Regarp Book Blog

Like politics, all history is local, at least at first. It seldom remains that way. Key events in one geography almost always send fierce if perhaps unacknowledged echoes elsewhere. Chroniclers preoccupied with the action unfolding at the center often neglect the effects upon far distant edges. More than sixty thousand books have been published on the American Civil War, but few examine the outsize influence of the conflict beyond the borders of the United States and the then-Confederacy. A notable exception in the literature (although not specifically a Civil War book) is Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which describes how the stifling of cotton exports from southern ports sparked a mad scramble for new sources of raw material that saw the heavy hand of British imperialism utterly transform the countryside of the Indian subcontinent—eight thousand miles away from Fort Sumter! American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 [2024], a powerful, insightful, and extremely well-written narrative by historian Alan Taylor, points to dramatic impacts much closer to home.

The central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, which powered the economies of the southern slave states. Studies have established that the slave system of agriculture was highly destructive of environments, and thus required aggressive expansion to new lands in order to thrive. To this end, and with the full (if often tacit) support of plantation and political elites, adventurers known as “filibusters” looked to occupy and annex locales in the West Indies and Central America. But the mother lode of wide open spaces turned out to be the vast territories in the west and southwest obtained by conquest in the Mexican War, jealously lusted after by both the southern slaveocracy and northern Free-Soilers. Neither had concerns for dispossessed Mexicans nor the indigenous. Or African Americans, for that matter: southerners would have them only as enslaved laborers, while northerners would ban them absolutely. Lincoln’s election foreclosed the spread of slavery to the territories, and seven states seceded, then four more after shots were fired at Sumter.

Typically, what then follows is the familiar story of Bull Run to Appomattox baked into most Civil War accounts, but Taylor, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whose body of work has dwelled predominately on the Early Republic, stands apart from most historians in approach and perspective with a thought-provoking fresh analysis of ground otherwise exhaustively covered before. Moreover, Taylor ever compels the reader to not simply look back to what was as we now know it, but rather to consider what might have been, in a time when there were many possibilities, and nothing had yet been decided.

It is this notion that brilliantly shapes his earlier book, American Colonies, which skillfully underscores that boundaries later stenciled in on maps of North America and the West Indies were hardly preordained, that what came to form those thirteen colonies that turned into the United States could very well have encompassed a larger—or, for that matter, smaller—area consisting of other regions then controlled by the French, British, Spanish, and Amerindians. Taylor later has American Colonies serve as the first volume in a series that to date includes American Revolutions, American Republics, and the latest, American Civil Wars. The plural in “Civil Wars” is deliberate, because there is indeed more than one going on in various corners of the continent, including a shooting war in Mexico, a political one in Canada, and something that is a bit of both in the rapidly shrinking lands once exclusively occupied by Native Americans. And all of it is informed by the twin principles that guided nineteenth century America: the Monroe Doctrine, that proscribed interference in the Americas by foreign powers, and Manifest Destiny, that promised the whole of the continent to the United States.

Some of the best content in American Civil Wars leaves the war between Washington and Richmond behind, and takes a deep dive much further south. Like many former colonies, Mexico was plagued by political instability after winning its independence from Spain in 1808, which was exacerbated by tensions in a highly stratified society marked by a gulf between a tiny slice of wealthy landowners and the masses of desperately impoverished landless peasants. In the twenty-five years that preceded the American Civil War, nation-building was further crippled by a series of land grabs by the United States that stripped Mexico of more than a third of its territory. The first was the loss of Texas, a region settled by invitation to Americans who established a slave society. Mexico’s abolition of slavery and other factors led to an armed conflict supported by the US that resulted first in Texas independence and then annexation. The greater blow, of course, came as a result of the Mexican War, a blatant act of armed aggression by the Polk Administration that obtained present-day California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The so-called Mexican Cession amounted to an enormous steal of an astonishing 529,000 square miles. Later, Mexico was strong-armed into ceding even more territory in the Gadsden Purchase.

Beset by its own series of civil wars, and deeply in debt to European powers, the Liberal Republic of Benito Juárez—which had routed reactionary forces on the battlefield—was no match for French adventurism encouraged, indeed invited in, by defeated Mexican conservatives. The French crushed resistance and placed a hapless Hapsburg archduke on the throne as Emperor Maximilian I. The Monroe Doctrine proved to be no deterrent. Republicans in Congress sympathetic to Mexican democracy bristled, but Lincoln was not only fully preoccupied with saving the Union, but worried that a strong rebuke might provoke France to recognize the Confederacy. Meanwhile, Richmond imagined an alliance with Maximilian that would entice France to do just that. In a masterful treatment of the many moving parts here of war, diplomacy, socioeconomic factors, and much more, Taylor succeeds in shifting the focus so that the reader’s perspective is dramatically redirected to view the fractured United States from the Mexican side of the border, a significant accomplishment.

