The Worst Passions of Human Nature

Reviewed by: The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North by Paul D. Escott Joshua A. Lynn (bio) The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North. By Paul D. Escott. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 248. Cloth, $29.95.) Rupture characterizes the Civil War era, with historians celebrating many of the period’s transformations. Paul D. Escott provides a sobering rejoinder by emphasizing continuity instead. In this narrative of wartime politics, Escott foregrounds one of America’s most stubborn continuities—white supremacy. Conceding white northerners’ racism is hardly new. Escott goes beyond trite acknowledgment, however, to document the profundity of the North’s “racist consensus in popular thought” and to explain how this consensus shaped the war’s course and aims (22). Racism’s historical significance stems from more than its pervasiveness. Attuned to variations within the northern racist consensus, Escott demonstrates white supremacy’s diversity, malleability, and effects on policy making. Recognizing racism’s ubiquity along with its sophistication is to understand why it endured even when slavery did not. [End Page 285] Escott recounts how white supremacy shifted in its intensity, manifestations, and effects alongside political and military developments between 1861 and 1865. The white North was not monolithic, with the main cleavage that of partisanship. Democrats regularly brandished rank white supremacy, as in the fall 1862 elections when protesting the war’s increasingly antislavery direction. The Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point, but not in terms of racial equality. Emancipation made Democrats question fighting for a Union that became unrecognizable to them. Republicans, meanwhile, embraced an antislavery war but not equality. They justified emancipation as a tool to win the war. No more eager for racial equality than Democrats, Republicans mostly failed to advocate for change even when they had political capital following battlefield victories in the summer of 1863 and Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 reelection. Emancipation prompted wide-ranging speculation over the status of formerly enslaved people that only reaffirmed white northern prejudice. Democrats howled about racial disorder at home, while Republicans answered that any social change would be confined to the South. Republicans offered colonization as a guarantee that freedpeople would not relocate northward and that, despite Democrats’ predictions, a Union without slavery would not alter race relations in the North. Looking beyond the war, Lincoln’s reconstruction plans subordinated racial equality to white Americans’ harmonious reunion. Lincoln, Escott suggests, was repeatedly willing to abandon the former for the latter. Escott engages the debate over northern war aims by highlighting the seeming incongruity of a racist white North fighting an antislavery war. “Nor did destroying slavery compel whites to support equal rights for blacks,” Escott stresses (14). This was an antislavery war, but bracketing antislavery from egalitarianism leads Escott to conclude that white northerners opposed slavery to win the war, a less high-minded goal for many historians. Although he does find diversity among antislavery sentiment, Escott may overstate the extent to which white northerners’ racism meant that they adopted emancipation solely to save the Union. Regarding emancipation as strictly utilitarian downplays antislavery’s deep and diverse antebellum roots. Even without favoring racial equality, there were principled antislavery stances that paved the way for wartime emancipation. Many white northerners had been railing against the slave power long before disunion made emancipation a military necessity. Turning his attention to Democrats, who never countenanced antislavery even to restore the Union, Escott further underscores that all white northerners adapted their war aims to the imperative of white supremacy. Democrats [End Page 286] rejected emancipation as a war aim, and even reunion lost its luster once that Union no longer protected slavery. Because white supremacy and constitutional guarantees for slavery were foundational to Democrats’ Union, emancipation precipitated an existential crisis for the loyal opposition. Although it is not entirely clear just how widespread this disaffection was beyond the obvious Copperheads and Peace Democrats, Escott’s nuanced analysis of Democrats’ painful ideological tensions helps make sense of a party often reduced to caricature. The Worst Passions of Human Nature is not an account of race “science” but rather a survey of the “public attitudes” that shaped individual reactions

Emancipation · Oppression · Passions · Political science · Politics · Proclamation · Racism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Theology · White supremacy · American History and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy