NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5327

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Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

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

                               -30-

(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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