Taylor just as adeptly goes north to explore the dynamic in a then still divided British Canada, anxious at what a restored union to her south by a powerful neighbor further emboldened by victory could mean for her territorial integrity. This tension had a very long history. In American Colonies, Taylor reminds us that in slightly altered circumstances parts of Canada could very well have been incorporated into the United States. In American Revolutions, he chronicles how colonists were angered that the treaty that concluded the French & Indian War also protected much-coveted French Quebec (later dubbed “Lower Canada”), adding to the catalog of grievances that would subsequently foment rebellion and lead to independence. Those hostilities were marked by a failed invasion, and the Battle of Quebec. After the war, loyalists fled to Canada’s west, present-day Ontario, then termed “Upper Canada.” Communities on both sides of the border formed strong trade and cultural relationships, intertwined with the region’s native tribes, which were ruptured by the War of 1812 and another series of failed invasions by the Americans, a story superbly rendered in Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812. When the British, exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, made peace from an existing stalemate that likely would have gone badly for the United States in the longer term, the result was a mutual respect for US-Canadian borders that endured for decades.

American Civil Wars describes how that respect grew more tenuous in the Antebellum as stress cracks widened. As enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act grew more vigorous, for the enslaved seeking liberty the most secure terminus of the Underground Railroad became Canadian soil, which infuriated slaveowners seeking to have their “property” restored. Blacks were treated favorably at first, but as their numbers grew so did racism and resentment towards immigrants competing for jobs and resources. During the Civil War, diplomatic tensions with the British extended to Canada, as well, which although officially neutral was openly sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Richmond attempted to open a second front in Montréal and Toronto, leading most famously to the raid on St. Albans, Vermont. But as the fortunes of the south faded, and rumblings could be detected in the United States of a reenergized Manifest Destiny that had seized lands to the west and south and was now looking north once more, self-preservation fueled a sense of urgency for unity among the various provinces. The result was the landmark 1867 Canadian Confederation that set forces in motion that within a few years brought all of Canada east and west together as a single entity, better capable of resisting appetites for expansion from Washington.

A consistent theme in Taylor’s works are the marginalized peoples frequently neglected in other histories, especially Native Americans. This time the author focuses on competing attempts by the Union and the Confederacy to recruit the indigenous as allies, such that the Civil War saw the phenomenon of various tribes fighting for the Blue or the Gray. Of course, before, during, and especially after the war, Federal forces employed brutal tactics to put down native peoples, seizing their lands on false pretexts, driving them to starvation by hunting the bison to near extinction, forcing them into reservations known for appalling conditions, and occasionally massacring entire villages. Whatever side they chose, Native Americans always lost.

Those who turned to Taylor’s latest book chiefly for yet another history of the American Civil War may come away disappointed, because that is hardly the main event in this volume. Still, that can be deceiving, because he does devote much print to a fast-paced summary. Indeed, sometimes fast-paced seems to turn into a veritable sprint, and along with that comes some unfortunate missteps. Taylor recycles the long-disproven canard that the term “hooker” was derived from prostitutes accompanying the army of Major General Joseph Hooker, when in fact that moniker dates back to the 1840s. There are also some issues with interpretation, as when he unfairly castigates Meade for failing to pursue Lee with appropriate alacrity after Gettysburg, which aligns with Lincoln’s view at the time but now has largely been discarded by scholars of the campaign.

Still, none of this is fatal, and if I winced here and there it is only because I have spent decades chasing down the Civil War. Moreover, such quibbles are more than offset by the triumph of the final product, which not only enriches the historiography but does so in an engaging style accessible to audiences both popular and academic. The beauty in nearly every work by Alan Taylor is that each leaves the reader treating what was once familiar territory as uncertain terrain demanding reevaluation. So too American Civil Wars. But the real triumph this time is that those turning its final pages will no longer again be capable of thinking about the war without considering its ramifications elsewhere—no small achievement indeed!

 

NOTE: This review is dedicated to Dr. Peter Carmichael, Director of the Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College, a remarkable scholar, educator, and friend whose recent untimely death is an incalculable loss to the historical community. Pete was a huge supporter of my work, introducing me to others in the field with praise I hardly felt I deserved, but which left me deeply flattered because of my admiration for him. He will be much missed by all who knew him.

