The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War by J. Matthew Gallman (review)

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• The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War by J. Matthew Gallman
• Brie Swenson Arnold (bio)

The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War. J. Matthew Gallman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-8139-4656-6. 416 pp., cloth, $35.00.

In this thought-provoking volume, noted historian J. Matthew Gallman offers his latest look at aspects of the political and social dynamics of the Civil War North. The emphasis here is Northern Democrats: who remained a Democrat between 1860 and 1865 and why; how various individuals and the party as a whole defined what it meant to be a Democrat during this pivotal period; and how Democrats navigated being the opposition in the midst of a civil war. [End Page 76] Though a sizeable contingent of Northerners continued to be Democrats during the era of the ascendency of the Republican Party, secession and the exodus of Southern Democrats, and the Civil War, Northern Democrats have remained less studied and understood. The Cacophony of Politics substantially attends to that, especially when read alongside other volumes that are part of an uptick in attention to Northern Democrats. (See, for example, Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006]; Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014]; Adam I. P. Smith, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017]; Joshua A. Lynn, Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019]; and Lauren Haumesser, The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022]. For the foundational study on the topic, see Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century [1983; repr., New York: Fordham University Press, 1998]). Gallman wants to understand the "men and women who did not see eye to eye with Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party" and what those "more ideologically conservative" Northerners meant by terms like loyalty, Union, Constitution, and Democrat (9, 10). As members of the party of the opposition during a civil war, Northern Democrats also ran up against and helped to define the boundaries of acceptable wartime dissent.

To tell this story, the book does not follow typical conventions: it is simultaneously a drawing together of Gallman's prior work as well as a new take, a synthesis as well as a collection of case studies; its organizational structure toggles between "a broad chronology" and "illustrative episodes"; historiographic interventions are not (overtly) attempted; and there is no central thesis (10–11). Instead, across the book's nine chapters Gallman explores several "major observations" and "core arguments," which include the need to pay closer attention to labels (e.g., War Democrat, Peace Democrat, Copperhead, loyal, racist) and the ways Northern Democrats have been categorized; the fact that politics was everywhere during the Civil War era; the ways location and timing influenced political beliefs; the complexities of civil liberties during the wartime moment; and the role of race and ethnicity in wartime politics (11–16). To pinpoint Democrats' beliefs, Gallman draws on traditional sources like newspapers, speeches, party platforms, and private correspondence as well [End Page 77] as established sources read in new ways (especially cleverly, district provost marshal reports) and sources beyond the written word (e.g., mobs, fistfights, riots, arrests). The volume sparkles in its depiction of the nineteenth-century North as "a world thick with politics" and its expansive view of who and what was political, which adds further confirmation that partisan politics was never the exclusive province of politicians and was always influenced by an array of people in the streets, in households, and at the polls (13). We encounter famous party insiders like Stephen Douglas, George McClellan, Clement Vallandigham, Samuel Barlow, and Charles and Edward Ingersoll plus the Democratic rank and file, including Irish and German immigrants, farmwives, politicians' wives...