Draw the Line Between Treason and Loyalty”: Union League Ostracism and Democratic Resentment
Chapter 6
“This Is the Time for Pamphleteers and Essayists”: The Pen Begins to Fight Alongside the Sword against Copperhead Dissent and Violence
Chapter 7
“The ‘Loyal Leagues’ Are Really Effecting Public Opinion”: The Broad-Based Loyal Leagues and “No Party Now”
Chapter 8
“Neutrality Is Allied to Treason; Indifference Becomes a Crime; and Whoever Is Not with Us Is Against Us”: A Union League of America Council in Every Town
Chapter 9
“We Are Not a Partisan, Yet We Are a Political Organization”: Women Enter the Fray as Midwest Dissent Boils Over
Chapter 10
“We Are Organizing Our Leagues and Getting Ready for the Great Fight of 1864”: An Open Arm of the Republican Party
Chapter 11
“Once More Rally Around the Flag , and Your Work Will Be Complete”: A Bitter and Partisan Election
Chapter 12
“It Is a Fatal Mistake to Hold That This War Is Over Because the Fighting Has Ceased”: The Union League in Reconstruction
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword

Union Leagues
Jonathan W. White
When Abraham Lincoln was a mere twenty-nine years old in January 1838, he exulted in the fact that Americans inhabited a peaceful and prosperous land, and that they lived under “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” The Founding Fathers had fought for this land and established this government; Lincoln’s generation had received them as a gift. But now it was their responsibility “to transmit these … to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.” Preserving America’s political institutions, Lincoln said, was a “task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.” 1
Clearly, from a young age, Lincoln believed the Union was worth preserving. And these ideas continued to motivate him into his adult life. In his 1852 eulogy for Kentuckian Henry Clay, Lincoln maintained “that the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States.” Why? Because the United States offered more liberty and equality than any other nation in the world. Ten years later, in 1862, Lincoln told Congress what he believed the Civil War was really about. In fighting for the Union and giving freedom to the slave, he said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” 2
Union soldiers echoed the sentiments of their commander in chief as they marched off to war. In what is now one of the most famous letters of the Civil War, Maj. Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island Infantry spoke of “how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution.” Through his own military service, Ballou hoped to set an example for his two young sons so that they might grow up to “honorable manhood.” Other soldiers felt alike. “Our fathers made this country, we their children are to save it,” wrote one Ohio volunteer, while a Connecticut infantryman was proud to fight for “those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution … in order that they may be perpetuated to those who may come after.” 3
For as important as the Union was to many Americans of the Civil War generation, the concept of “the Union” has not received its due in the historical literature. In some ways it makes sense that scholars would be more interested in questions of nationalism in the Confederacy. After all, the Southern states were attempting to create and define a nation during the Civil War. The Union, by contrast, was merely fighting to preserve a preexisting nation. And yet we cannot begin to understand what motivated Northerners to enlist and fight in the Civil War—and what prompted Northern civilians to support the soldiers in the field—unless we probe what “Union” and “nation” meant to them. 4 After all, as Gary W. Gallagher reminds us in The Union War , belief in Union, “more than any other factor by far,” motivated northerners to fight and die for their country. For them, the American Union was “a democratic beacon shining in a world dominated by aristocrats and monarchs”—a unique and exceptional nation that provided economic opportunity, political liberty, and the possibility of upward social mobility. 5 If the Union fell, no other nation would be left on earth to carry the torch of liberty.
In this wonderful new study of the Union Leagues during the Civil War Era, Paul Taylor brings to light new evidence about the ordinary men—and, in some cases, women—who supported the Union from behind the lines through the establishment of Union Leagues in cities, towns, and villages throughout the North (and during Reconstruction, in the South). When many of us think of “the Union League,” we perhaps envision the spectacular 1865 building on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, or the elegant postwar clubhouse in New York City. And yet, as Taylor reveals, these groups emerged not as the elite social clubs they are today, but as patriotic (and sometimes secret) community-based societies dedicated to preserving a nation that was smoldering amid the chaos of civil war.
Taylor deftly provides the context for the emergence of these grassroots patriotic organizations, reminding us that Unionists did not simply encounter an enemy on the battlefield—they also faced strong, and sometimes violent, political opposition in the rear. Lincoln’s critics—the Copperheads, or antiwar Democrats—have received a significant amount of attention from historians. Tellingly, much of this scholarship has appeared during periods in which America has been involved in wars, most notably during World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the post–9/11 era. 6 Scholars working in this field have probed the nature of loyalty and dissent in wartime. But the private citizens who organized to counteract the Copperheads have received far less attention. And yet they deserve it. In respons