No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War NorthDuring 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. |
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Page 3
... Francis Lieber in 1863: No Party Now But All For Our Country.3 A year later, on a cold, damp October evening in 1864, a crowd gathered in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, to watch a parade in support of the re-election of Abraham Lincoln ...
... Francis Lieber in 1863: No Party Now But All For Our Country.3 A year later, on a cold, damp October evening in 1864, a crowd gathered in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, to watch a parade in support of the re-election of Abraham Lincoln ...
Page 4
... Lieber's “No Party Now” pamphlet in more colorful language, the song denounced the “fetid filth and nauseous dust of ... Francis Lieber may have advocated, it was difficult—not to say impossible—for Civil War Northerners to organize ...
... Lieber's “No Party Now” pamphlet in more colorful language, the song denounced the “fetid filth and nauseous dust of ... Francis Lieber may have advocated, it was difficult—not to say impossible—for Civil War Northerners to organize ...
Page 11
... Francis Lieber, professor of political science at South Carolina College in Charleston was among those who, in a long treatise on government, his Manual of Political Ethics (1838–39), saw a party system as a natural and healthy ...
... Francis Lieber, professor of political science at South Carolina College in Charleston was among those who, in a long treatise on government, his Manual of Political Ethics (1838–39), saw a party system as a natural and healthy ...
Page 13
... Francis Lieber, who valued a party system, stressed a vital caveat: parties must uphold a certain standard of behavior or they would slip back into the status of faction. “By a party,” Lieber explained, “we understand a number of ...
... Francis Lieber, who valued a party system, stressed a vital caveat: parties must uphold a certain standard of behavior or they would slip back into the status of faction. “By a party,” Lieber explained, “we understand a number of ...
Page 78
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Contents
3 | |
9 | |
2 The Patriotic Imperative | 25 |
3 The Emancipation Proclamation and the Party System | 49 |
4 The Union Leagues and the Emergence of Antiparty Nationalism | 67 |
5 The Army Loyalty and Dissent | 85 |
6 Slavery Reconstruction and the Union Party | 101 |
7 Emancipation and Antiparty Nationalism in the 1864 Election Campaign | 124 |
Conclusion | 154 |
Notes | 167 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Index | 259 |
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