Civil War

CIVIL WAR. The concept of “free labor,” vigorously endorsed by radicals on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, enabled their participation in the politics leading up to and continuing through the Civil War. At its most conservative, the “free labor” ethos celebrated the implicit superiority of capitalism in the North over what was then mistakenly perceived as a backwards and feudal practice in the South. At its most radical, the plebeian proponents of land reform, socialist communities, or cooperation advocated a “free labor” independent from capital, whether self-employed or laboring cooperatively. Despite these different, sometimes contradictory ideas and values, the belief in the moral, political, and economic superiority of “free labor” prevailed.

Abolitionists advocated “free labor” on largely moral grounds, while most Northern whites saw slavery as a strictly regional or state issue beyond their control or concern. Abolitionists who entered electoral politics under the banner of the Liberty Party began drawing in African Americans. Southerners determined to expand the territory open to slavery successfully engineered the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), making slavery an unavoidable national issue. Liberty Party followers, allied to radical land reformers, adopted the clever slogan, “Free Soil.” This shrewd proposal, papering over such ambiguities as the continuation of slavery in the South or the status of African Americans in the North, appealed sufficiently to elements of both the Democratic and Whig parties to make possible an independent presidential campaign in 1848. Women in and around the abolitionist movement meanwhile held a series of conventions for women’s rights increasingly focused on issues of the suffrage, property rights, and civic equality.

The concerns of the Southern elites inspired a new aggressiveness on their part. The 1850 compromise over the future of slavery in those territories taken from Mexico included the Fugitive Slave Law. A few years later, a bipartisan bill set aside earlier compromises to open the Kansas Territory to the possibility of becoming a slave state, resulting in an armed struggle there. In 1857, the US Supreme Court, in its Dred Scott decision, declared that no black person in America had any rights under the law that whites had to respect. These developments persuaded many in the North that “the Slave Power,” dominating the national government, was bent on forcing its will not just on slaves but upon all residents of the United States.

These concerns inspired a new Republican party. Abolitionists and land reformers organized initial meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan, often including women alongside men. Officeholders across the North responded to the collapse of the Whig Party and the shattering of the Democrats by joining the new party, agreeing only to support the expansion of slavery into the territories. In their 1860 campaign, presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln consistently refused to back away from that position. Southern advocates of secession responded to the prospect of any future Federal restriction to their unbridled natural right to property in human beings with arguments couched in the general right to property. Encouraged by sympathizers in the North, secessionists saw abolitionism as advocacy of expropriation and warned that the ascendancy of “Black Republicans” and “Red Republicans” presaged a more general radicalization of the Union.

The secession of the Southern states barely represented a popular movement in the region, not even among the property-owning whites. Between late December 1860 and the first days of February 1861, only seven states in the Deep South formally withdrew from a United States to form the Confederate States of America. Of these, only Texas submitted secession to a popular vote. Moreover, the remaining eight states steadfastly refused to secede into mid-April.

To break this impasse, the Confederacy fired on Federally-held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This move forced the US government to organize an army to repress the rebellion. Even still, the secessionists failed to win the hearts and minds of the South and ultimately doomed the Confederacy but not before oceans of blood had been spilled.

Forced into war, the government in Washington initially restricted its goals to simply preserving the Union. Radicals had a long-standing aversion to war and a deep faith in the power of moral suasion and rational discourse, but nearly all supported the Union cause vigorously from the onset. Abolitionists, land reformers, socialists, and radical spiritualists entered the military. German communities sent units of Turners who marched into the field using the red flag as their regimental colors. At the same time, radicals realized that, in the absence of representatives from the seceded states, the Federal government would be forced by the logic of the war to increasingly sweeping measures. During the first few years of the Civil War, the US government adopted the Homestead Act, seen as a down payment on radical land redistribution; a graduated income tax; confiscation; and the Legal Tender Act by which government took control of the circulation of paper money. Meanwhile, Union troops began successfully reestablishing US authority over Southerners. A series of victories brought Southern white unionists, including socialists in New Orleans, to the fore of wartime Reconstruction.

