Southern Man of Northern Principles: Michael C. Garber and the Political Realignment of the 1850s

Abstract

This study is a political biography of Indiana editor Michael C. Garber from 1849 to 1856. A Virginia-born Democrat, Garber purchased the Madison Daily Courier in 1849 and for almost five years filled its pages with Jacksonian Democratic dogma. And yet, in May 1854, Garber denounced the Democratic Party, and immediately became a leader in Indiana's anti-Democratic Peoples' Party, and later in the Republican Party that evolved out of it. Garber's writings not only address the various reasons he bolted from the Democratic Party, but they also provide insights into the cultural and ideological underpinnings of the early Republican Party. Unfortunately, very few of Garber's personal papers still exist, and therefore the study is based chiefly upon Garber's writings in the Madison Daily Courier between 1849 and 1856. This is the first work to extensively study the political thought of this important voice in mid-nineteenth century Indiana politics, and is done in an attempt to better understand both political realignment and the formation of the Republican Party within Indiana during the early 1850s. This study argues that Michael Garber's life and thought were anchored in a Jeffersonian tradition of republican political economy that saw aristocracy as the source of all political or economic corruption. It was Garber's belief in republican economic theory that made slavery expansion appear to be a threat to the future of free labor society, while his belief in republican political theory that made the Slave Power appear to be a threat to Northern civil and political rights. It is this intellectual background that explains his move to the Republican Party, all the while claiming that he had not changed his foundational principles. For the first forty years of his life Garber considered the Jefferson Jackson party tradition to be the political expression of republican political economy. By 1854 however, Garber was convinced the Democratic Party had betrayed that tradition, and he saw no choice but to help organize a new party that would embody the principles of republican political economy, the Republican Party.