Origins of the American Civil War
Overview
With the emergence of the United States Republican Party as the nation's first major sectional political party, by the mid-1850, politics became the stage on which sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery in the West was played out. The acquisition of new lands in the 1840s catapulted the nation into civil war.
Earlier, the Constitution, which defined the terms in which debate over the future of government would continue, had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. But many other factors had changed from 1820-1860 that would render civil war rather than the gentlemanly bargaining of the Missouri Compromise or the Compromise of 1850, including the rise of mass democracy in the North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, and increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies, especially "free labor" in the North.
Through the agency of the Republican Party (bolstered by the panic of 1857 and its skilled radical politicians and activists), the industrializing North was committed to the ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism, and the resolution of sectional conflict - culminating with the American Civil War - was perhaps the nation's principal social revolution, a watershed in the rise of modern industrial society in the United States.
By 1860, depression sharpened economic and class divides, realigning the interplay of race, class, and political ideology in a society undergoing both a sectional confrontation and an economic revolution. In other words, the realignment of cleavages and cooperation among geographical, social classes, and party affiliations in politics between the depression of 1857 and the election of 1860 led to the election of a president so objectionable to Southern slave-owing interests that it would trigger Southern secession, and consequently a war to save the integrity of the Union.
Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery
By 1860, diverging stances on the expansion of slavery in the West occurred in the context of a nation divided into four quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system and (in some areas) declining economic fortunes as well; and the Southwest, a booming frontier-like region with expanding cotton economy.
The starkly different levels of economic and social change across the nation's geographical regions - one based on free labor the other on slave labor - underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by 1860 in the North and in the South. But by the 1840s and 1850s sectional tensions would change in their nature and intensity.
The rise of abolitionism
Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan
The anti-slavery movement of the 1830s and 1840s could not have emerged without the transformation of Northern society. Undergoing the early stages of industrial development and urbanization (with the significant exception of the South), the era witnessed stark alterations in American life. Anti-slavery gained momentum along with a fervor of reformism in the 1830s and 1840s, which fed off this floodgate of sweeping social change. Often, the era's reformist impulse was one of conservative nostalgia. However, it also inspired efforts to create or streamline new institutions of social order and control suited to the changing realities of a new era. For example, reform movements were the impetus for the prison- and asylum-building of the era.
To understand the rise of anti-slavery, it is important to get a sense of the how the "peculiar institution" was being perceived among most Northern activists at the time. The legacy of Second Great Awakening, which largely stressed the reform of individuals, was still a relatively fresh memory. Consequently, the principal reform movements in the North were tinged with the ethos of Yankee Protestantism. While composed of a great welter of types and often-conflicting ideologies, the reformism of the second quarter of the nineteenth century largely focused on transforming the human personality, which would hinge on internalizing a sense of discipline, order, and restraint. In this sense, reformers of the era generally blamed poor Northern factory workers, alcoholics, and criminals for their own misery. If they were impoverished, it was because they wasted their meager salaries on alcohol (not because of their wages that were barely above subsistence levels), failed to curb their sexual passions, or bore too many children.
Viewed from the guise of the same mentality, most abolitionists - most influential among them was William Lloyd Garrison - advanced an idea of human character stressing internalized self-discipline. They condemned slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and the fruits of one's labor, but defined freedom as more than a simple lack of restraint. The truly free man, in the eyes of antebellum reformers, was one who imposed restraints upon himself.
However, the context of the changing structures of the American society and economy is noteworthy. The structural changes of the era included the rise of an integrated economic and political structure, the shift from labor-intensive toward capital-intensive production, and the spread of market-oriented capitalist relations. The socio-economic pressures reaching the surface required a value system viewing continuous social change as natural and desirable.
Social mobility was a key requisite to the era's economic development. For development to proceed, property rights, consumer goods, and laborers must be freed from traditional bonds and restraints, from aristocratic traditions, quasi-feudal arrangements, personalistic and other multi-bonded relations. It is thus interesting to note that in the 1830s and 1840s, the rise of the anti-slavery movement coincided with the height of Jacksonian democracy, feeding on the same "anti-aristocratic" and egalitarian ethos. Anti-slavery men exalted "free labor," meaning labor working because of incentive instead of coercion, labor with education, skill, the desire for advancement, and also the freedom to move from job to job according to the changing demands of the marketplace. Behind such expectations, the changing economic structures of the era helped to encourage the growing appeal of "free labor" ideals.
