The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War

by Joel H. Silbey

Was slavery really the most significant issue in American politics just before the Civil War? No, says Joel Silbey in this provocative revisionist work. Using the insights of the new political history (to which he has been a major contributor), Silbey shows how local issues, ethnic and
religious attitudes, and, most important, the power and persistence of national political parties were actually the key elements animating the political life of the era.
Silbey argues that ethnocultural factors and partisanship not only gave shape and substance to the period's political conflicts but also affected the coming of the Civil War in direct and crucial ways. Pointing to the fervor and seriousness with which the people of the period embraced the parties,
he contends that parties both delayed and worked against the flowering and growth of sectional influences and for a long time frustrated the demands of sectional spokesmen, both North and South. These same elements, he says, also affected the way Northerners and Southerners understood each other
and contributed to the growth of the Republican party as well as to the South's decision to secede from the Union.
The book thus provides a very different framework for understanding one of the most critical periods in our nation's political development, a time when many long-standing customs and political institutions first took shape. Offering fresh insights into a dramatic and fascinating era, Silbey's
iconoclastic perspective will both affect the way historians view the period hereafter and suggest an agenda for future research.
About the Author :
Joel H. Silbey is Professor of American History at Cornell University. His previous books include The Shrine of Party, The Transformation of American Politics, and A Respectable Majority .

234 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 1985

About the author

A specialist in mid-19th century American politics, Joel H. Silbey was Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University, where he taught from 1966 until his retirement in 2002. A graduate of Brooklyn College, Silbey earned his master’s degree in 1956 and Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Iowa. In addition to teaching at Cornell, Silbey taught as an assistant professor at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Maryland.

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

review

Civil War History
The Kent State University Press
Volume 31, Number 3, September 1985

This volume conveniently assembles what would otherwise be the scattered writings of an industrious scholar who has consistently enlarged our undertstanding of American political history. Although only one of the nine essays here has not previously been published, six date from the past several years, giving this anthology a freshness and vitality often abent in comparable collections.

Joel Silbey and other "new political historians" insist that we must know more about the partisan stage on which the drama of political batle has been played. Earlier historians, they content, tended to see only the major actors on the stage and tended to overlook all issues other than economic and sectional ones. The new political historians have thus labored since 1960 to develop a fresh understanding of the structural underpinnings of American politics. Their work touches all periods of American history, but it has focused primarily on the middle and late nineteenth-ventury when parties were strong, popular, and "the main agencies ordering the political system".

[Emily Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great to understanding partisan politics and electoral behaviors.