Review - "Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North" by Jack Furniss

[Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North by Jack Furniss (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,260/334. ISBN:978-0-8071-8218-5. $50]

It's useful to keep in mind that the Republican Party, which followed the seismic collapse of the national Whig Party as well as a collection of short-lived transitory political parties, was still in its infancy during the 1860 presidential election cycle when it triumphed over the fatally fractured Democratic Party. As Russell McClintock perhaps explained best in his 2008 book Lincoln and the Decision for War, the incoming president, mindful of his party's youthful fragility, prioritized party unity over countenancing any compromise measures that might threaten promises enshrined in the party's electoral platform. Upon southern secession, the northern (or Douglas) Democrats assumed the role of the national Democracy in the United States, seemingly restoring the two-party system broken during the previous electoral cycle.

Contesting that interpretation, Jack Furniss's Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North critically argues that stressing restoration of a stable, oppositional two-party system during the Civil War period creates a false impression of an overall political structure better described as a fluid system in which inter-party coalitions on state and national levels were instrumental in propelling the United States to victory. As Furniss powerfully contends, it was the fusion of Republicans, Douglas Democrats, and independent old-line Whigs into state-level Union party arrangements, the persistence of which no one could predict, that harnessed and maintained the pro-war support of the country's vast conservative middle. On the most fundamental level, the members of that majority shared the same veneration for the Union and the popular government it represented, and with that came unqualified respect for the outcomes of free and fair elections.

The wartime Democratic Party as principled and loyal opposition (versus an unprincipled obstructionist, even treasonous, fifth column dangerous to the survival of the republic during its gravest existential crisis) is something that historians have struggled with for a very long time. Published viewpoints, and the influence they have had on scholarly contemporaries, have been all over the map. The most recent trend, exemplified through Jennifer Weber's Copperheads (arguably the most widely read and referenced study on the topic), returns the emphasis toward presenting a portrait of Democrats much in common with how their partisan Republican foes painted them during and after the war. What Furniss offers is much more nuanced, an acknowledgement of the party's strategic missteps and racist appeals balanced by a more respectful appreciation of the spectrum of views contained in party leaders and voters as well as their high-minded stands (ex. for freedom of speech and the press and against arbitrary arrest and other aspects of martial law) that rose well above mere partisan convenience.

It's probably not far from the mark to say that the popular understanding of Civil War period fusion parties generally begins with the National Union Party's success in the 1864 election that propelled its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to a second term in office and decisively rejected the minority peace movement in the North. Between Extremes, however, properly frames that late-war triumph as a culmination of years of build up. In eye-opening fashion, Furniss freshly traces the origins of the National Union Party to its state-level forebears, which were created as early as 1861. Important elections occurred on a yearly basis during the Civil War, so the author's outlining of the evolution of political trends, primarily in gubernatorial politics, in six states (Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and California) offers an informative picture of popular will at regular intervals. Each state's unique geographical situation and political representation shines through, as do the personalities, ideological disposition, and strategic political acumen of the governors themselves.

As referenced earlier, Furniss's study clearly demonstrates that the two-party system was already in flux by the time 1861 elections came around. Even at that early stage, with the war only months old, candidates were already identifying themselves with formally organized Union parties. Those early-war coalitions between Republicans, Democrats, and independent Whigs fostered centrist pro-war cooperation that would be maintained through war's end. Indeed, by the elections of 1863 and 1864, over 80% of congressional contests matched Union (not Republican) Party candidates against Democratic opponents. As Furniss clearly shows, in particular for California, the emergence of Union parties could be immediately and powerfully transformative on the state level.

In analyzing Democratic Party gains achieved during the 1862 midterm elections, Furniss challenges those who base their understanding of that shift just on popular backlash against seemingly stalled progress toward victory and widespread anger against expanding war aims to include emancipation. He adds that Democratic success should also be seen as their convincing the political center that the war could and should still be fought vigorously but on conservative principles using conventional means different from the radical-sponsored war measures passed through Congress. In Furniss's view, the two Confiscation Acts, among other things championed by the radicals, upset the centrist consensus without producing any dramatic corresponding progress toward victory. Again using state-level election results as an indication of shifts in national direction, that midterm disaffection propelled a Democrat into the governor's seat in New York and a coalition Union party of conservative Republicans and Democrats greatly reduced the radical Republican gubernatorial vote majority in Massachusetts.

1862 Democratic gains proved only transitory, however, as the party disastrously stubbed its toe in 1863. A common theme in Furniss's analysis is that electoral success predictably went to the party that  most persuasively appealed to the centrist majority but also was able to strategically contain the most electorally threatening ambitions of their own most extreme political faction (the immediatist abolitionists of the Republican Party and the peace wing of the Democrats). In 1863, mainstream northern Democrats failed to adequately check their vocal peace movement minority, irreparably harming their party's hard-worn position as loyal opposition. On the other side, Union parties, which were always majority Republican, consistently outmaneuvered their most radical allies while still keeping them within the fold. Union parties won by repeatedly messaging military restoration of the Union at the expense of all other concerns while at the same time publicly downplaying (or even omitting mention altogether) slavery and emancipation. Even in Kentucky, where many of Lincoln's war policies were condemned by the majority of the population, Union Party gubernatorial candidate Thomas Bramlette won through single-minded campaign focus on restoration of the Union. Factors most obnoxious to Kentuckians were referred by Bramlette to the future ballot box once victory in the war was secured. In his discussion of this period, the author also cites the troubling beginnings of a "militarization of politics" in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, though he does minimize the scale and significance of army interference in free elections. While he deems such events "rare occurrences," Furniss does appropriately call for more in-depth study of the topic. Ever since the publication of Jonathan White's extensive analysis of the soldier vote in 1864, this reviewer has hoped someone would take up that baton.

Implementation of emancipation and other controversial wartime measures such as black enlistment is often presented as a triumph of radical influence and persuasion, but Furniss sees the war itself as the primary instigator. Through the war's unforeseen length and level of destructiveness, revolutionary measures such as emancipation organically shifted into the centrist sphere as being among those means deemed necessary for reaching the common overarching goal of restoring the Union. While fully acknowledging Democratic blunders leading into the 1864 election, Furniss persuasively interprets Lincoln's smashing electoral victory at the head of the National Union Party as being significantly based on winning political strategies that were initially developed by state Union parties and effectively honed by their gubernatorial leaders over the previous three years of war. The study also addresses the question of how long the coalition of Republicans and Democrats would outlast the achievement of its central goal, that of restoring the Union. The answer was not long, as the debates and clashing views over the character and goals of Reconstruction that started to fester in 1864 renewed the forces of political change and realignment during the postwar period.

In exploring the indispensable nature of centrist political strategy in sustaining a war effort with the non-partisan aim of defeating the Confederacy and restoring the federal union (much of which can be explained through the success of Union parties designed to broaden that base of support as much as possible), Jack Furniss's Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North offers its readers a fresh and highly insightful new way of characterizing and understanding the political alignment and party system of the United States during the Civil War years. The volume also profoundly reinforces recent scholarship detailing the critical importance of the political partnership, fraught as it may have been in many instances, between state governors and the Lincoln administration. Highly recommended.