---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 7:24 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Butler on Fry, 'A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac' To: <[email protected]> Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Zachery A. Fry. A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac. Civil War America Series. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 336 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5445-4. Reviewed by Clayton J. Butler (University of Virginia) Published on H-Nationalism (June, 2021) Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera Historian Zachery A. Fry's recent book, A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac, represents a valuable contribution to the recent historiographical trend of examining the influence of partisan politics in Union armies during the Civil War. Engaging most directly with Jonathan White's 2014 Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, Fry argues that, rather than succumbing to the electoral chicanery employed to ensure the greatest possible Republican Party vote, the great preponderance of the rank and file of the Army of the Potomac--under the considerable influence of the junior officer corps--genuinely gave their ever-increasing support to the Lincoln administration and subscribed to a Republican ideology. Fry illustrates how a remarkable proportion of Union soldiers in the eastern theater came to view voting Democratic as disloyal and borderline treasonous. They made it clear that they would not tolerate a fire in their rear and that they viewed the Copperhead faction undermining the war effort on the home front with an enmity equal to or perhaps even greater than the Confederates they faced on the battlefield. Fry's examination of the war of words carried on in the Northern press--as soldiers wrote in to their hometown papers, usually to castigate those who opposed the administration from the safety of their hearthside--provides his best evidence that the party of Abraham Lincoln truly won the battle for the hearts and minds of Union soldiers over the course of the conflict. Fry organizes his book around what he characterizes as key political "crisis points" (p. 11). Chapter 1 describes the army's political awakening that began during George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign of 1862. That the men adored "Little Mac" for the pride and self-confidence he instilled in them after the ignominy of First Bull Run is well established, and it would take a great deal of hard experience to dislodge their idol from his pedestal. For some that would never happen. Yet the Peninsula Campaign, Fry shows, represented the important first stage of the process to those for whom it did. The setbacks they endured, the evident determination of the enemy, and Confederates' use of enslaved labor against them demonstrated to many in the Union rank and file the validity of the Republican contention that the kid glove approach would not be sufficient to subdue the rebellion. If the spring and summer of 1862 represented the first lesson in the political education of the impressionable soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, Fry contends, the Democrats had not made their strongest case. The second chapter focuses on the fallout from the Battle of Antietam and the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Fry makes the good point that, due to McClellan's notorious inactivity following the battle, the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had ample time to deliberate the politics of emancipation as they sat around and licked their wounds. The men, for their part, increasingly signaled their willingness to support any policy that they felt could weaken their enemy. The more they became exposed to Southerners and their "institutions," the more they tended to concur with the Republican ideology that connected slavery with disloyalty. Lincoln's visit to the battlefield also boosted his personal popularity with the men. Combined with the fact that Democratic state governments showed a reticence to allow soldiers to vote in the fall elections, support for the administration and the Republican Party continued to grow. Chapter 3 details how, as much as soldiers may have personally expressed ambivalence about the Emancipation Proclamation, they recoiled at the Democrats on the home front who undermined the war effort by openly opposing the administration. Soldiers in the Army of the Potomac increasingly perceived anti-administration efforts as tantamount to support for the Confederacy, and while Fry does not weigh in on the actual breadth of the antiwar movement on the Northern home front, he argues that it suffices to say that thousands in the Union army believed it constituted a real threat. For Fry, early 1863 represented a critical period in the army's embrace of the Republican Party. "By the spring," he writes, "no gray area remained" (p. 70). The party of Lincoln had, he finds, successfully associated itself with uncritical support for a "vigorous prosecution" of the war--the phrase used over and over again--which went a long way toward ensuring the loyalty of the men (p. 100). While a diversity of political opinion undoubtedly persisted, which Fry details ably, the tide had certainly turned. The next chapters chart the increasingly Republican political trajectory of the Army of the Potomac. The draft riots in the summer of 1863 left a particularly bitter taste. The men could not abide the feeling of having to fight both Confederates in their front and civilians in their rear. As one succinctly put it, "we are mad with rage to think they [rioters] should give our enemies encouragement" (p. 106). In this respect, McClellan's embrace, or at least toleration, of the peace wing of the Democratic Party strained the relationship with his former charges to the breaking point. His endorsement of George W. Woodward over the "soldier's friend" Andrew Curtin for governor of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1863 represented a grave misstep. Soldiers insisted they be allowed to finish the job. If the political leadership agreed to a "patched-up peace" with the rebels, as Woodward and thus McClellan appeared inclined to consider, they felt that their comrades' lives would have been sacrificed in vain (p. 127). The presidential election of 1864 proved the final inflection point of the war, the moment when the Army of the Potomac's steady drift into the Republican--or at this point National Union--camp made itself felt. Numerous factors combined to deliver an emphatic win for the Lincoln administration, but the Copperheadism and resistance to conscription on the home front, as well as the fact that it was Democrats, not Republicans, seeking to curtail the right of soldiers to vote in the field, represented crucial inducements to vote to sustain the national government. The fact that Confederates made their preference for McClellan clear constituted a final nail in the coffin of his electoral chances, as far as the soldier vote went. In the end, the Lincoln administration succeeded in linking themselves inextricably with support for the war effort, an association very few soldiers appeared willing to array themselves against. Ultimately, the degree to which support for Republicans and the administration became understood and characterized by soldiers as the "apolitical" position, above reproach--in spite of the fact that it was, of course, thoroughly political--represented the party's greatest coup. As soldier logic tended to operate, "no party now" meant support for the war, which meant support for the administration, which meant voting Republican. Fry traces this phenomenon with skill. As a military historian, he also does an admirable job reminding readers of the contingency of events even while tracing the seemingly inexorable ascent of Republicanism in the army. Fry demonstrates the ways that the organization of the army itself, and its seemingly constant reshuffling, had a perceptible effect on its political culture. Among his numerous interventions, he also argues--and makes a compelling case--that soldiers' political persuasion did not represent a reliable indicator of their willingness (or not) to reenlist, instead showing that it had more to do with how intense their combat experience had been. His book steps confidently into the midst of one of the most vibrant contemporary historiographical conversations of the Civil War era and deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the intersections of nineteenth-century political and military history. Citation: Clayton J. Butler. Review of Fry, Zachery A., _A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac_. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. June, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56401 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#8911): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/8911 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83247147/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
