The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

I would lie if I said I didn’t at times find my retreat into the late nineteenth century, with all of its turmoil, pain, and suffering, a relief. The past is the secret refuge of historians.

People became Republicans and Democrats because of who they were more than because of the principles they espoused. Both parties contained members across an ideological spectrum.

Lincoln had been shot in a theater, but it was unthinkable that he should die there. For many American Protestants theaters were profane, and the president’s presence there on Good Friday was disturbing.

This was a northern ceremony because the North was, for the moment, the nation. Its sectional values of free labor were the values Lincoln both proclaimed and embodied, and they had become by virtual default the national values.

The war begun to save the union had become, as Maine’s Sen. Lot Morrill would say in 1866, a second American revolution. Slavery and the extremes of states’ rights—the hallmarks of the South—were dead. Without slavery, there would have been no war. The South fought in defense of slavery; it had said so, vociferously and repeatedly, and the South had lost. The federal government was more powerful than ever. These things were settled.

The Republicans were the party of nationalism, economic improvement, personal independence, and, more tentatively, universal rights.

The proclamations revealed how poorly Johnson fitted the historical moment. He had a weakness for principles, which, combined with his stubbornness, meant that once he had reasoned himself into a position, that position, intended to be an intellectual fortress, often became a prison.