Antebellum and Wartime Politics
Massachusetts played a major role in Civil War causation, particularly with regard to the political ramifications of the antislavery movement. Antislavery activists in Massachusetts sought to influence public opinion and applied moral and political pressure on Congress to abolish slavery. William Lloyd Garrison of Boston began publishing the antislavery newspaper The Liberator and founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, becoming one of the nation’s most influential abolitionists. Garrison and his uncompromising rhetoric provoked a backlash both in the North and South and escalated regional tension prior to the war.
The antislavery wing of the Republican Party was led by politicians from Massachusetts, such as Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, who espoused Garrison's views in Congress and further increased sectionalism. In 1856, Sumner delivered a speech on the Senate floor so scathing and insulting to pro-slavery politicians that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina severely beat him with a cane. More moderate Massachusetts political leaders adopted the views of the Free Soil Party, seeking to limit the expansion of slavery in the western territories. The Free Soil Party was eventually absorbed into the Republican Party, which became the dominant political party in Massachusetts. By 1860, the Republicans controlled the Governor’s office, the state legislature and the mayoralty of Boston.
During the 1860 presidential election, 63 percent of Massachusetts voters supported Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, 20 percent supported Stephen Douglas and the Northern Democratic Party, 13 percent supported John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party, and 4 percent supported John C. Breckenridge and the Southern Democratic Party. Support for the Republican Party increased during the war, with 72 percent voting for Lincoln in 1864.
The dominant political figure in Massachusetts during the war was Governor John Albion Andrew, a staunch Republican who energetically supported the war effort. Massachusetts annually re-elected him by large margins for the duration of the war—his smallest margin of victory occurred in 1860 with 61 percent of the popular vote and his largest in 1863 with 71 percent.
Read more about this topic: Massachusetts In The American Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words antebellum, wartime and/or politics:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)