THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 67
the other. Now we see that one set of
brothers was fighting to keep still an-
other set in a permanent state of prop-
erty, to be bought and sold and worked
as wanted. The Republicans in Con-
gress, long classed as unreasonable rad-
icals, finally seem like moral heroes.
T
his was a long time coming. Even
in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”—
with an impeccably progressive Tony
Kushner script—Thaddeus Stevens,
the Pennsylvania congressman, played
by Tommy Lee Jones, was shown as
admirable but ornery, a peppery fire-
brand compared with Lincoln, a char-
acter of deep wisdom and soul and
Weltschmerz. Bordewich will have
none of it. In his account, Lincoln, far
from being the steely-minded leader
to whom all eyes turned, was a weak
temporizer. He meekly endured Gen-
eral George McClellan’s rudeness—
one night, the egomaniacal but incom-
petent “young Napoleon” kept Lincoln
waiting downstairs in the parlor while
he slept—leaving it to Congress to
challenge McClellan’s insubordination
and seeming reluctance to engage in
warfare. While Lincoln was still toy-
ing with absurd and insulting coloni-
zation schemes for freed blacks, Re-
publicans in Congress were insisting
on granting them political freedom
and giving them guns to fight their
oppressors. Lincoln needed a big war
but had no plan to pay for it. The Re-
publican legislators, by contrast, found
a way to finance the war, by employ-
ing an unprecedentedly large-scale sale
of government bonds, raising taxes on
luxuries, and imposing the first real in-
come tax. Lincoln was a photogenic
free rider in a tall hat.
To be sure, the specifically anti-Lin-
coln polemic subsides as the book pro-
ceeds. Bordewich is more concerned
with magnifying his Radical Repub-
lican heroes than with diminishing old
Abe. He has two heroes in particular:
Stevens and Senator Ben Wade, of
Ohio. It was Wade who led the fight
against the “tardy” and soft-on-the-
South McClellan, confronting him
over his inaction and then urging Lin-
coln to fire him long before the Pres-
ident got up the courage to do it. Wade
increased congressional oversight and
helped form the Joint Committee on
the Conduct of the War, which held
various uniformed feet to the fire. “For
most of the next four years, an invita-
tion to the committee’s room ... was
a summons dreaded by defeated gen-
erals, timeservers, and corrupt contrac-
tors,” Bordewich writes. (N.B.: the
subpoenaed witnesses don’t seem to
have had the temerity to resist the
summonses.) Wade and the commit-
tee became “the driving engine of con-
gressional war policy, prodding and
pressuring the president toward more
decisive action against slavery and more
aggressive military action.”
Wade especially hated what he saw
as a cozy compact of officers trained at
West Point, whose allegiance to the
Union, let alone to antislavery causes,
he thought shaky. “I am willing to carry
on this war until, if it be necessary, the
South was reduced to utter desolation,”
he announced in the Senate. “But not
a war run by professional officers.”
Wade, whose portraits show him as
one of the crusty Yankee-Ohio types
whom Thurber was still portraying a
century later, all spikes and certitudes,
was also a snob about Lincoln’s an-
tecedents, bluntly calling him “born of
poor white trash.” Wade advocated mo-
bilizing black regiments in the war and,
even after the war, was the loudest voice
for a permanent African-American
presence in the Army. Ulysses S. Grant
would later consider him as a Vice-Pres-
idential candidate but seems to have
been disinclined to have someone so
combative so close.
If Wade was the motor of a more
aggressive warfare, Stevens was the tri-
bune of black emancipation. When
McClellan, a stone-cold racist, was op-
posing any steps toward emancipation,
and Lincoln was still dithering, Ste-
vens favored immediately freeing
Southern slaves and arming them to
fight against their masters. At a time
when even abolitionist Northerners,
amid memories of Nat Turner, were
nervous about black “rapine,” Stevens
was unequivocal. What, he asked, was
to be feared more, “a rebellion of slaves
fighting for their liberty, or a rebellion
of freemen fighting to murder the na-
tion?” When, as late as August of 1862,
Lincoln could say, “If I could save the
Union without freeing any slave I would
do it,” Stevens was consistently force-ful about the moral point of the war:
“Let the people know that this Gov-
ernment is fighting not only to enforce
a sacred compact, but to carry out to
final perfection the principles of the
Declaration of Independence ... to
strike the chains from four millions of
human beings, and create them MEN;
to extinguish slavery on this whole
continent.”
The Stevens-Wade nexus in the
House and Senate took advantage of
the near-monopoly on power that the
Republican Party had—the Southern
Democrats having mostly seceded
themselves right out of Congress—and
reshaped the role of government in
ways that proved permanent. If one
sees the Civil War as a struggle, in part,
between the Jeffersonian small-
government, states’-rights strain and
the Hamiltonian big-government fed-
eral strain in American politics, it’s
clear how thorough the victory was.
The Hamiltonians were the ones who
believed in federal management of
finances for the good of the whole coun-
try, in taxes and bonds, in deliberate,
strategic debt, and in far-reaching di-
rected development.
In 1862, in the span of just a few
months, the congressional Republicans
launched the first comprehensive home-
steading plan for settlement in the West,
providing land for anyone who would
cultivate it; a project to build and sup-
port the transcontinental railroad; and
a program to create “land grant” col-
leges—technical and agricultural, though
still humanities-teaching, institutions
subsidized through grants of land. As
has occurred so often in American his-
tory, war, or the prospect of it, provided
an excuse for national development.
(Consider the not very convincing case
in the Eisenhower era that national de-
fense against Communism required su-
perhighways through Boston and Phil-
adelphia.) Bordewich refers to the
railroad plan, which encouraged com-
panies to build by giving them not just
the land for the tracks but much of
the land immediately around them, as
“hothouse capitalism,” but one might
as well call it subterranean socialism.
Left to themselves, the railroad com-
panies would never have built a fully
national system, any more than a private
post office would seek to guarantee the