From the start of the war, African slaves themselves abandoned their work and chose to make their own bid for freedom. In parts of the South they fled to the isolated mountains and marshlands, areas to which they had traditionally escaped. Local authorities now lacked the means to retrieve them. The escaped slaves inspired others to follow, constituting a de facto resistance. Union forces often found themselves overwhelmed by large numbers of runaways and responded in various ways. On the Virginia coast, the General Benjamin F. Butler declared slaves “contraband of war,” property captured from the enemy, which the army was not bound to return. Generals John C. Fremont and David Hunter attempted to issue orders declaring slavery no longer in existence within their jurisdictions, but were reversed by Washington, where leaders insisted on a common national strategy.

Meanwhile, on the home front, abolitionists and other antislavery militants launched Emancipation Leagues that urged aggressive Federal action against slavery based on military exigency. By mid-summer 1862, these arguments moved Lincoln to expand the war goals to include emancipation, but he waited for some sort of military success on the eastern battlefields. In September 1862, after the battle of Antietam, the president issued a preliminary proclamation of emancipation, to go into effect on January 1, freeing slaves in all areas of the South still in rebellion.

The exceptions and loopholes to the proclamation remained problematic. The Cherokee nation became the first official body in the South to eliminate slavery on its own, though Southern white Unionists in Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee faced severe obstacles. The Women’s National Loyal League of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized a national petition campaign that gathered nearly 400,000 signatures for the universal abolition of slavery and passage of a constitutional amendment.

An effective argument for this plan was the fact that people of color had readily made the cause of the Union their own. They started among the refugees of the Confederate occupation of the Indian Territory, which early fielded three mixed race and integrated regiments of Indian Home Guards. The first armed runaways fought against the Confederates in July 1862. The first Black regiments organized during the summer and waged their first battle at Island Mount in October. Reorganized in early 1864 as United States Colored Troops, nearly 190,000 participated in the war under white officers, including many abolitionists and radicals. They suffered disproportionate casualties and became victims of some of the war’s worst atrocities.

Southern resistance to the Confederacy intensified from April 1862, when the government imposed a virtually universal conscription on white men of military age. The initial attempt to impose this order on the occupied Indian Territory created mass resistance, and the white response was similar, if slower. The sense that Southern independence had become “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” ultimately dissolved most of the Confederate armies, as the ranks denied a voice on the secessionist project voted with their feet and left for home.

By 1864, institutional Radicals coalesced within the federal government. Taking into account the concerns of both their Northern constituents and Southern Unionists, Black and white, about a postwar restoration of the old order, they passed a Wade-Davis Bill to require post-war Southern governments to embrace emancipation and accept equal rights. Unwilling to commit itself while the war raged, the Lincoln administration vetoed the measure. African American leaders could nevertheless look beyond slavery and establish an Equal Rights League, aided by veteran abolitionists and radicalized women. The Congress also heard demands for civic equality from Indian nations and their allies.

By the war’s end, Lincoln and the national government not only took up universal abolition but publicly accepted the idea of black citizenship and civic equality. In the wake of Lincoln’s murder, however, the Federal government exiled the victorious black troops to the Rio Grande valley, betrayed allied Indian governments, and excluded women from constitutional guarantees of equality. After a monumental struggle, the old elite returned to power in the South, terrorizing African Americans and driving out some of the noisiest Unionists.

The promise of the war’s victory and the strategy of using political power to reconstruct society nevertheless inspired a succession of greenback, populist and socialist movements. As late as the 1890s, the survivors of John Brown’s inner circle and prominent veterans of the Union army responded when Edward Bellamy, the Yankee social thinker proposed a patriotic crusade to abolish capitalism. As late as 1920, little groups of “Abe’s Boys” in retirement homes eagerly voted for Eugene Debs.

Blackburn, Robin. An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. London: Verso, 2011.

Fleche, Andre M. The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Lause, Mark. Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of the American Working Class. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Levine, Bruce. The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South. New York: Random House, 2013

Tuchinsky, Adam-Max. Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune: Civil War-era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.