NOTE: I reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:

Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor

Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor

Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor

Review of: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor

Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor

NOTE: I reviewed the Beckert book here:

Review of: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert

 

 

 

Those who have heard of Benjamin Butler tend to remember him principally by the pejorative sobriquets dipped in venom attached to him by Confederate military and civilian leaders during the American Civil War: “Beast,” an epithet earned when as military governor of occupied New Orleans he issued an order equating all the fine southern ladies in the city with prostitutes, following certain episodes that saw them dumping chamber pots out of windows upon passing Union soldiers; and, “Spoons,” assigned based upon a more than passing suspicion that while establishing order he was also regularly lining his pockets. But he was actually an individual of far greater significance than implied by the unfortunate monikers meant to mock him. A Zelig-like figure—or perhaps a craftier Forrest Gump—Butler pops up everywhere, not only during the Civil War where he made a name for himself (for both good and for ill), but on the eve of secession, during Reconstruction, and in the decades that followed. And he was funny-looking too— a dead ringer for Dennis Franz as Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue—making him an ideal target for the outlandish political cartoons that ruled his day. Thus, there exists in the historical record a Butler of legend that is mostly caricature, as well as a more nuanced portrait of a complex, fascinating, and by all means flamboyant character who carved a deep groove on his era, for better and for worse. Larger-than-life is an often-overused cliché, but it suits Butler perfectly.

That life gets a detailed scholarly treatment in Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life [2022], by award-winning historian Elizabeth D. Leonard, a meticulously researched, well-written, if sometimes tedious chronicle that is long on the laudatory and too often a bit blurry when tracking her subject’s many trails of malfeasance. Leonard, a professor at Colby College, Butler’s alma mater when it was known as Waterville College, found inspiration for this work in an article written by her late mentor, Colby’s Civil War historian Harold B. Raymond. Her book explores Butler’s public life without neglecting his private one, a welcome approach for the reader who looks to biography to go beyond dates and deeds to establish a sense of greater intimacy with the protagonist.

Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893) was born in New Hampshire, but as a boy moved with his family to Lowell, Massachusetts, where his mother ran a boarding house for workers at the local textile mills. After Waterville, he became a lawyer and took cases in turn representing the mills, where he also invested, as well as their beleaguered employees. He seems to have developed genuine empathy and affection for these workers, especially the young girls, who labored fourteen hours a day in often brutal conditions, and he became a spirited advocate for “ten hour day” legislation. A pro-slavery, pro-southern “doughface” Democrat who supported first Jefferson Davis and then John C. Breckinridge in the election that put Lincoln in the White House, secession transformed him into a Major General who occupied Baltimore and helped keep Maryland in the Union. Next he went to Fort Monroe in Virginia and demonstrated in the bungled Battle of Big Bethel the lack of military prowess that was to define him on the battlefield throughout much of the war. At the same time, he distinguished himself by devising a clever legal loophole that declared the enslaved who fled to federal lines “contraband of war” who would not be returned to the rebels, a landmark policy later adopted by the Lincoln Administration.

Next up was his stint in New Orleans, which began when he had a civilian tried and executed for tearing down a United States flag. But despite the contempt he provoked in the subject population, he also effected a humane administration that saved many from starvation and disease, and he formed the very first African American regiment in the US Army, the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. That Jefferson Davis loudly called for his execution if captured only added to his popularity back home. Still, in concert with his felonious brother, he confiscated cotton and resold it for personal profit, just one of many financial irregularities that followed his military career.

Glaring examples of corruption led to his being replaced in New Orleans, but as one of Lincoln’s “political generals” who abandoned the Democrats and was reborn as a leading Radical Republican, he was reshuffled rather than cashiered, eventually ending up in Norfolk, Virginia in command of what became the Army of the James. Here he famously created multiple regiments comprised of former rebel prisoners of war who became known as “Galvanized Yankees,” while also allegedly enabling illicit trade between northern merchants and the Confederacy. Yet, in 1864, Grant gave him critical responsibility for a planned attack on strategic Petersburg, but Butler dropped the ball entirely and his army ended up out of action, bottled up at Bermuda Hundred. He then botched an attempt to take Fort Fisher, which not long after fell almost effortlessly to Adelbert Ames, his future son-in-law. Finally, Grant and Lincoln had enough of him.

