I would like to thank Professor Green for his very fair and thoughtful review. The ‘stormy present’ of my title could well be applied to the state of scholarship on the American Civil War at the moment, so I am especially grateful for a review that, while offering a measured critique, is generous in its openness to what I was trying to do.
As Professor Green recognises, I have framed my book in terms of ‘conservatism’ not because, in my judgement, Civil War Era Northerners met some a priori definition of conservatism but because – demonstrably, as the evidence shows – they used that term about themselves. Not everyone wanted to be known as a ‘conservative’ of course – but the centre ground of politics where elections were won and lost was occupied by voters and politicians who thought that to be ‘conservative’ was an unequivocally good thing. These ‘conservatives’ were the voters who tipped the balance in elections — they were the middle-of-the-roaders, the ‘non-agitators’ and ‘non-shouters’, the people who (I was delighted to discover) an 1860s newspaper called ‘the silent majority’.
The term ‘conservative’ meant different things to different people of course (and in particular Democrats and non-Democrats often meant very different things by it), though in general it implied pragmatism and a suspicion of ‘ideologues’. ‘Conservatives’ also called themselves ‘liberal’ (less often) and ‘progressive’ (quite often) with no sense that this contradicted their preference for ‘conservative measures’ or ‘conservative men’. Unsurprisingly perhaps, as tensions mounted and the threat of disunion grew, it became ever more important for politicians to assert their fundamental conservatism. Democrats who in the 1840s prided themselves on their radicalism called themselves conservative by the late 1850s.
In this era, white Americans almost universally believed the American Union to be the freest and most perfected polity in human history, and so preserving it was not only their generation’s best policy choice it was their divinely-ordained responsibility. It is unsurprising, though telling, that some of the radical Chartists who emigrated from Britain to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s called themselves ‘conservative’ in America (a country where the People’s Charter had, in almost all respects, already been put into effect) when they had been revolutionaries at home. That defence of a past Revolution, and valorisation of existing institutions (along with a pragmatic desire to reform them as needed) is a fundamentally conservative posture so it is not surprising that this was a term that resonated. But the challenge for self-defined conservatives in all times and places is what do you do if revolutionary measures are needed in order to preserve the things you think are important and are in danger?
In the period I write about in my book, Northern voters were confronted by crisis after crisis and what I’ve sought to do is to suggest some of the ways in which they tried to navigate their way out of these stormy waters. In the end, a critical mass of Northerners supported what were, by any standards, revolutionary or potentially revolutionary positions. My reading of the evidence simply suggests that most of them arrived at these conclusions for what were – by their own accounts – conservative reasons.
Professor Green is right that there are many additional sources I could have drawn on, though my focus on the free states meant I consciously steered clear of the Blair family from the Border slave states of Maryland and Missouri. His point about Henry Raymond’s suspect motives for endorsing popular sovereignty in 1860 is well made – and I agree that Raymond surely did not seriously think that Douglas’s plan was one that would unite the South. But to me at least, the fact that the New York Times joined the other principal New York Republican paper, the Tribune in writing warm words about the main plank in the opposing candidate’s platform suggests, at the very least, that Northern politics was not bifurcated into two warring camps of ‘antislavery’ Republicans and ‘proslavery’ Democrats. These blunt concepts simply do not do justice, in my view, to the complexity of Northerners’ shifting and multi-layered attitudes to the problem of slavery.
Richard Hofstadter, as Mike Green rightly says, had a knack for putting things pithily. I think he got that one about right: Lincoln was both radical and conservative. In the same way, I believe that only if we understand the conservative half of the equation can we really understand the revolutions of the 1860s in the United States.