George
Julian was
born
in
Wayne County, Indiana, on 5th May, 1817. After studying law he was
admitted to the bar in 1840. Julian worked as a lawyer in Greenfield
before being elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1845.
A member of the Free Soil Party, he
was elected to the 31st Congress in 1848 and over the next two years
advocated land reform and women's suffrage.
He also opposed the growth of monopolies. Defeated in 1850 Julian
continued his campaign against slavery
and was an early member of the Republican
Party.
Julian was elected to the 37th Congress in 1860 and along with his
father-in-law, Joshua
Giddings, became a leading figure in the group that
became known as the Radical
Republicans.
During the American
Civil War Julian
argued that the Union Army should not
only free the slaves but to reconstruct Southern society. Julian strongly
supported the Freeman's
Bureau, the Civil
Rights Bill and the Reconstruction
Acts.
After the war Julian clashed with President Andrew
Johnson and voted for his impeachment in 1868.
Julian served as chairman of the Committee on Public Lands and the
Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Navy. In July,
1885, President Grover Cleveland appointed
him surveyor general of New Mexico. His autobiography, Political
Recollections, was published
in 1884. George
Julian died in Irvington, Indianapolis, on 7th
July, 1899.
(1)
George
Julian, speech in the Senate on the American
Civil War (14th
January, 1862)
This
rebellion is a bloody and frightful demonstration of the fact that
slavery and freedom cannot dwell together in peace. Why is it, that
in the great centres of slavery treason is rampant, while, as we recede
into regions in which the slaves are few and scattered, as in Western
Virginia, Delaware, and other border States, we find the people loyally
disposed toward the Union?
I know it was not the purpose of this administration, at first, to
abolish slavery, but only to save the Union, and maintain the old
order of things. Neither was it the purpose of our fathers, in the
beginning of the Revolution, to insist on independence. The policy
of emancipation has been born of the circumstances of the rebellion,
which every hour more and more plead for it. I believe the popular
demand now is, or soon will be, the total extirpation of slavery as
the righteous purpose of the war, and the only means of a lasting
peace.
When General Fremont proclaimed freedom
to the slaves of rebels in Missouri, it was greeted with almost universal
joy throughout the free States. The popular instinct at once recognized
it as a blow struck at the heart of the rebellion. The order that
rebels should be shot did not carry with it half the significance
of this proclamation of freedom of their slaves. But the President
at once modified it, so far as its anti-slavery features went beyond
the Confiscation Act. Their slave property must be held as more sacred
than any other property; more sacred than their lives; more sacred
even than the life of the Republic. Could any policy be more utterly
suicidal?
(2) George Julian, like most
Radical Republicans, saw the American
Civil War as
a war against slavery. He reinforced this view in a speech he made
in the Senate on 7th February, 1865.
The
government did not realize the inexorable necessity of actual war,
because it lacked the moral vision to perceive the real nature of
the contest. To every suggestion of so dire an event it turned an
averted face and a deaf ear. It hoped to restore order by making a
show of war, without actually calling into play the terrible enginery
of war. It will be remembered that just before the battle of Ball's
Bluff, General McClellan ordered Colonel Stone to "make a slight
demonstration against the rebels," which might "have the
effect to drive them from Leesburg." The government seems to
have pursued a like policy in dealing with the rebellion itself. "A
slight demonstration," it was believed, would "have the
effect" to arrest the rebels in their madness, and re-establish
order and peace in about sixty days.
(3) George
Julian, Political Recollections (1884)
The
Radical Republicans insisted that what the rebellious districts needed
was not an easy and speedy return to the places they had lost by their
treasonable conspiracy, but a probationary training, looking to their
restoration when they should prove their fitness for civil government
as independent States. It was insisted that they were not prepared
for this, and that with their large population of ignorant negroes
and equally ignorant whites, dominated by a formidable oligarchy of
educated land-owners who despised the power that had conquered them,
while they still had the sympathy of their old allies in the North,
the withdrawal of Federal intervention and the unhindered operation
of local supremacy would as fatally hedge up the way of justice and
equality as the rebel despotism then existing. The political and social
forces of Southern society, if unchecked from without, were sure to
assert themselves, and the more decided anti-slavery men in both houses
of Congress so warned the country.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
