No Party Now Politics in the Civil War North

by Smith, Adam I. P.

• ISBN13: 9780195188653
• ISBN10: 0195188659
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. In No Party Now, Adam I. P. Smith challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, Smith argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly non-partisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of anti-party discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. By the time of the 1864 election they sought to de-legitimize partisan opposition with slogans like "No Party Now But All For Our Country!" No Party Now offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the "party period paradigm" in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As Smith shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

Author Biography

Adam I. P. Smith is a Lecturer in American History at University College London.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(6)
Concepts of Party and Nation before the Civil War	9	(16)
The Patriotic Imperative	25	(24)
The Emancipation Proclamation and the Party System	49	(18)
The Union Leagues and the Emergence of Antiparty Nationalism	67	(18)
The Army, Loyalty, and Dissent	85	(16)
Slavery, Reconstruction, and the Union Party	101	(23)
Emancipation and Antiparty Nationalism in the 1864 Election Campaign	124	(30)
Conclusion	154	(13)
Notes	167	(56)
Bibliography	223	(36)
Index	259