It is thus noteworthy that the most reform movements of the era were generally manifestations in one way or another of a loose set of principles that functioned as attempts to transform the lifestyle and work habits of labor, helping it respond to the new demands of an industrializing, capitalistic society. And mainstream abolitionists were among those helping wage laborer adjust to - rather than challenge - the demands of capitalism. For example, relations between the American Anti-Slavery Society - with its Yankee Protestant membership base - and the new, radical unions emerging in the North were by no means cordial during the 1830s and 1840s.
Only a minority of the era's reformers straddled both camps, such as radical English immigrant George Henry Evans (editor of the New York Workingman's Advocate), and the utopian socialists of the period. Small artisans - often subject to declining fortunes and hostile to big manufactures - played a central role in these groups. But prevailing abolitionist sentiment viewed those who advanced the concerns of exploited working class toilers with harsh scorn. Abolitionists despised slaveholders, but loved newly rich capitalists (even those who subjected toilers to the cruelest labor conditions possible). Starving child laborers, from their standpoint, were merely less more fortunate in their pursuits, or less exalted in their situation.
Instead, mainstream abolitionists were more often cordial with reform movements with another vision of society, such as the creation of prisons and asylums, temperance, and relief for the "deserving poor" (with the caveat distinguishing them from the "undeserving poor"). According to most abolitionists and members of related crusades, this was to be done through the purification of society from sins such as drunkenness, prostitution, ignorance, and above all slavery.
It would also entail inculcating non-conformers to the ethos of middle class Yankee Protestantism (especially Southerners and the working class Irish in the North) in the Protestant ethos of industry, piety, sobriety, thrift, and self-improvement through self-discipline. In this sense, abolitionists shared the fervent enthusiasm for opportunity and "free labor" common among the country's rapidly growing bourgeoisie. To many believers in the free-labor ideal, the promise of upward social mobility (opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control one's own labor) was central to American democracy.
The rise of the "free soil" movement
See also Free soil movement.
The assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the reformers of the thirties and forties (and the mostly upwardly mobile/middle class/Protestant constituencies advancing them) anticipated the political and ideological ferment of the 1850s. A surge of working class Irish and German Catholic immigration provoked reactions among many Northern Whigs, as well as Democrats. But nativism and anti-slavery were not the only strong forces in the 1850s. Along with anti-slavery, a powerful temperance movement emerged, achieving the adoption in Maine in 1851 of a law against the sale of liquor.
In the Northwest, although farm tenancy was increasing, the number of farmers was still double that of farm laborers and tenants. Moreover, although the expansion of the factory system was undermining the economic independence of the small craftsman and artisan, industry in this region, still one largely of small towns, was still concentrated in small-scale enterprises. Arguably, social mobility was on the verge of contracting in the urban centers of the North, but long-cherished ideas of opportunity, "honest industry," and "toil" were at least close enough in time to lend plausibility to the free labor ideology.
In the rural and small-town North, the picture of Northern society (framed by the ethos of "free labor") corresponded to a large degree with reality. Propelled by advancements in transportation and communication, especially steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs, the two decades before the Civil War saw the rapid expansion of the Northwest - a rapidly expanding region of free farmers. Combined with the rise of Northeastern and export markets for their products, the social standing of farmers in the region substantially improved. The small towns and villages that emerged as the Republican Party's heartland showed every sign of vigorous expansion. Their vision for an ideal society was of small-scale capitalism, with white American laborers entitled to the chance of upward mobility opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control their own labor. Free-soilers demanded that slave labor and the plantation system should be excluded from the Western plains to guarantee the predominance there of the free farmer and to prevent any extension of the political power of the slaveholders.
Relating Northern and Southern positions on slavery to basic differences in labor systems, but insisting on the role of culture and ideology in coloring these differences, Eric Foner's groundbreaking Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) went beyond the economic determinism of Charles Beard (a leading historian of the period in the 1930s). Foner emphasized the importance of free labor ideology to Northern opponents of slavery, pointing out that the moral concerns of the abolitionists were not the dominant sentiments in the North. Foner demonstrated that most Northerners (including Lincoln) opposed slavery largely because they feared it might spread to the North and threaten the position of free white laborers.
In this sense, Republican radicals and the abolitionists were able to unleash powerful emotions in the North through a broader commitment to "free labor" principles. The "Slave Power" idea had a far greater appeal to Northern self-interest than arguments based on the plight of black slaves in the South. As Frederick Douglas noted, "The cry of Free Man was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white."
