Republican Consolidationists of a More Ultra Type
 
From: bernhard1848@att.net
 
The Democratic party of the North saw their Republican opponents using the war for their own partisan purposes, “not in the interest of the Union, but in the interest of the Republican party and its greedy retinue of contractors.” They further understood that Lincoln was in no hurry to end the war, as he wished to solidify Republican control of the country “with the deliberate design to…subvert the Union, not to restore it, to overthrow the Constitution and not to preserve it.”
 
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
 
******************************************************************************************************
 
Republican Consolidationists of a More Ultra Type:
 
“”A most remarkable similarity exists in the actions of [the Lincoln] Administration toward the people of the North,” Congressman Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania charged in 1863, “and those that were perpetrated by the Mother Country against the colonies.”
 
To Democrats, Lincoln’s government demonstrated that Republicans were “consolidationists of a more ultra type” more than anyone had heretofore thought possible, more so than either Hamiltonians, Tories, or monarchists. In particular, Republicans intended to use government power to impose rigid standards of personal behavior on the lives of individual citizens.
 
To Randall and his colleagues, they were expanding the power of government into every nook and cranny of being, appointing federal officeholders to supervise everyone’s life and depriving Americans of their liberty.  They were creating “an Absolute state asserting all the prerogatives of an infallible church.”
 
At the core of the administration’s behavior, the Democrats believed, was a puritan-evangelical perspective originating in the history and traditions of New England religious beliefs. It was a perspective that fostered an aggressive and uncompromising program of government intervention to order and direct individual behavior. Puritan-dominated Republicanism had “asserted a higher law above the Constitution itself.”
 
Republicans believed that they had “a right to regulate the whole political, moral and religious world, and that God has appointed them supervisors over the conduct of their fellow men, to control even their domestic affairs.”  They had “sought to do in the name of God, what could not be done in the name of the Constitution.” In other words, their policies originated in “an imprudent assumption of a superior intelligence and a higher purity.”
 
They did not accept the right of people to differ about social or political matters. “The most malignant and bigoted intolerance is a predominant element amongst those who follow the lead of the Puritan today.”  Nobody “ever could get along with the Puritan spirit of New England….It was a persecuting, intolerant, hateful and malignant spirit….It was sour, narrow-minded and illiberal.”
 
The war had only brought out this tendency, sharpened it, and given it free rein in the policies of the Lincoln administration. The results of Republican rule were clear, therefore American would become and unacceptably restrictive society with a snooping, interfering government, forcing conformity to a narrow set of behavior patterns.
 
“We think New England, when it tries to regulate the morals of the whole world, and prescribes them drink and diet…will only bring trouble as she persists in it….When preachers assume to be statesmen, and direct the affairs of the country, it is no wonder that the country goes rapidly to ruin and destruction…”
 
(A Respectable Minority, The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868, Joel H. Silbey, W.W. Norton & Company, 1977, pp. 74-75)