Sadly, Cox’s grim visions would take form soon enough on both sides of the conflict.
The Democratic opposition was based on pragmatic considerations, including fears that foreign-born soldiers and citizens would bear a disproportional share of the dying (not true), an underlying sympathy with the white South, and a sense of political defeatism (that the war was not winnable).
5
Democrats observed correctly that the war had not continued as it began, but rather had become a “holy crusade” to remake Southern society and rewrite the Constitution—nrst as a “war measure” for emancipation and second as a constitutional amendment. They pointed to a vastly expanded Federal bureaucracy with unprecedented powers to draft, tax, and impose martial law. And they vigorously protested Lincoln’s “unconstitutional” reaches, most egregiously his Emancipation Proclamation.
All of the Democratic principles were legitimate and arguable within the context of a loyal opposition. But in looking for moral significance, the end to which they pointed must be judged. And that end was, bluntly, hardly moral. Essentially, Democratic opposition to Lincoln and the Republican Party found its grounding less in a prophetic critique of the Union military machine than on the creation of an apartheid state built on the social and political reality of white supremacy This all-encompassing mission dictated virtually every Democratic response to Lincoln’s party and Lincoln’s conduct of the war.
The racist goals of Peace Democrats ensured that they would win no loyalty among the relatively small number of American pacifists in the North. The largest peace party—the American Peace Society—refused to condemn the war at all, interpreting it as a police action rather than a war between nations. Other, more radical “perfectionist” pacifistic organizations, like Alfred Love’s Universal Peace Union, agreed with Peace Democrats that the war was a sin and that therefore the Confederacy should be acknowledged as a legitimate nation, but they refused any cooperation with the Democrats because their “motives” were diametrically opposed. As the historian Thomas F. Curran recognizes, “The perfectionists perceived nothing but insincerity and hypocrisy in the Democrats’ call for peace.”
6
In contemplating the rise of the Republican Party and the evolution of the war, Democratic leaders suspected a conspiracy that had nothing to do with constitutional principles of Federal rule versus states’ rights, and everything to do with abolition. In a speech before Maine’s House of Representatives, Moses Page raged against “the fiddling Neros of the Republican Party.” By “trampling” on the Constitution, Lincoln was betraying his office with mindless bloodshed. In response, Page concluded:
I see but one way left open for us to prevent it [disunion], and that is to grant to our wayward sisters the rights which belong to them under the Constitution, and let the nigger alone; then, I have no doubt, we could conclude an honorable peace with the South in less time than Mr. Seward declared he would, when he got the reins of government.... I think this country was destined for one people, and would have remained ok, had not the fell spirit of abolition crept in and overturned the work of our fathers.... Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward are in a great measure responsible for the present unholy war, which has sacrificed so many of the young men of our country, and wasted so much treasure.
7
As war deaths mounted, Democratic critics condemned Lincoln for deceiving the American people with a premeditated plot to transform the war into an abolition war. Like their white Confederate enemies, they insisted that Lincoln’s end was not the preservation of the Union after all, but the creation of a mixed race society that would undermine white supremacy They recited a checklist of Lincoln’s policies, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, congressional recognition of “the Negro” Haitian Republic, opposition to slavery in the territories, and abolishment of slavery in the District of Columbia. It all pointed inescapably to one fact: Republicans were conspiring to “Africanize” the nation by privileging the interests of blacks over whites. It would be race—and not moral arguments over just war—that set the defining context for the coming national elections in 1864.
When faced with the issue of recognizing Haiti in 1862, Congressman Cox had objected on the grounds that America should not recognize Negro ministers of state from a nation whose constitution barred whites from office. The United States should do the opposite, Cox argued, and bar blacks from holding public office. This, he averred, exemplified the innermost meaning of America: “I have been taught in the history of this country that these Commonwealths and this Union were made for white men; that this Government is a Government of white men; that the men who made it never intended, by any thing they did, to place the black race on an equality with the white.”
8
Elsewhere Cox praised Lincoln’s state of Illinois for refusing to allow blacks full citizenship, and insisted on the rights of the states, including his own, Ohio, to determine residence and the voting franchise for themselves:
The right and power to exclude Africans from the States North being compatible with our system of State sovereignty and Federal supremacy, I assert that it is impolitic, dangerous, degrading, and unjust to the white men of Ohio and of the North, to allow such [black] immigration.... As a general thing, they are vicious, indolent, and improvident.
9
What appeared humanitarian and pacifistic on the surface turned out on closer examination to be a clarion call for white supremacy and a Jim Crow society Indeed, midwestern states with large Democratic constituencies succeeded in passing segregationist legislation that the postwar South would later emulate.
10
To the Republican credo “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” Democrats replied: “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Negroes where they are.”
Democrats had their heroic generals who fought loyally even as they opposed Lincoln’s policies. Most notable was McClellan, the “Christian General.” His behavior in the field comported with the limited goals of Democratic politicians. He tried to enforce Sabbath observance and strove to avoid belittling and vilifying the enemy
McClellan’s “humane” voice stood in stark contrast to the crude and sometimes profane utterances of Grant or Sherman, but it did not extend to slaves and Northern freed blacks. Their humane “place” was the inhumane condition of enslavement. In an earlier address to the House of Representatives, Congressman Cox praised McClellan and condemned Republican moves toward escalation. Lincoln’s removal of McClellan “was a sacrifice to appease the Ebony Fetich.”
