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Book Reviews
Republicans and the Free Republic in the Gilded Age
| CALHOUN, CHARLES. W. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. x + 347 pp. Introduction, photographs, notes, index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1462-1.
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Charles W. Calhoun, professor of history at East Carolina University and a leading political historian of the Gilded Age, presents an elegant, classic political history of what is often called "Republicans and the Southern Question" from 1865 to the turn of the twentieth century. Calhoun argues that the "southern question" involved a transcendent struggle—the effort on the part of Republicans to establish a "new republic" based on equal civil and political rights for all men and the power of the federal government to make those rights secure. |
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The proposition that Republicans aimed to establish "a new republic" implies a larger enterprise than simply expanding the right of suffrage, but Calhoun never fully explicates the new ideology of republicanism that Republicans worked to achieve. "Most fundamentally, they defined it as rule by the people through the instrument of representative government," he writes (3). Although promised by the Declaration of Independence, this ideal had not been realized until the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, which in the words of Charles Sumner was "nothing less than the regeneration of the Nation" (4). But Sumner was referring to something much broader than the political democracy to which Calhoun refers. Calhoun's seems a rather thin definition of the ideology of a "new republic." It does not incorporate the social and economic elements of the Republican ideology so compellingly described in the work of Eric Foner and more recently by Heather Cox Richardson and Nancy Cohen.1 Therefore Calhoun does not address the inherent tensions in republican ideology that they say accounted for the waning of support for Reconstruction in the North. |
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Nonetheless, a great deal is to be learned from Calhoun's account of how Republicans tried to establish some of republicanism's basic tenets and how they grappled with the dogged resistance they faced from white southerners. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge the debt, Calhoun carries forward the insights of Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic.2 Fehrenbacher observed that by the 1850s, the governance of the United States was so completely entwined with slavery that the United States could be understood only as a "slaveholding republic." By seeking to break that connection, the Republican party proposed a radical constitutional transformation that makes intelligible white southerners' conviction that antislavery northerners were bent on destroying the constitutional system. In Fehrenbacher's view, the triumph of the Republicans in the presidential election of 1860 and the North's victory in the Civil War replaced the slaveholding republic with a republic dedicated to freedom. |
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Fehrenbacher did not live to complete his book and evaluate the success of the transformation from a slave to a free republic. Conceiving the New Republic can be seen as undertaking that task. And Calhoun's conclusion is sobering. In the end, Republicans were unable to make their conception of a new republic stick. He titles his last chapters "Republicanism Defeated" and "Surrender of the New Republic." |
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