Sectional tensions and the emergence of mass politics
If the free labor ideology of the 1830s and 1840s and the rise of depended on the transformation of Northern society, its entry into politics depended on the rise of mass democracy propelled by far-reaching social change. Its chance would come by the mid-1850s with the collapse of the traditional two-party system, which had long suppressed sectional conflict. The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in 1820 and 1850 - the most important of which being the stability of two-party system—were being eroded as this rapid extension of mass democracy went forward in the North.
The question of compromise and Civil War historiography
The question of compromise (especially Abraham Lincoln's rejection of the Crittenden Compromise in 1861) opens up one of the enduring debates in Civil War historiography. Even as the war was going on, Seward and Buchanan were outlining a debate over the question of inevitability that would survive among historians for more than a century to come. Two competing explanations of the sectional tensions inflaming the nation emerged even before the war. One side, believed the sectional hostility to be accidental, unnecessary work of self-interested or fanatical agitators. William Seward, on the other hand, believed there to be an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces. James Buchanan, for example, left office, arguing that extremist agitators were to blame for the Civil War. He also singled out the "fanaticism" of the Republican Party.
The irrepressible conflict argument was the first to dominate historical discussion. In the first decades after the fighting, histories of the Civil War generally reflected the views of Northerners who had participated in the conflict. The war appeared to be a stark moral conflict in which the South was to blame, a conflict that arose as a result of the designs of slave power. Henry Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of Slave Power (1872-1877) is the foremost representative of this moral interpretation, which argued that Northerners had fought to preserve the union against the aggressive designs of "slave power." Later, in his seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Civil War, (1893-1900), James Ford Rhodes identified slavery as the central, and virtually only cause of the Civil War. The North and South had reached positions on the issue of slavery that were both irreconcilable and unalterable. The conflict had become inevitable.
But the idea of the war as avoidable did not gain ground among historians until the 1920s, when the "revisionists" began to offer new accounts of the prologue to the conflict. Revisionist historians, such as James G. Randall and Avery Craven saw in the social and economic systems of the South no differences so fundamental as to require a war. Randall blamed the ineptitude of a "blundering generation" of leaders. He also saw slavery as essentially a benign institution, crumbing in the presence of nineteenth century tendencies. Craven, the other leading revisionist, placed more emphasis on the issue of slavery than Randall, but argued roughly the same points. In The Coming of the Civil War (1942), Craven argued that slave laborers were not much worse off than Northern workers, that the institution was already on the road to ultimate extinction, and that the war could have been averted had skillful and responsible leaders worked to produced compromise.
But it is still possible that the "blundering" politicians of the 1850s were not unusually inept after all. More recent studies have kept elements of the revisionist interpretation alive, emphasizing the role of political agitation (i.e. the efforts of Democratic politicians of the South and Republican politicians in the North to keep the sectional conflict at the center of the political debate). The leading historian in the field until his death, David Herbert Donald argued in 1960 that the politicians of the 1850s were not unusually inept but that they were operating in a society in which traditional restraints were being eroded in the face of the rapid extension of democracy. In short, the stability of two-party system kept the union together, but would collapse in 1850s, thus reinforcing, rather than suppressing, sectional conflict.
On a related note, political sociologists have pointed out that the stable functioning of a political democracy requires a setting in which parties represent broad coalitions of varying interests, and that peaceful resolution of social conflicts takes place most easily when the major parties share fundamental values. Before the 1850s, the second American party system conformed to this pattern — largely because sectional ideologies and issues were kept out of politics to maintain cross-regional networks of political alliances. However, in the 1840s and 1850s ideology made its way into the heart of the political system, despite the best effort of conservative Whig Party and Democratic Party to keep it out.
Movements, parties, and agitators in the 1850s
This was an era when the mass political party galvanized voter participation to an unprecedented degree, and in which politics formed an essential component of American mass culture. Historians specializing in the antebellum years agree that political involvement was a larger concern to the average American in the 1850s than today. With the growth of the American middle class, and rapid growth and change in the economy and society in general, mass participation in politics was much more pronounced, allowing astute politicians to soon mobilize support by focusing on the expansion of slavery in the West. Politics was, in one of its functions, a form of mass entertainment, a spectacle with rallies, parades, and colorful personalities. Leading politicians, moreover, very often served as a focus for popular interests, aspirations, and values.
