Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America
Fergus M. Bordewich
Knopf (February 2020)

Here is a political history of how the U.S. Congress fought the Civil War

Abraham Lincoln was a member of what was then known as the Republican Party, one that bears little (if any) resemblance to the political party that supports the current POTUS who, in turn, bears little (if any) resemblance to Lincoln. It is important to keep all that in mind as you read Fergus Bordewich’s brilliant analysis of one of the most dynamic and disruptive periods in U.S. history.

There certainly were some especially interesting people involved in efforts either to abolish or preserve slavery. Louis Trezevant Wigfall is a case in point. As Andrew Verguson explains in his review of the book in The Atlantic, “Elected to the United States Senate from Texas to fill a vacancy in 1859, Wigfall wasted no time in making himself obnoxious to his colleagues and the public alike. He was lavish in his disdain for the legislative body in which he had sought a seat. On the Senate floor, he said of the flag and, especially, the Union for which it stood, ‘It should be torn down and trampled upon.’ As the southern states broke away, Wigfall gleefully announced, ‘The federal government is dead. The only question is whether we will give it a decent, peaceable, Protestant burial.’

“By then Wigfall had been appointed to the Confederate congress, and the only question that occurred to many of his colleagues was why he was still bloviating from the floor of the U.S. Senate.”

Wigfall is only one of hundreds of people of varying significance who populate Bordewich’s controversial account of how, the book’s subtitle asserts, “Republican reformers fought the Civil War, defied Lincoln, ended slavery, and remade America.” The focus is primarily on four. “Three of them were Republicans. Of these, two proudly embraced the label of Radicals, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio. One, Sen. William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a conservative by nature, only belatedly and cautiously aligned himself with the Radicals. All three were critical leaders during the war. The fourth, Ohio representative Clement L. Vallandigham, was a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies and the leading advocate of a negotiated peace.”

In her review of Bordewich’s The First Congress for The New York Times, Carol Berkin offers praise that also applies to what he accomplishes in Congress at War, “a perfect example of what a very good writer can do with these raw materials. Fergus M. Bordewich has transformed the recent multivolume collection of sources on the First Federal Congress into a lively narrative. Bordewich, who has written on a wide range of topics and eras, follows this Congress, which sat from 1789 to 1791, almost day by day, from the inauguration of the president to Congress’s close. He takes the reader through the debates on issues small and large, including the creation of the federal judiciary, the selection of a permanent capital site and the ratification of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.”

This is precisely the same approach Bordewich took when gathering as much information as was available in primary sources, then proceeded to craft a narrative that gives much greater importance to Congress’ role and less to Lincoln’s than is generally suggested. With all due respect to the leadership provided by the 16th president, Bordewich insists that the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses “must be reckoned among the most effective in American history, along with the first Congress of 1789 to 1791, the New Deal Congresses of the 1930s, and the Great Society Congresses of the 1960s.”

Moreover, “Wade was a driving engine of Republican war policy and inspired many men of lesser conviction to continue to stand fast behind the war effort. He was also a guiding spirit when, repeatedly, it seemed doomed by failed generals and lost battles. He was also a guiding spirit of congressional Reconstruction, and in 1868 he came as close as any American did to becoming president without actually doing so.”

I cannot recall reading another book in recent years from which I learned more — and enjoyed more while learning it — than I did reading Fergus Bordewich’s Congress at War. That said, I am unable to imagine what would have happened — within and beyond the United States — had there been no coalition of Abraham Lincoln, the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses, and individual patriots such as Ben Wade and Thaddeus Stevens as well as military leaders, especially Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.

E pluribus unum