George Washington Julian

• George Julian
• Born: May 5, 1817
• Died: July 7, 1899

Abolitionist and Radical Republican politician, was born in Centreville, Indiana, the son of Isaac Julian and Rebecca (Hoover) Julian. His father died when he was six and he was raised by his pious Quaker mother. The shy boy added an extensive independent reading program to his common-school education. At eighteen he became a schoolteacher but switched to the law when he was twenty-one. In May 1845 he married Anne Elizabeth Finch, who shared his antislavery views. After her death in 1860, he married Laura Giddings, daughter of the radical abolitionist Joshua Giddings.

In 1845 Julian won election as a Whig to the Indiana assembly but failed two years later to win nomination to the state senate because of his radical antislavery stand. He broke with the Whigs in 1848 and actively supported the Free Soil party. The following year, he was elected to Congress for a single term as a Free Soiler. His initial speech in the House was an attack on slavery in which he observed, “American slavery is an institution ... so ‘sanctioned and sanctified by the legislation of two hundred years,’ that Northern men are not permitted to breathe an honest whisper against it.” He opposed the Fugitive Slave Act for obliging northerners to serve as “a constable and jailkeeper for slave holders,” adding that he could not obey the act because there existed a “higher and paramount allegiance by which all men are bound.” His reputation as an abolitionist was enhanced by his battles in Indiana courts to keep fugitive slaves from being returned to bondage.

When Andrew Johnson of Tennessee proposed in 1851 passage of a Homestead Act, Julian vigorously supported it. It was the beginning of a lasting commitment to reform of the national land policies. In 1852 the Free Soil party chose him as their vice-presidential candidate. A deepening friendship with the black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass helped him to overcome the “ridiculous and wicked prejudice against color which . . . most antislavery men [found] ...difficult to conquer.” The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 put Julian in the forefront of building the Republican party in Indiana; at an antislavery convention in 1855, he pleaded, “Let us say to the world that we wage war against slavery because we are Christians.” Faced with the anti-Catholic stand of the Know-Nothing party, he asserted “an antislavery man is, of necessity, the enemy of caste, bigotry, and proscription.” He argued that the objective of the Republicans should be to advance “the extinction of slavery in all states.” At the outbreak of Civil War, he was widely recognized as a radical political abolitionist.

Julian was in Congress between 1860 and 1871 as a Radical Republican. For him the primary goal of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery. Supporting the radical program to smash slave power and to impose northern values on the South, he took an uncompromising stand that led to his appointment to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Dominated by Radical Republicans, the committee pressed for total war and the overturn of southern institutions. Although Julian agreed with moderate Republicans that the supremacy of the federal government was the underlying matter, slavery, he contended, was the immediate concern: “It is slavery which today has the government by the throat, and thus thrusts upon us the issue of its life or death.” He dismissed the idea of readmission of the southern states without penalty; “Let us convert the rebel States into conquered provinces, . . .” he insisted, “and [govern] them as such in our discretion.”

Julian accepted the Emancipation Proclamation as an important step, but only as a prelude to the arming of slaves, the total confiscation of rebel property, and the distribution of southern plantations to the emancipated blacks. Increasingly interested in land reform, he pushed for the distribution of public lands to individuals and for the termination of huge grants to railroads and to states for the support of schools and colleges. “Speculators are hovering over the public domain,” he warned, “picking and culling large tracts of the best land, and thus cheating the Government out of their productive wealth, and the poor man out of a home.” He pressed for the redistribution of confiscated southern lands to poor southerners, fearing that these lands would fall to speculators and predicting that the planters would be replaced by the “grasping monopolist of the North, whose dominion over the freedmen and poor whites [would] be more galling than slavery itself.” In 1866 Julian maneuvered the passage through Congress of the Southern Homestead Act, setting aside 46 million acres of public lands in the South for distribution to freedmen. He was unsuccessful however, in his attempt to deny private companies’ rights to surrendered Indian lands.

In 1866 Julian sponsored acts that gave blacks suffrage in the District of Columbia and in federal territories. He blocked efforts to put educational qualifications on black voting but opposed the Fourteenth Amendment although it reduced the representation of states that denied the vote to any of their residents. Suffrage, he believed, was a natural right to be protected fully by federal power. He supported the Fifteenth Amendment, however, and proposed another amendment to give women the vote. He backed the eight-hour day in federal employment in 1866. His proposals that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee be executed and that the South be indefinitely held in territorial status marked the extremes of his postwar Reconstruction radicalism.

Julian’s congressional career ended in defeat in 1871. Appalled by the corruption of President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, he joined the Liberal Republicans in 1872 and called for an end to Reconstruction. His interest turned to hard money, deflation, and laissez-faire. Four years later, he had joined the Democrats and supported Samuel Tilden’s presidential campaign. In 1885, he was appointed surveyor general of New Mexico Territory and energetically set about reclaiming large land tracts held illegally by speculators. He supported the first tentative efforts to conserve federal land holdings. He returned to private life in 1889.

In the final decade of his life, Julian supported the gold standard, contending that currency debasement explained the economic dislocations of the 1890s. Those who remembered his radical antislavery days were astonished when he argued that Congress should solve national economic problems by following the “deliberate judgment of a large body of well-informed and disinterested businessmen representing every interest of the people and constantly striving for their welfare.” His final comments on reformers had an ironic touch: “The order and well-being of society at all events must be entrusted to the care of the sane. If one man is accorded the right to undertake the work of reform as the chosen instrument of the Almighty, . . . any other man might claim the same right, and the multiplication of these saviors of society would turn the world upside down.” Julian died at his Irving-ton, Indiana, home at the age of eighty-two.

Autobiographical material is to be found in Julian’s Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (1884). The most useful biography is P. W. Riddleberger, George Washington Julian: Radical Republican (1966). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1933).