We’re all familiar with the party of Lincoln as emancipator of the slaves. But listening to the nearly 30 hours of David Blight’s Open Yale course on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, I’ve learned a thing or two about the birth of the Republican party. It came of a very exciting time in politics:
[T]he Republican Party was really born amidst hundreds of meetings across the North, to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to react to it, to figure out some way to politically resist it. That “hell of a storm” that Stephen Douglas had predicted, is exactly what happened, but he didn’t have any clue the direction or the ferocity of the political storm that this would cause…. What was born in that summer, and especially that fall, was the most rapid third-party political coalition movement in all of American history; and if you want a prototype for any possibility of that kind, any other time in our political history, this is it. The Republican Party, brand new–not six months old–will elect 100 people to the House of Representatives in the fall elections of 1854, and they will begin to draw together a remarkable coalition.
And expansionist when it comes to federal power:
War enabled the Republicans to pass sweeping visionary legislation borne of a certain worldview, and that worldview…depended on an activist interventionist federal government, and that is exactly what the Republicans created, in part out of necessity of the war and in part out of the fact that they actually believed in it. And it’s going to bring about a great deal of constitutional innovation and economic experimentation. Here’s what they did. In finance, in agriculture, in taxes, in building railroads, and in emancipation–at least those five major categories–the Republican Party transformed the United States Federal Government.
They began by first selling war bonds. The Treasury needed money to fight the war… How are you going to produce all this money? They began selling bonds to banks and financiers. In 1862, about 500 million dollars in bonds were sold at six percent, payable in five years. Buy a bond, support the war… The whole idea here was economic nationalism, to invest the citizen in the fate of the Union by making them pay for it. And it was in 1862 that the Federal Government for the first time created the Greenback Dollar, the paper dollar, which actually revolutionized American currency. Financial markets went up and down during the war, depending on battlefield success or failure. But by 1863, they were financing a war, companies were making profits and the Federal Government could pay its bills. It worked. The total national debt of an annual two-and-a-half billion was absorbed by the general population, and it was celebrated as what the Republican Party called a people’s triumph….
[W]hat came out of this was a revolutionary set of legislation that only wartime could probably have produced; the Homestead Act in the West, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Morrill Act of 1862, which was the Land Grant College Act, which created agricultural colleges across the country, by federal money… And really, frankly to understand how Northerners, the Republican Party, Lincoln himself and at least the majority of those Union troops came to support emancipation, the freeing of black people, by federal authority, you need to see it in the context of all else that this Republican Party was doing through the Federal Government. They were using government now as the engine of great social experimentation and change; granted, so much of it out of necessity, some of it out of will.
I knew that before the Civil War it was, these United States are; and after it became, The United States is. What I hadn’t realized before was that eleven of the first twelve amendments to the U.S. Constitution before the war had been written to limit national power. After Lincoln, six of the next seven constitutional amendments directly increased federal power.
My how times change.