Other Democratic generals evidenced similar reservations as the move toward total war gained momentum. For Winfield Scott Hancock, a gifted general but like McClellan a Democrat, the command of the Army of the Potomac held no appeal. In a letter to his wife written soon before Gettysburg, where he would be severely wounded, he wrote: “I have been approached again in connection with the command of the Army of the Potomac. Give yourself no uneasiness—under no conditions would I accept the command. I do not belong to that class of generals whom the Republicans care to bolster up.”
11
Democratic racist rhetoric was hardly limited to the leaders in Congress and the military. They merely echoed their rank-and-file constituency in towns and cities throughout the North and in the army. Besides mob violence directed toward African Americans, popular entertainment reinforced racial phobias.
12
As a form of popular entertainment in the North, minstrelsy had no rival, particularly among the urban and immigrant working classes who filled out so much of the Democratic electorate.
13
Minstrel shows embodied and dramatized the abstract prejudices that Northern whites, particularly Democrats, absorbed. Chief among these was the bestial inferiority of the black race, captured in virtually all minstrel shows and in the lithographs that advertised them. The historian Jean H. Baker shows how
minstrelsy simply placed blacks in nonhuman roles: the hair of Negroes was like sheep’s wool, their faces and features resembled monkeys, their feet were those of elephants, their eyes like “de coon,” their skin tough as animal hide, their arms strong as “the smell of de pole cat,” and their hearts bigger than the biggest raccoon.
14
During the Civil War, minstrel shows featured black “Zip Coons” dancing with white partners at “Emancipator Balls,” signaling white fears of both miscegenation and Republican abolitionists, who were supposedly promoting interracial marriage.
Hysterical Democratic fears of a Republican-incited campaign for racial miscegenation became one of the great rallying cries of Democrats in the 1863 and 1864 elections. For Congressman Cox, the real issue was race. “The irrepressible conflict is not between slavery and freedom,” he wrote, “but between black and white.” The Republican party sought miscegenation, which, Cox continued, “was another name for amalgamation.” From science, it was clear to Cox and his fellow Democrats that this could never work: “The physiologist will tell the [abolitionist] gentleman that the mulatto does not live; he does not recreate his kind; he is a monster. Such hybrid races, by a law of Providence, scarcely survive beyond one generation.”
15
The same racist themes appeared in other popular art forms, most notably the music of outspoken Democrat Stephen Foster and the lithographs of Currier & Ives. Popular cartoons also contributed to the perspective of white supremacy stereotyping Lincoln as an African-like baboon or a monkey, cementing the Democratic identification of Republicans with those who would “Africanize” America.
For sheer race-baiting, it is virtually impossible to distinguish Democratic cartoons in the North from their Southern counterparts. In contrast to most clergy and some newspapermen, no abolitionists existed among lithographic journalists. The Civil War of Currier & Ives was not an abolitionist war. Their audience was white, usually middle-class, and predominantly female, and they had no use for black subjects except to degrade and humiliate them. In one lithograph,
The Irrepressible Conflict or the Republican Party in Danger,
Currier & Ives pictured the major Republican figures of the day with a black man who was trying to keep their boat from capsizing by tossing the radical William Seward overboard and giving the more moderate Abraham Lincoln the helm. Depicted standing on the bank, Uncle Sam recommended that they “heave that Tarnal nigger out” instead.
16
Like northern Democratic politicians and their constituencies, “Christian” (clerical) Democrats insisted on retaining a strict separation of church and state, in keeping with their Jacksonian origins. They maintained the silence of ministers in the pulpit on purely political matters—most notably party politics—opposed preaching social reform, and rejected Federal intervention as an agency of social transformation.
17
If they were not as explicitly racist in their pulpit discourse as their party’s pols, their silence on the subject nevertheless identified them with the cause.
Clerical Democrats provided their party with the biblical exegesis that supported the proposition that slavery was not a sin.
18
As late as 1864, they continued to produce treatises “proving that the institution of slavery was not abolished by the Gospel.” These they often coupled with critiques of Lincoln’s appeal to equality.
The Reverend John Henry Hopkins of Vermont asked, “In what respect are men ‘created equal,’ when every thoughtful person must be sensible that they are brought into the world with all imaginable differences in body, in mind, and in every characteristic of their social position?” Nor, Hopkins continued, were there any “unalienable rights,” for “they are all alienated, forfeited and lost through the consequences of [Adam and Eve’s] transgression.” As for Christian Republicans, they were anything but Christian: “Here, then, we have a full display of the new revelation—the gospel of ultra-abolitionism which anticipated our mournful war as the true means to emancipate the negro, and seeks to accomplish this favorite object through a deluge of blood, and at any sacrifice of life and treasure.”
19
While unwilling to comment on political parties in print, Christian Democrats would address the issue of slavery in writings like “Why Christ did not proclaim emancipation.”
For all intents and purposes, most Northern Protestant pulpits and publications espoused Republican views, a fact not lost on those Christian Democrats who were denied a voice in all publications save those in the border states. Clerical Democratic dissenters spoke at their own risk, vulnerable to denominational discipline and dismissal. Nevertheless, a small minority of clerical voices did call the Republican Party into question, and with it the conduct of the war and the bald “political preaching” of Northern evangelical Protestant denominations.
Emancipation did not stand as Lincoln’s only war measure. Earlier he had established his right under the war powers of the presidency to suspend writs of habeas corpus (which enables a citizen who has been detained by government officials to seek a judicial determination on the legality of that detention). Two days after announcing his Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln issued another proclamation suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. At the same time, he established extrajudicial military tribunals for trying all those “affording comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.” It would be left to the Lincoln administration and the War Department to determine who those “disloyal” citizens were. Just as the war on rebellion was being transformed in military tactics and objectives, so also was the war on insurrectionists in the border states and among disloyal Northerners raised to accommodate the totality of the new situation.