| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles W. Calhoun. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2006. Pp. x, 347. $39.95.

Since the publication of Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor and Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970) there has been a need for a similar study that would address the ideology of the Republican Party for the postbellum period. Now the need is partially met by Charles W. Calhoun's book. In this solidly researched and lucidly written work, Calhoun offers us a reexamination of Republicans' "actions and motives" toward the "Southern Question" from the Grant to Harrison administrations through the lens of ideology, "with primary regard to their beliefs about the meaning and nature of the American Republic" (p. 2). As the Civil War had transformed the nation, it had also transformed the Republicans' perceptions about the nation and the destiny of their own party. Viewing themselves as "the successors of the Founders" (p. 3), the Republicans were inspired to reapply the principles of Declaration of Independence to reconstruct the American republic that had remained incomplete until the Civil War. The idea of a "new Republic," as conceived by the Republicans at the end of the war, actually contained a host of wide-ranging notions about society, government, and public life and included old and new values, such as liberty, free institutions, virtue, majority rule, racial equality, citizenship, and primacy of federal power. At the heart of the party's postbellum ideology, however, was the principle of "democratic republicanism" (p. 16), which meant racial equality in political representation and participation and the enjoyment of citizenship.

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