After the war, he embarked on a career in Congress that soon had him managing the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, which failed for a variety of reasons, not least his own mediocre performance. He championed civil rights, women’s suffrage, and the working poor, but managed to drift through a variety of ideologies, alliances, and parties that saw him develop his own peculiar brand of politics known as “Butlerism,” and led to a single term as a populist Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, followed by a landslide defeat in his bid for the presidency as nominee of the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly parties. Near the end of his life, he published a one thousand page autobiography—Butler’s Book—that revels in his self-importance, and sits on the shelves of my home library. Through it all, he amassed vast wealth and proved to be ingenious, opportunistic, stubborn, difficult, ego-driven, ambitious—and so chameleon-like that many wondered if he was less given to populism than demagoguery.  For all his passions on various sides of various issues, in the end the question was whether Benjamin Franklin Butler actually fervently believed in anything other than Benjamin Franklin Butler.

I first encountered Butler back in 2014, when I had a key role in a grant-funded project to digitize the recently rediscovered letters, diaries, and memoirs of the 31^st Massachusetts Volunteers, the regiment Butler commanded in New Orleans, materials now available on the web for public access. This motivated me to read up on him, in a number of sources. Some biographers might claim that much of the calumnies charged against Butler were grievance-driven slanders manufactured by proponents of the “Lost Cause” to magnify minor peccadillos in an enduring retaliation for his insults to the honor of southern women and his eagerness in putting African Americans in uniform. Leonard seems to take that position, as well, acknowledging, for example, the financial improprieties that clung to Butler’s tenure in New Orleans, but laying all the blame on Butler’s brother. But the more one reads about Butler, who was hardly naïve and indeed quite shrewd, the more difficult it is to accept that he was some kind of innocent bystander to corruption—or that his shifting allegiances to ideas and principles were always sincere.

Ever the opportunist, Butler did however seem to muster up honest sympathy for the downtrodden, even if he often only put it to best use when there was a mutual benefit for him. Leonard may have missed an opportunity to focus more deeply on Butler’s paternalistic relationship with the Lowell mill girls he sought to shield from overly harsh conditions, since this seems to have left a truly lasting impression. Those who have read Robert Caro may find similar echoes in young Lyndon Johnson’s defining moment as schoolteacher to poverty-stricken Mexican-American children. Both men deeply felt those respective sufferings, and both carried that with them ever after. And each, a century apart, became ardent defenders of black Americans in their struggle for civil rights.

As noted earlier, Leonard dwells a good deal upon the private sphere of Butler’s life, which was marked by a long and happy marriage blessed with several children, and by all indications he was a loving father and an attentive family man. But sometimes the author goes overboard: throughout the book, too many paragraphs are plagued with excerpts from correspondence given to insignificant chatter about quotidian happenings that add nothing to the narrative. There are even multiple references to Butler’s gratitude for the homemade sausages his sister sends him! This stands in stark underscore to Leonard’s coverage of Butler’s part in Johnson’s impeachment, which the astonished reader will find amounts to all of three paragraphs. Moreover, whenever Butler stumbles, as he did mightily in this episode, or seems to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as occurred more than once, Leonard takes him at his word and ever gives him the benefit of the doubt, which frequently equates to a superficial treatment of negative incidents that then give way to longer looks at his accomplishments. It should be noted, though, that Leonard is a careful historian who does report dissenting views, even if the latter sometimes seem to have been tacked on begrudgingly.

Still, this tendency towards the all-too-forgiving only serves to dial the volume down on Butler’s so-called “noisy, fearless” life, in which he cast himself as both hero and scoundrel. To varnish away the villain only dulls the outsize impact of his legacy. As it turns out, this book is not quite a hagiography, but it does suffer from a lack of balance that consistently celebrates Butler while rarely finding fault. And that’s a shame, because Butler, warts and all, was a colorful, intriguing character made far more compelling by his manifest blemishes. But for more on that, the reader will have to turn elsewhere.

 

Link to letters, diaries, and memoirs of the 31^st Massachusetts Volunteers:  31st Massachusetts Volunteers: Honoring the Civil War Soldiers of the Western Bay State Regiment

Four American presidents have died by assassination, the last when I was six years old. John F. Kennedy, who suffered a devastating head wound, was likely dead on arrival at Parkland Hospital. Nearly a century before, the first, Abraham Lincoln, was also shot in the head, but survived overnight. In 1901, William McKinley took bullets to the abdomen, and lived just slightly longer than a week, with hopes for his recovery rising and falling. But in 1881, James A. Garfield, shot in the back, lingered on the precipice of death—incapacitated and in excruciating pain—for an astonishing seventy-nine days before the end! When it was finally over, he had been president for only just a bit longer than six months, and nearly half of that time he spent very slowly dying. In the meantime, the entire nation, nearly paralyzed, watched and waited.

In Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President [2011], Candice Millard, certainly one of history’s greatest storytellers, splendidly captures the high drama of this event and its aftermath while skillfully recreating the milieu of an America—despite the brief interval in years—strikingly different than that which belonged to Lincoln or McKinley. 1880, the year Garfield was elected, was only fifteen years removed from Appomattox, but a time traveler from Wilmer McLean’s parlor would be astonished to find an entirely different version of this United States, marked by rapid economic expansion and the outsize wealth creation that characterized the Gilded Age—fueled by opportunity, ambition, and the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution. And it sat perched on the edge of even more wonders to come, the very dawn of the age of the great inventions that would so thoroughly transform American life over just three decades, with the incandescent bulb and widespread electrification, the phonograph, motion pictures, the automobile, and even manned flight!

But the first of these marvels—the telephone, which truly revolutionized communications—was becoming increasingly common. Patented in 1876, one was installed in the White House in 1879. (We can only imagine how eagerly Lincoln—who leaned so heavily on the telegraph for news of battlefield results—would have adopted this innovation and relied on it to talk strategy with McClellan, Meade, or Grant.)  By 1880 there already almost 48,000 telephones in the United States; that number would nearly triple just a year later. Its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, has a part in this tale.

The Republican Party wasn’t the same either. A week after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was dead, replaced by grim Tennessean Andrew Johnson, who turned out to have far more sympathy for the rights of defeated rebels than the fates of millions of freedmen left to the sometimes vengeful “mercy” of their former masters. And Johnson had to contend with a Congress of “Radical Republicans” no longer tempered by Lincoln’s moderation. Impeachment failed, but soon Johnson was replaced by the great hero Ulysses Grant, who had the best of intentions but in the end made for a far better general than president. As time went on, Republicans cooled towards civil rights, and drifted into a rigid factionalism that saw few policy differences but was marked by an addiction to power and privilege fueled by corruption. That was the state of the party when Garfield won the White House, but to his credit in his very short tenure he took great strides towards crippling the power of the most corrupt faction in Congress, while asserting executive independence.

Garfield was a bright, amiable character, well-regarded by most, whose politics mostly chased consensus, and whose life’s trajectory bore some strange if uneven parallels to Lincoln’s. Each were born to poverty in a log cabin and were in their youths brilliant autodidacts, although unlike Lincoln, Garfield was to go on to formal education. Both had strong antislavery convictions, and during the Lincoln Administration, Garfield took the field as a major general before going on to the House of Representatives. But while prior to his presidency Lincoln had just a single term in Congress, Garfield served for nine terms, while also finding the time to practice law and publish a mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem! Both could be said to be “dark horse” candidates in their respective tries for the Republican Party’s nomination, but Garfield’s horse was far darker, so to speak: in 1860, Lincoln was everyone’s second choice; in 1880, Garfield was no one’s choice, not even his own, but was nevertheless nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot. Finally, in a truly odd coincidence, not only did each die by assassin, but Lincoln’s son Robert, who once sat at his father’s deathbed, happened to be walking towards Garfield when he was shot! For her part, Millard does not dwell much on Garfield’s life, nor does she need to; it is rather his long drawn out death that is the focus of Destiny of the Republic.

On the other hand, many pages are given to another main character, the unlikely assassin Charles J. Guiteau, who stalked Garfield at a distance for an extended period of time before gunning him down at a railroad station on July 2, 1881. Guiteau, likely insane, was overcome with visions of grandeur that had him convinced that he was personally responsible for Garfield’s election and thus deserved the Paris consulship as a reward. Prior to this, Guiteau had tried his hand in a number of avenues in life, including law, theology, bill collecting, and utopianism, only to fail spectacularly in each. Virtually homeless, he stayed at a series of boarding houses and fled when the bills came due. When it finally sunk in that Garfield—who was of course unaware of Guiteau’s mad fantasies—would deny him the grand recognition he believed himself due, he persuaded himself that the president was instead a villain who must be murdered for the good of the country. Guiteau’s lack of competence in every arena remained consistent with assassination, as well: pistol shots fired point-blank at Garfield’s back yet missed his spine and all major organs.

This is when the story really gets interesting, for based upon the extent of his injuries,  according to most modern appraisals Garfield should have recovered. Why he ultimately does not survive, and how heroically he endured persistent, agonizing pain for the eleven weeks of life that remained to him—while doctors fed the nation wildly inaccurate reports of his alleged recovery—is the central theme of this book. It is a tribute to Millard’s talent with a pen that the reader truly winces along with Garfield throughout his suffering.

