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
... George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and carried home-made “transparencies”—canvases illuminated by oil lamps or candles—displaying patriotic slogans such as “the three Ps we propose: Patriotism, Perseverance and Pluck.” The ...
... George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and carried home-made “transparencies”—canvases illuminated by oil lamps or candles—displaying patriotic slogans such as “the three Ps we propose: Patriotism, Perseverance and Pluck.” The ...
Page 12
... George Washington protested in a letter to Jefferson in 1796 that “I was of no party myself and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”30 Washington's famous Farewell Address, written in 1796, in which ...
... George Washington protested in a letter to Jefferson in 1796 that “I was of no party myself and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”30 Washington's famous Farewell Address, written in 1796, in which ...
Page 15
... George Caleb Bingham. In his wildly successful series of paintings of a Missouri election, Bingham self-consciously con- trasted the American democracy with the ribald, cynical, anarchic world of Hogarth's paintings of an election in ...
... George Caleb Bingham. In his wildly successful series of paintings of a Missouri election, Bingham self-consciously con- trasted the American democracy with the ribald, cynical, anarchic world of Hogarth's paintings of an election in ...
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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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