Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War Transformation of the U.S. State

Abstract

he sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the Reconstruction are upon us-and they will be for the next decade and more. Path-breaking scholarship about these epochs appears at a steady clip, inviting us to tear ourselves away from such current preoccupations as polarization, income inequality, and the struggle for social policy. "But wait," a busy political scientist would think, "isn't that better left to historians?" The scholar might reconsider that thought after absorbing the books under review, which communicate a great deal about public policy, political parties, leadership, and political transformation. They vividly remind us that destroying the world's largest system of slavery-which is what we did 150 years ago-was a world-historical accomplishment.Liberals and revolutionaries in Europe applauded the end of American slavery. Karl Marx was among those cheering for the Stars and Stripes. They knew something that we usually fail to recall-and can rediscover through the kinds of books under review. A stylized fact about nineteenth-century American politics is the relative inactivity and limits of national government. What our authors show, though, is how ambitious national public policy, partybuilding, and leadership were in the lead-up to the Civil War and during the Civil War itself. The daring aim of Reconstruction, to establish the world's first bi-racial democracy, had roots in a decade of "big"-in fact, really big-policy. The deeper lesson here is that the sesquicentennial period is our time as much as it is a time for historians.There's a striking leitmotif in these works-namely the role of transformative policy in bringing on the Civil War and in its conduct. Christopher Childers' study of "popular sovereignty" and Martin Quitt's biography of Stephen Douglas, the figure who thought most deeply about it, place us at one end of the historical arc: the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Kansas-Nebraska is a major case of a statute generating new politics, though hardly the politics that Douglas intended. It triggered the formal organization of the Republican Party and imposed sharp losses on Democrats in the 1854 elections. Equally important, it brought Abraham Lincoln back into national politics, but this time with a much higher profile.At the other end of the historical arc lies the Emancipation Proclamation. People often consider it symbolic-at most a statement of a change in the Union's war aims but not a substantive policy that actually emancipated anybody. There is nothing soaring about it. As Richard Hofstadter remarked, rhetorically the Proclamation has "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." 1 But as James Oakes shows, the Proclamation was the charter that ratified and expanded the policy process of making "freedom national." (Charles Sumner's 1852 Senate