Paulding adds: "I fear it will not be long before we of the North become the tools of the descendants of the old Puritans . . . .": He means that the well-known and much despised New England fanaticism was encroaching upon the whole North.

This is one Northern commentary on the origins of the Republican party and on the sad public conditions that made it possible. Failed politicians of both parties, like Lincoln, had seized the occasion of the acquisition of new territory from Mexico to launch themselves forward in a way destructive of the comity of the Union. The opportunity they made the most of had two parts: the discontent of major Northern economic interests over free trade and separation of the government from control of the bankers that had been accomplished by the Democrats; and the hysterical and false claims that Southerners were conspiring to spread slavery to the North, given plausibility by three decades of vicious vituperation against the South. The Republican success depended on a Northern public that was unsettled by economic change, religious ferment, and immigration. Thus these politicians were able to form for the first time in American history a purely sectional party, something that every patriot had warned against.

Almost all current interpretations of the meaning of the Republican war against the South 1861–1865 come to rest on pretty phrases from Lincoln's speeches. If you look at primary sources, as historians used to do, you get a very different picture. In their private letters and sometimes in public speeches the Republican leaders reveal themselves to be just the ruthless villains that several previous generations of historians knew them to be. They boast about their intention to keep control of the government by any means, to keep the South captive for economic exploitation, sometimes about their intent to exterminate the Southern people. (Those in favour of the last-mentioned are usually clergymen.) They revel triumphantly in conquest in a manner that puts one in mind of Nazis. As for the glory of emancipation that so long lent righteousness to their war, as Frederick Douglass pointed out, Lincoln's party was pre-eminently the party of white men. Before, during, and after the war the Republicans never did anything with a primary motive of the welfare of the black people. The black people were for use for higher purposes, for keeping down the South and keeping the Republicans in power. Most importantly, they were to stay in the South. Millions of acres of vacant western land could be given away to corporations who could provide the representatives of the people with the proper cash incentives, but there was not a patch for the freedmen.

In the free-soil debates before the war Republican leaders dwell not on the evil of slavery but on their intention to keep the black scourge out of the new territories, which must be reserved for white men only. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, stalwart Radical Republican, writes his wife that he hates to go to Washington because of all the n-words there. If you look at the iconography of Emancipation, what you see is not a celebration of black freedom but a celebration of Northern nobility of which the blacks are the passive and slavishly grateful beneficiaries.

What other elements besides opportunistic politicians went into making this new party? Obviously the powers of industry and finance that would know how to profit from a new regime. And the New England intelligentsia for whom, by common consent, we can cite Ralph Waldo Emerson as the representative. Emerson who said he was more concerned about one white men corrupted by slavery than about a thousand enslaved blacks; who also said that the inhabitants of the Massachusetts penitentiary were superior to the leaders of the South; and that serial killer John Brown was a great man.

Another major ingredient in the Republican confection were the nativists formerly of the American party. Lincoln was too shrewd to come right out as a nativist, but he gladly accepted the support of the people who had torched convents in Boston and Philadelphia. It is not very well known that nativist vigilantes called "Wide-Awakes" carried out mob action against enemies of the Republican party before and during the war. And you thought only Southerners were guilty of mob violence.

Another founding block of the Republican party, often overlooked, were German refugees from the 1848 revolutions. Their numbers in the Midwest, as much as fifteen per cent of the population in some states, were great enough to form a major voting block and to account for the change of the Midwest from Democrat to Republican between 1850 and 1860. In other words, there were just as many state rights democrats in the Midwest in 1860 as there had been in 1850, but they could now be outvoted. Lincoln cultivated this cohort early by secretly subsidizing its newspapers and involving its leaders as activists in his behalf. For the new Germans the predominant nativist Puritans of the North made an exception to their dislike of all non–Anglo-Saxons. In the German revolutionaries they found spiritual kinsmen.

Pre-1848 German immigrants, German Catholics, and those belonging to quieter Protestant sects did not participate in Republican fervor. Let's understand who these German Republicans were. They were military nationalists. You can call them proto-communist or proto-fascist, it doesn't matter. It amounts to the same thing. When the foremost among them, Carl Schurz, arrived in America he complained that the Americans were too laid-back and unideological in their politics and he vowed to change that. These Germans believed that the unified and aggressive nation-state was the height of human existence, that progress toward it was inevitable, and that obstacles to centralization and revolution should be violently destroyed like the provincial aristocracies and petty princes of Europe. These Germans were among the most active and aggressive of Republican orators and campaigners and motivated Union soldiers. Before they arrived, America had been marked by a regional conflict between Northerners and Southerners with contradictory interests and inclinations. With the rise to influence of the Forty-Eighters the manageable competition of different regions became in the Northern mind an ideological class conflict.

On one side was Freedom and the nation. On the other side an evil force called the Slave Power, a deadly enemy that must be destroyed like any other obstacle to the ascent of the nation toward perfection.

So that, as he records in his memoirs, General Richard Taylor of the Confederate Army, son of a President of the United States and grandson of a Revolutionary officer, when he surrendered in 1865, was lectured by a German in a federal general's uniform about how Southerners were now going to be forced to learn the true principles of America. (I always think of the "scholarship" of Harry Jaffa when I recall this incident.)

Let us always come back to the fundamentals. The Republican party engineered and carried out a bloody war against Americans that revolutionized the basis on which our liberty had been built. They maintained a cold war for another decade, governing by force and fraud, unprecedented in American history. While in power they bribed, swindled and looted themselves to private wealth that still underpins many fortunes. Historians of the first half of the twentieth century, whether liberals or conservatives, read the sources and understood this. They regarded what had occurred as a great national tragedy. But now it is all rendered in Marxist terms (whether those who are following the line realize it or not) as a great revolution that unfortunately failed to go far enough. Historians now see nothing in the experience but the race question. They condemn the evil Southerners who sometimes intimidated black voters in attempting to bring about an end to the disorder and blatant "legal" stealing of Reconstruction. That during Republican rule there had been pervasive fraud and terror and never an honest election in the occupied territories is not worth mentioning.

I doubt if even Lincoln and his stoutest supporters would agree that their pursuit of power and profit amounted to an unfortunately incomplete Marxist revolution. That was not exactly what they had in mind.

A speech given at the Abbeville Institute conference on "Re-Thinking Lincoln," July 7–12, 2006 at Franklin, Louisiana.

___________________