1864 Sect. of State William Henry Seward on Unionism/’The Union War’

Many Americans don’t know much about the political ideas of the time that made the civil war happen. More know about the flow of the battles than of the politics. I have encountered an interesting book published recently on the politics of northerners- the politics of the Confederacy were covered in a previous book by the author Gary W. Gallagher.

This book on U.S. Civil War history is named ‘The Union War’. I found a note fragment Gallagher provided from Sect. Seward to Lincoln on the topic of Unionism vs. secession. Taking an RS 2477 course at the Univ. of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1988 and sitting at a table with Joe Voegler-founder of the Alaska Independence Party later found murdered in the city landfill, I was interested on Seward’s ideas on unionism. Sect. Seward of course was instrumental in purchasing Alaska from Russia.

I decided to reprint it here. The state of Alaska is also releasing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s quotidian emails during her time in office as transcripts today. Sect. Seward’s note to Lincoln is of more historical interest for me at least. The book is something of an historian’s history book reviewing ideas of other historians as well as presenting the author’s own on the subject.

Perhaps Americans have become a little forgetful of the political question of unionism and what it meant in the first half of the 19th century before the civil war rendered the topic res judicata. Equally likely we have forgotten many of the subtleties of politics that Abraham Lincoln and others were required to use politically to get a northern population that was 99% white to fight to liberate the slaves of the south. Gallagher’s book advances a credible thesis that popular sentiment to keep the union together was the main reason northerners volunteered 1.2 million men to fight a civil war even before conscription. The idea that abolitionists wanted to let the south go its own way-perhaps to get rid of the beast-is curious. Still, it is challenging to imagine that Wisconsin with a black population just .15% had much concern about ending slavery in Louisiana.

I read a quote from Ulysses S. Grant on his first experience of encountering slaves in the south while with the Army of the West in another book. Slavery hadn’t made much of an impression on him until then as it was not part of his experience. Thereafter he became hardened in sentiment against it.

Some historians have written about those all-white unionists before the United States Colored Troops units formed in 1864 as racists, supremacists and chauvinists (really).

That 19 million white northerners would fight fewer (13 million?) southern whites to keep the union together is not so surprising. I assume first nations tribes are not included as Northern unionists in the tally-even though a full blooded Indian Union Colonel named Parker wrote the document of surrender Lee would sign at Appomattox after his Army was decimated, barefoot and starving. First nation’s tribes had not fully reconciled themselves yet to being citizens of the Union.

Gallagher mentions that Negro slaves were counted as 3/5ths citizens in the ante bellum south for the purpose of political apportionment. Southern elitists were happy enough to have the swollen congressional representation numbers yet wanted more- leading to war. The tacit recognition that Negro slaves are both humans and citizens even if not voting ones implied that the terms would eventually change.
In retrospect the south did seem to press its will to secede too far to perpetuate its way of life. There were moderate Northern offers to gradually phase out slavery the oligarchs disdained.

As an oligarchy the southern leadership presented a direct threat to unionism. Northern whites supported their own egalitarian liberty and right to advance to a property owning class, and on that basis readily enlisted to combat the secessionist south. As the possibility of a global elitism recovering portions of the United States even for potential imperial rule grew, free whites obviously would be willing to war to preserve a union and collaterally eliminate slave labor.

Seward-more famous for negotiating the purchase of Alaska from Russia- wrote to Lincoln in 1864 ‘we must Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion”.

Lincoln ran in 1864 for the Presidency on a Union Party ticket rather than the Republican. Seward supported the Union Party and provides good political advice for the President’s re-election campaign.
Lincoln’s political approach for eliciting political support for the war against southern Democrat secessionists followed the narrative of preserving the union. Some retrospectively may regard the entanglement of unionism and black emancipation as inseparable. As William James might have observed though, the Confederacy presented the Union with a forced option of fighting or yielding to oligarchic expropriation of the southern states.

It is interesting that some vague ideas about a union of free people continues today as an underlying basis for a logic of support for global revolutions-even paradoxically as networked global concentrations of wealth via corporatism exploit labor globally. Human society is often not founded upon purely rational pragmatic methods politically, but instead evolves as a circumstance with a lack of adequate public interests in structuring effective and adaptive social and economic governance.