More than anything else, Garfield was the victim of a medical community that did not yet believe in the existence of invisible germs. Much of Europe had adopted Joseph Lister’s antiseptic methods, which were mostly belittled in the United States. Thus, multiple doctors on multiple occasions inserted unwashed fingers into the wound site, probing for a bullet which could not be located. Ironically, this bullet which had skirted all critical internal targets was now essentially harmless. Following a duel, Andrew Jackson had lived another thirty-nine years with a spent bullet lodged just two inches from his heart. Numerous Civil War veterans of both armies carried bullets in various parts of their bodies for the remainder of their lives. But, unfortunately for Garfield, in the search for the missing bullet, one of those unwashed fingers introduced an aggressive infection that slowly and painfully killed him despite numerous attempts to save his life.

From the start, Garfield’s torment was exacerbated by his own doctor—actually his entire medical team—who naively waxed optimistic over his eventual recovery while stubbornly seeking the bullet that no longer posed a threat. One of these attempts involved the now celebrated Alexander Graham Bell, who had pioneered a prototype for the first metal detector that in this case promised the perfect marriage of technology and medicine, yet proved to be an epic fail that puzzled the renowned inventor and sent him back to the drawing board more than once. Only later did it emerge that the mattress of Garfield’s sickbed was constructed of internal metal springs that drove the detector’s sensors off the charts.

Meanwhile, as Garfield lingered, the entire country held its breath. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the population of the United States stood at just thirty-one million. In 1880, it was more than fifty million, swelled by immigration. And it was far more networked than ever before with transcontinental railroads, the telegraph, and Bell’s telephone, so that communication was now near instant, at least in more populated regions. News of Garfield’s “progress” was broadcast daily, and crowds gathered around public bulletin boards hungry for updates. Much of it was misleading. The president was dying. Since his doctors could not acknowledge that to themselves, it is perhaps less surprising that they could not say it out loud. On September 19, James A. Garfield was no more. The author succeeds brilliantly in recreating the America of 1881 that daily watched breathlessly until Garfield breathed no more.

Millard, who is not a trained historian, puts many seasoned academics to shame by combining meticulous research with a gift for compelling prose that grips the reader from the first paragraph to the final pages. Her first book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, won national acclaim for its appeal to both a popular and a scholarly audience. Its success was closely rivaled by the more recent Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. For her readers, it is perhaps no surprise that Destiny of the Republic earns similar accolades. Like many other terrific books that I purchase and set aside for later consumption, this one sat on my shelves for many years. I eventually turned to it just after closing the cover of another author’s biography of Garfield that succeeded masterfully in its study of the man but was marred by a too superficial treatment of his era. Millard proved the perfect remedy! For fans of American history: do not skip this one.

My review of:  Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, by Candice Millard    

My review of:  President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, by C.W. Goodyear 

Interested in reading this book?  You can purchase a copy here:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/p/destiny-of-the-republic-large-pr/55CHR5FSSF?run=d38b6373-c5ec-4dc3-af61-a92982a96d76

 

 

 

 

I read an opinion piece in a leading New York newspaper that attributed the calamitous presidential election loss of one party’s nominee to the sinister tactics of the opposing party, which had enlisted vast numbers of the foreign born—many with strange customs and an alien faith—into voting for their candidate. This was primarily achieved, the author asserted, by willfully spreading misinformation and fanning the flames of fear among foreigners to “vote in a body for the side they are told is the Democratic, no matter what it proposes to do or leave undone.” Moreover, it was alleged, there was a suspicion of widespread fraud by noncitizens casting votes illegally that may have tipped the balance.

No, this editorial is not hot off of any press in 2024, but instead saw publication late in 1844! And the author is a no pundit on the right venting in an op-ed, but rather the esteemed Horace Greeley, a reformist who was then-editor of the Whig-friendly New-York Daily Tribune. That Greeley’s grievances strike such familiar chords one hundred eighty years later is illustrative of an unsettling but familiar constant in American history: a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants has with some consistency frequently demonstrated a hostility towards the next generation of immigrants. This odd streak of nativism dates back to the very dawn of the Republic with the “Alien and Sedition Acts” of 1798, enacted only ten years after the Constitution was ratified and championed by none other than Alexander Hamilton, who himself was born in the West Indies! And long after Greeley was gone, Woodrow Wilson warned in 1903 that “there came multitudes of men of the lowest class . . . as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” As recently as 1960, Rev. Norman Vincent Peale assailed the candidacy of John F. Kennedy in apocalyptic terms: “Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.” In this context, the uncomfortable truth is that when Donald Trump branded Mexicans “rapists” and called for a Muslim ban, he was operating within a reluctantly acknowledged time-honored American tradition, even if he voiced it in a tone more vulgar than customary.

