5 - War democrats and copperheads
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Republocrats/5: WAR DEMOCRATS & COPPERHEADS
The Democrats and Republicans: Part Five
WAR DEMOCRATS AND COPPERHEADS
By Vince Copeland
When the Civil War began, the more patriotic and revolutionary Democrats at first stayed in the same party with the counter-revolutionary Copperheads, merely calling themselves "War Democrats."
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's radical secretary of war, was one of these. Andrew Johnson, governor of Tennessee and vice president in 1864, was another. In fact, he proved to be an abject appeaser of the old slave owners when he later became president after Lincoln's assassination.
In 1864 the Democrats ran General George McClellan against Lincoln, who had to run on a coalition ticket: the National Union Republicans. McClellan had been chief of the Union forces but never really won a battle; in fact, he hesitated to get into a fight, being himself a compromiser with slavery.
The main Democratic campaign slogan in 1864 was, "The Union as it was and the Constitution as it is." This meant: reconstitute the slave owners' Union, call the war off, and keep the Black people enslaved.
Nevertheless, McClellan got 2.7 million votes to Lincoln's 3 million. And this was in the North! While the anti-slave voters were in the majority, the figures give only the palest reflection of the intensity of the struggle.
If the Southern white supremacists had been counted (and not the slaves), a clear majority would have been against the Civil War. So much for the constitutional verities and formal democracy.
Johnson tries counter-revolution
Vice President Andrew Johnson, the "War Democrat," became president after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865. He proceeded to pardon many of the key figures of the Southern counter-revolution who had been taken into custody with the military victory of the North. The former slave owners were emboldened by this and began to reimpose slave conditions on the freed Black masses.
Feeling his isolation in the North, Johnson called a big conference in Pennsylvania in 1866 to get Northern support for his program of reconciliation. The merchant banks and the New York Times gave strong support to this convention. But it was short-lived.
It was short-lived because the national elections of 1866 returned a larger proportion of Radical Republicans to Congress, the Northern population correctly feeling that the Democratic president was taking away their victory. There were several currents pushing this vote, but one, undoubtedly, was a genuine and still militant sympathy for the freed slaves.
The changed relation of forces in Congress led to the famous showdown between Congress and the president which has produced so many maudlin stories depicting Johnson as the victimized underdog whose impeachment, which lost by just one vote, was an insult to civilization and a virtual burning at the stake.
Election of 1868
Johnson's impeachment and subsequent trial were merely the end result of his collaboration with the defeated slave masters and were only remotely connected with the legalistic side of the offense he had committed, which had to do with demoting the militant secretary of war. His real offense was infinitely greater: betraying the revolution of which he was supposed to be a leader.
Thus Congress in reality set up a dictatorship--and an "unconstitutional" dictatorship at that, according to all its opponents, who at that time were mostly Democrats. But it was in reality the dictatorship of the middle class, who together with the ex-slaves made up the real majority of the whole country.
It is true that most of the purely industrial capitalists of the North were behind the Republican Party and were opposed to the pro-Southern New York banks. But there is not the slightest question that congressional Radical Republicans Thaddeus Stevens, Ben Wade and Charles Sumner were to the left of most industrialists, and far to the left of the Democratic New York bankers.
They took the revolution--in its legal forms--much farther than the bankers and businessmen would have if left to themselves. Nevertheless, because the crushing of Southern ruling-class political power was now so directly in the interest of these bankers and business people, the congressional dictatorship, "unconstitutional" though it was, and pro-Black as it never was before nor has been since, was for the moment successful.
Wall Street was pulled along. Its preponderant elements felt they could not act against the Radicals at this moment without injuring their own interests.
Grant, the unlikely Radical
However, Wall Street did want to moderate or at least control the Reconstruction as soon as possible. And whereas the political instrument of the radical middle class was Congress, the handiest instrument of big business was the presidency. Like business, it was getting more centralized and easier to manipulate by a small, powerful capitalist clique. But the wealthiest capitalists of the North, including many Democrats who had turned Republican for the war and its profits, had a problem.
Enormously enriched and far more powerful economically than before the war, they were at last convinced that they could run the national ship of state alone without the Southern rulers and get their business anyway. The problem was to find a president who would appeal to this radical middle class and the voting ex-slaves and radical whites of the South, and yet represent Wall Street rather than the Radicals. How could they, in other words, take the first careful steps in cutting down the Radical dictatorship of Congress?
They found the answer, not in another conciliatory politician like Andrew Johnson, but in the general who had led the Radicals as well as Wall Street to victory in the war.
There can be no doubt about their manipulation of the election. The first public meeting to float the candidacy of General Ulysses S. Grant was held not in his home state of Indiana, nor among the Black revolutionaries who were taking over the Sea Island plantations in Georgia, nor among the anti-Wall Street mill owners or farmers of Western New York and Ohio.
It was held in New York City early in December 1867 and was sponsored by the same Astors who had tried to defeat Lincoln in 1860. Cornelius Vanderbilt, soon to displace the Astors for the dubious honor of the richest man in America, was there. So were Peter Cooper, Daniel Drew, Levi P. Morton (later a Morgan partner and a vice president of the United States), Moses Taylor and Moses Grinell--all bankers and/or big capitalists. Several had opposed Lincoln in 1860, even though he was still only a moderate at that time, and supported his reactionary opponents.
Grant campaign
Big money joined with big professionalism to put Grant over. Republican chairman Thurlow Weed, once the indefatigable political manager for William Seward and a campaign leader for Lincoln, now busy playing the stock market with tips supplied by the Vanderbilts, worked happily with the people who had supported the anti-slavery struggle the least and profited from it the most.
This almost 20th-century politician promised to get Grant elected if he would say nothing and write nothing. And with a fat campaign fund, Weed did. The voting masses could be pardoned for thinking that Grant, the victor in their war, would also support their program in peace.
Wall Street put up hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Grant campaign. The Jay Cooke brokerage house--one of the few that was Republican from the start--supplied at least $30,000 and possibly as much as $50,000, an amount larger than any total presidential campaign fund before 1860.
Wall Street had now changed from junior partner to senior partner in the affairs of the Republic, with the Southern masters considerably more junior than Wall Street had been before. But this economic fact was not completely expressed in Washington politics. That is, the progressive North, in general, along with its revolutionary Black ally in the South, was in charge, but not yet Wall Street itself.
Grant's job was to change that. But he did not immediately do so. He could not. The continuing rule of the Radicals in Washington, with the best of them pushing for the division of the old plantations among those who had worked them, pulled Grant along in its wake.
Besides not wanting to enjoy the same fate as Andrew Johnson, Grant knew he could support Black Liberation without antagonizing the majority of Northern capitalists, who now recognized their strong interest in definitively disciplining the Southern master class. And that interest was becoming clearer all the time.
The big reason why the Grant administration has come down in the history books as such a corrupt one is not so much that he was hand-in-glove with big business as that he was relatively independent of it as far as Black freedom was concerned. That is, the Radicals took him over politically, even while the financiers got what they wanted economically.
What relative independence Grant could muster came from the fact that he and his associates did not just depend upon the golden shower of campaign contributions, but received the votes of the still radical North and West in addition to the still optimistic and enthusiastic freed Black people.
Wall Street could only become the absolute manipulator of elections at a later date, and it would take a decade before it put its political servants in their proper place, even in the presidency, which was so much easier to control than was Congress as a whole.
In fact, it would be several decades before civil service reform, corporate regulation and other "progressive" devices made it possible for the new monopolists to restrain the economic racketeers from doing to them what they themselves had done to the small capitalists.
Next: Grant and the gold
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)
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