Book Review: Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North

Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North. By Jack Furniss. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 340 pp. $50.00.

Reviewed by Zachery A. Fry

Centrist politics in the United States allowed northern voters to support “revolutionary changes for conservative reasons,” claims Jack Furniss in Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North.

Readers just wading into the topic of Civil War politics might assume that a simple divide between Republicans and Democrats was the animating force in northern elections. But as early as the war’s outbreak, in large part because of a “rally around the flag” force that captivated the electorate in the wake of Fort Sumter, moderate “Union” parties appeared in key states and districts. In some areas this movement expanded the Republican base, and in others it grew out of Democratic voting blocs. These parties have surprisingly escaped significant study from scholars, though other works have investigated the larger question of northern nationalism before and during the war, as well as the power of “Union Leagues” as agents of political mobilization. Furniss spotlights the primacy of Union parties, including the views of Republicans and Democrats who tacked to the center, as a critical wartime effort to defeat the rebellion. His work promises to hold a prominent place in the literature on Civil War politics.

Union Party and centrist support meant different things in different places, mirroring the chaos that Matthew Gallman observed in his recent volume A Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (UVA Press, 2021). Furniss builds on the work of Michael F. Holt, who has pushed for a recognition of just how malleable and transient partisan identity in the Civil War era was. He also extends Gary Gallagher’s emphasis on the near-religious devotion to Union for northern voters by investigating how that focus manifested itself in northern political structures. Unlike previous scholars who have analyzed party dynamics by analyzing national-level institutions, Furniss organizes his book by stressing how specific state parties and politicians shaped, and often were shaped by, the war’s great questions and events. “The drama of antebellum and Civil War-era northern politics,” he observes, “played out in many self-contained state-level theaters rather than on one national stage” (19).

The book’s specific terminology warrants a discussion here. In his definition of “conservatism” throughout the Civil War North, Furniss situates the constituency not in a modern conservative-liberal dichotomy, but instead in the center of a continuum from Democratic pro-peace “ultras” to “radical” abolitionist Republicans. Thus, conservatives who had previously attached themselves to the Whig, Free Soil, Know-Nothing, or Constitutional Union Parties were the moderating influence on the northern political scene. He dovetails his views with Adam I.P. Smith’s The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics (UNC Press, 2017) in arguing, “Conservatives, in the center of the northern spectrum, formed the key swing-voter bloc that shaped the outcomes of wartime elections” (118).

Although he offers abundant analysis of northern and border state politics, including partisan battlegrounds as different as California and Kentucky, Furniss centers his best insights on Pennsylvania and New York. On the Keystone State, the author emphasizes how “People’s Party” Governor Andrew Curtin, often viewed as an ally of the Lincoln administration, worked frequently to align himself with centrist and conservative views on the war and to distance himself from the more controversial policies of the Republican Party. On the other side of the coin, New York’s Horatio Seymour tried to broaden the appeal of the Democratic Party by casting it as an anti-radical “loyal opposition” to the administration. Seymour’s movement refused to blur the distinction between loyalty to Union and loyalty to Lincoln.

In discussing the viability of centrist politics, Between Extremes illuminates that Lincoln’s National Union Party of 1864 was no mere partisan ploy or window-dressing for Republican policy. It was, Furniss insists, a fundamentally conservative coalition where the push for emancipation “took a back seat” (234). By building on the work of state Union parties and politicians, Lincoln’s supporters at the national level bridged the core message of the Republican Party, however radical, with a conservative vision for reuniting the country. And in contrast to historians who interpret the scale of Lincoln’s victory as virtual proof of its inevitability, Between Extremes argues quite convincingly that “the outcome balanced delicately on the combination of military progress, civilian morale, and the positions taken and rhetoric delivered by politicians” (246).

Between Extremes is a welcome addition to the literature on northern politics in the Civil War. By focusing on the critical role of centrists and conservatives on the political scene, Furniss helps us better understand how the war was won and, by implication, why the peace that followed was so tumultuous.

These views are the reviewer’s alone and do not represent the position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the federal government.

Zachery A. Fry is assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is author of A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020.