But never in our history did nativism—and the forces aligned against it—have as much outsize consequence for American politics and policy as it did in the antebellum and the Civil War era, as becomes abundantly clear in the splendid new book by acclaimed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration [2024]. In these pages Holzer, author of more than fifty books and winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, takes a fresh look at the critical if too often overlooked significance of the Native American “Know-Nothing” Party in antebellum politics as the Whigs came apart and the new Republican Party was born. At the same time, he widens the lens on the familiar “benefit vs. burden” debate over immigration to establish with some conviction that in this particular moment in history immigrant minorities proved not only key cohorts of electoral contests but, upon the onset of secession and war, surprisingly essential to our national survival.

First, Holzer takes us back to a time when the most despised immigrant population was the Irish: desperately poor, largely illiterate, and Roman Catholic—a faith that was an anathema to Protestant America. Their numbers increased exponentially after 1844 with the devastating potato famine that claimed a million dead to starvation and sent millions more fleeing the country. They were largely unwelcome in America, even as their addition to the labor force boosted American business. There was the typical charge against the Irish of putting the native born out of work, but like most immigrants then and now, they flocked to low-paid menial jobs most Americans did not want, and because of an overheated demand, their presence actually generated a degree of upward mobility for those already employed, particularly in places like Boston brutally focused upon wage labor in factories and mills. But, then and now, the perceived threat was all that really mattered.

Politically, that perceived threat spawned an unlikely coalition of the disaffected, including many former Whigs, to form secret societies to resist the influx of immigrants that quickly evolved into the Native American Party, popularly dubbed the “Know-Nothings,” which briefly but mightily shook up the established political order. That the Whigs as a national party eventually imploded over the issue of slavery overlooks nuance in other factors such as the Know-Nothings, which contributed to their slow unraveling. At the same time, the Know-Nothings’ advertised hostility to the Irish sent them into the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party, which happily targeted them as a dependable long-term voting bloc. This was the conundrum Greeley, a steadfast Whig, opined about in the Tribune.

Today’s charged allegations of immigrant votes swaying elections are largely imaginative talking-points broadcast to inflame hyperpartisanship, but in Greeley’s day such anxieties were well-founded. The reality in our times—with so much vitriol directed at millions of the undocumented—is that in order to cast a ballot, an immigrant must first establish legal residence (no small hurdle for those who lack legal status), then wait five years before applying for citizenship and earning the right to vote. But back then, no one could be branded as “illegal”—such a concept did not even exist until the shameful 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—so five years after stepping off the boat, regardless of national origin, virtually anyone could request and be granted citizenship, and along with it any male of a certain age could obtain voting rights. The push-pull factor of the Know-Nothings’ blatant enmity and the deliberate embrace of the Democrats rattled Whig confidence to no end.

The other significant foreign born demographic was German, Protestant and Catholic, many whom had fled Europe after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. While wary of Whigs who sometimes danced in the same circles as Know-Nothings, their antislavery principles could not abide a close coupling with Democrats closely allied with southern slave power interests. Germans, for a variety of factors, also seemed to assimilate more rapidly, and their votes remained valuable if up for grabs. All of this occurred against a dramatic backdrop that saw national unity crumbling, Whiggery gradually going extinct, and the creation of the Republican Party.

Enter Lincoln, a longtime Whig unfriendly to nativism, who was also a brilliant politician  capable of sensing and seizing opportunities. Armed with reliable antislavery credentials but well-distanced from the radicalism attached to abolitionists, Lincoln privately denounced the Know-Nothings while publicly withholding judgment, and championed “free soil” opportunities in the territories equally attractive to the native and the foreign born. Shrewdly navigating a precarious center that found competing as well as conflicting interests to his left and right, Lincoln recruited all-comers, reconciling nearly all save those that would countenance the further spread of slavery. In the end, Lincoln managed to find wide support among immigrants, especially the Germans, without alienating former Know-Nothings, a notable achievement too often overlooked in the literature. But none of it was by accident: leaders of the German-American community that Lincoln courted worked tirelessly to drive voters to the polls. The breadth of Holzer’s scholarship and his expert analysis are perhaps best showcased in this portion of the narrative as he explores how the subtleties of Lincoln’s character, coupled with his strategic instincts, reinforced his political acumen.

