There have been several periods in America's history when the Union was sorely tried, the federal system put to extreme test. The First Congress met in such a time, as did the Seventy–third Congress, in 1933. The men of 1789 essayed a unique task; they had to vitalize structures visualized to that point in thought and discourse alone. Still, despite their magnitude, the dangers that the founding legislators confronted were also vague and unfocused. In 1933, on the other hand, the threat was clear; a devastating depression threatened to obliterate the economic security and pride of millions of Americans. Even so, most will agree that the Civil War provided the greatest challenge to the American Republic. The pledges of Union had been violated; one–time citizens were in arms against it; its very existence hung in the balance. How did the Congress of these years react to the crisis? Did its members willingly follow President Lincoln's lead? Did they find in their own system of internal governance the direction and will to contribute positively to the Union effort?

The Seventy–third Congress and those of the Civil War years, the Thirty–seventh and the Thirty–eighth, provide opportunities to study the American government under extreme stress. The Democratic majorities in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first administration were so cowed by events, it has been said, that they accorded their president the famed one hundred days of grace when executive recommendations were treated with special deference. Apparently Lincoln experienced no such period of willing acquiescence.

After the initial gratification at being invited to present a lecture series honoring a distinguished historian has subsided, a difficult question usually remains. What should the topic be? While working on a study of the Republican senators of the Civil War period, I was recurrently surprised at the number of important questions about the role of the United States Congress in that great conflict that either gave promise of rewarding further research or, indeed, had not been answered at all. The legislative history of the House of Representatives appeared to be particularly unclear. This is not, of course, meant to diminish the worth of that substantial and often distinguished body of scholarly research that several generations of historians of the Civil War have accumulated. But the members of each generation of scholars bring a different sense of what is interesting and important to their tasks. Perhaps an effort to view the war through the eyes of the members of the House of Representatives would be rewarding? I decided to try to find out by devoting the Carl Becker Lectures at Cornell University in April 1986 to an exploration of several themes in the history of the U.S. Congress during the Civil War and the years immediately preceding it.

Most Americans know something about the history of the Civil War. Few social studies or history teachers in the public schools either can or wish to avoid treating so dramatic and fateful a struggle.

As a member of the Thirty–sixth Congress, rough–hewn Representative John Covode (R.,* Pa.) became a national celebrity in 1860 when he chaired a highly political investigation of President Buchanan's earlier relations with Congress and his efforts, or those of members of his administration, to subvert “the execution of any law now upon the statute book.” Shortly after the publication of the committee report, Covode embarked upon a campaign swing through New Hampshire in company with Charles H. Van Wyck (R., N.Y.), a young politician who was considered to be a better speaker than the Pennsylvanian. But the voters of the Granite State proved to be much more interested in the findings of Covode's committee than in listening to Van Wyck's oratory. So impressed by this circumstance was Van Wyck, said Covode later, that “no sooner was [the Thirty–seventh Congress] organized than he had an investigating committee appointed, of which he was chairman.” Covode continued: “While I run the investigating machine over my enemies, Van Wyck has run it over his friends.” The Pennsylvanian's accusation emphasized an important aspect of congressional activity during the Civil War; Van Wyck had not been alone in his desire to investigate. “The last Congress,” noted the New York Herald in 1863, “will be memorable for its inquiring disposition.” Both in this Congress and the next, investigation influenced the form of legislation, partisan and factional activity, and the behavior and careers of individual congressmen, as well as those of other public servants and ordinary citizens.

During the 1850s, sectional stress fatally weakened the political structure that the Founding Fathers had so skillfully crafted some seven decades before. One eminent historian has used the word “disruption” to describe the fate of the dominant political party of the 1850s; another described the political leaders of that decade as a blundering generation. When Abraham Lincoln, the presidential candidate of the Republican party, won election in 1860 despite the fact that he obtained no electoral votes from below the Mason–Dixon line, most southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. Efforts to compromise the sectional differences between North and South failed, and four years of internecine warfare followed. Finally the South capitulated; 620,000 soldiers had lost their lives; even more carried physical or psychic scars to their graves; slavery, which had been the major institutional distinction between the North and South, was ended – a great accomplishment – although the realities of racial distinction and discrimination would persist, even to today. The Civil War was the greatest trauma the American nation has ever suffered, and quite naturally historians have found the struggle and its political prelude to be subjects of keen and continuing interest.

The political history of the American middle period is complex, and scholars in search of greater understanding may bring many different perspectives to it. Political careers and the various institutional and social roles that made up the individual career course challenge our understanding.

When the Civil War broke out, the federal representatives and senators had been making their annual pilgrimages from their states to the nation's capital for seventy years. They had traveled in fair weather and foul, on horseback and by stagecoach, coastal vessel, canal boat, and river steamer, and finally on the cars of the wonder of its age, the railroad. Usually in December of each year they settled into the boarding messes, hotels, and private homes of the capital city and set themselves to the tasks of national governance. Sometimes their labors brought them little but tedium, enlivened perhaps by the occasional clash of personalities, but on occasion the lawmakers faced grim crises when their decisions defined the realities and meaning of the American Republic. Through time, these men shaped the ways in which the Congress of the United States did business and were themselves shaped to some degree by the experience. But through those seventy years none of the people's representatives faced a more fateful task or future than those who filled the legislative chambers of the Capitol during the Civil War. Yet their concerns, their perspectives, their individual objectives, and their collective labors are still too little known to us. This little collection of essays is an attempt to reconnoiter some of the possibilities for understanding the congressmen, their relations with one another, and their interaction with Lincoln, through an understanding of Congress as an institution.

No American president has so caught the interest of historians as has Abraham Lincoln; the great Illinoian towers above the other political figures and the great soldiers in the scholarly literature of the Civil War. That he merits careful attention none can deny, and such an emphasis is all the more pleasing when the subject has so many admirable qualities – courage, honesty, forbearance, wide–ranging skills, humor, a marvelous command of the language, and, in the end, a martyr's death after victory had been achieved in the field. To sit with Lincoln at the White House, or follow him in his sauntering walks to read dispatches at the War Department, is to be in the very cockpit of the war. In his person the manifold threads of arms and policy come together. Within the checks and balances of the American government, Lincoln was chief executive, head of the executive branch. But east and south down Pennsylvania Avenue the Capitol glistened, and there men had their own ideas of how the war should be fought, different in significant respects from those Lincoln stubbornly maintained. Many of the lawmakers were little trained in the legislative arts, as we have seen, and were undisciplined “disorderly schoolboys,” as a friend of one Speaker of the House put it.