With secession and Civil War, of course, the focus shifted from ballots to bullets, and here immigrants—citizens and non-citizens alike—proved vital to the struggle. The foreign born filled the ranks. With  their adopted nation under threat, the Irish, who had voted for Lincoln in far smaller numbers than their German counterparts, nevertheless sent more than 150,000 men to the front. Still, the largest ethnicity belonged to the Germans, who contributed well over 200,000 soldiers—about ten percent of the fighting force! But the new president also put his thumb on the scale: in the scramble for political appointments Lincoln astutely rewarded those with the most clout, including German-Americans who campaigned for him. And this type of favor was even more pronounced as new generals were commissioned, most famously with Franz Sigel, whose ability to inspire enthusiasm in the ranks vastly exceeded his talents on the battlefield. Sadly, he was not alone. In fact, the ineptitude of many of Lincoln’s political generals—both native and foreign born—plagued him throughout the conflict, but yet remained essential to recruitment efforts as the war dragged on.

Immigration was crucial elsewhere, as well. From the time the first shots were fired, the Confederacy was able to field a larger percentage of men with muskets than the United States because they could rely on the enslaved as a massive labor force, both at home and at the front; we now know that thousands of “camp slaves” accompanied rebel armies for the duration of the war. The north had no such luxury. So in addition to their service in uniform, the Union counted on immigrants behind the lines for production of materiel as well as to take the places of those at the front in factories, mills, and beyond. At the same time, acts fostering internal improvements, long blocked by the south, were now making their way through Congress. Lincoln, a man of vision whose prescience often far exceeded that of any of his contemporaries, recognized the urgency in expanding the population to meet accelerating demands for labor, just as the nation confronted an existential threat of extinction. Of course, with no end to the war in sight, more soldiers would be needed too. Thus Lincoln became the first president to sponsor and sign legislation that encouraged immigration.

Many nationalities other than Irish and German deserve their due, and the author touches upon them, but he rightly focuses his attention on the most consequential groups. Yet, he does carve out space to discuss Jews in America, a minority both within and outside of the immigrant community, whom Lincoln generally treated with favor, for personal as well as political reasons. While Lincoln was sometimes given to the telling of ethnic jokes, as Holzer recounts, he genuinely seems to have lacked many—if certainly not all—of the prejudices common to his time.

If I was to find fault, I thought there were far too many pages devoted to chronicling the series of German-American generals who consistently let Lincoln down on the battlefield, the only drag to an otherwise fast-moving narrative. At the same time, I craved a deeper dive into what drove fierce German antislavery sentiments to begin with, something that made them natural allies to the Republican cause. But these are, I suppose, just quibbles. It is, after all, a fine work, and it more than earns a place on your Civil War bookcase.

I came to this book in an unusual fashion. I unexpectedly ran into Harold Holzer in the lobby of an eighteenth century inn in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. We had met before, at the Civil War Institute Summer Conference at Gettysburg College, and at other events. I was on my way to see blues guitarist-vocalist extraordinaire Samantha Fish in Great Barrington; Harold was returning from a presentation of this very book at a local library. We exchanged pleasantries and moved on. The next day, my wife and I stopped in at bookstore in a nearby town and I asked about Holzer’s book. The owner of the bookstore suddenly became quite animated. Did I know Harold, he wanted to know … While I chatted with him, I pretended not to notice my wife surreptitiously purchasing Brought Forth on This Continent, which two weeks later showed up in my Easter Basket. (Yes, we still do Easter Baskets in my house!)

I was most grateful to receive this book because antebellum nativism falls into my zone of interest. Some years ago, I even published a journal article about the weird confluence of events that in 1855 had the Massachusetts legislature controlled by Know-Nothings pass the very first bill mandating school desegregation in American history! I have also spent decades studying Lincoln and the Civil War, so Holzer’s book checked all the boxes. As it turned out, I was not disappointed. This is an outstanding work that succeeds not only in recapturing critical moments in American history, but in restoring the relevance of immigration to the survival and success of the Republic. Given the dynamics of this election year, that comes perhaps not a moment too soon.

Link to Greeley, cited above:  New-York Daily Tribune, November 11, 1844

Link to my journal article: Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans and School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts, by Stan Prager

More on the Know-Nothings: Review of: The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement, by John R. Mulkern

More on CWI:  Civil War Institute at Gettysburg Summer Conference 2024 – Regarp Book Blog