Historian Allan Nevins, for instance, writes of political rallies in 1856 with turnouts of anywhere from twenty to fifty thousand men and women. Don E. Fehrenbacher notes that voter turnouts even ran as high as 84 percent for the North by 1860. Religious revivalism reached a new peak in the 1850s. Hysterical fears and paranoid suspicions marked this shift of Americans. The 1850s were fertile ground for propagandists, agitators, and extremists. A plethora of new parties emerged by 1854, including the Republicans, People's party men, Anti-Nebraskaites, Fusionists, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings (anti-slavery nativists), Maine Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells, Adopted Citizens, and assorted others.
Meanwhile, controversy over the so-called Ostend Manifesto (which proposed U.S. annexation of Cuba) and the return of fugitive slaves kept sectional tensions alive before the issue of slavery in the West would preoccupy the country's politics in the mid-to-late fifties. Opposition among some groups in the North intensified after the Compromise of 1850, when Southerners began appearing in Northern states to pursue fugitives or to claim as slaves often residing there for years. Meanwhile, some abolitionists openly sought to prevent enforcement of the law. At times, violation of the Fugitive Slave Act was often open and organized. In Boston — a city from which it was boasted that no fugitive had ever been returned — Theodore Parker and other members of the city's elite helped form mobs to prevent enforcement of the law as early as April 1851. A pattern of public resistance emerged in city after city, notably in Syracuse in 1851, and Boston again in 1854. But, as mentioned, the issue would not spur crisis until revived by the same issue underlying the Missouri Compromise of 1820: slavery in the territories.
The emergence of the Republican Party
Convinced that Northern society was superior to that of the South, increasingly persuaded of the South's ambitions to extend slave power beyond its existing borders, Northerners were embracing a viewpoint that made conflict likely; but conflict required the agency of the Republican Party. The Republican Party — harkening on the popular, emotional issue of "free soil" in the frontier - would capture the White House after just six years of existence, cultivating a coherent ideological message playing into sectional discontent in the rapidly developing North with Democratic leaders.
The issue of slavery in the West
In the 1850s the crisis of sectional tensions was revived by the same issue that had produced it dating back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820: slavery in the territories. Northerners and Southerners, in effect, were coming to define "Manifest Destiny" in different ways, undermining nationalism as a unifying force. In 1857 the Dred Scott would highlight the ambiguity of Constitution, undermining the unifying force that the nationalistic veneration of Constitution one was.
By the 1850s, the line of frontier settlement had extended beyond the western boundaries of Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri to encompass the Great Plains. Known as "the Great American Desert" just a generation earlier, most Americans were unaware of arable land beyond the great bend of the Missouri River. In the states of the Old Northwest, therefore, pressure began to build for efforts to extend settlement westward once again. Not only did this bring up the old issue of upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the Senate, it also placed the federal government at the center of sectional conflict. After all, settlers expected a great deal from the federal government: providing territorial governments, reneging on promises treaties concerning Indian reservations, and dislocating the indigenous population (so as to make room for whites). In addition, the problems of communication and transportation between the older states and areas west of the Mississippi naturally became salient. The interest in further settlement was thus among many factors serving to strengthen the federal government. Washington was no longer the remote, unthreatening power that it once was. It was a power needed to resolve the status of territories, and deal directly with sectional disputes.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
Stephen A. Douglas — along with many throughout the Mississippi valley — naturally wanted the railroad for his own region, which could allow Chicago to emerge as a great terminal for vast traffic with the Pacific coast. To garner Southern support, Douglas inserted a provision that the status of slavery in the territory would be determined by the territorial legislature (i.e. "popular sovereignty"). While the idea of a transcontinental railroad gained favor in Congress, it quickly became embedded in sectionalism.
Of greater importance than the opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Congress was the reaction against it in the Northern states. Many historians have argued that no other piece of legislation in congressional history produced so many immediate, sweeping, and ominous changes, since it was seen as an effort to repeal the Missouri Compromise—a measure that many Northerners believed had a special sanctity, almost as if it were a part of the Constitution. But in reality, for the first month after Douglas introduced his bill, radicals were worried by the lack of popular response. At first, most Northern papers ignored the issue. Eventually, however, the popular reaction did come, but the radicals had to take the lead.
The founding of the Republican Party
Willam H. Seward
Once the Northern reaction against the Kansas-Nebraska Act took place, the radicals swung into action to attempt another political reorganization. Henry Wilson declared the Whig party dead, and vowed to oppose any efforts to resurrect it. Horace Greeley's Tribune called for the formation of a new Northern party, and Wade, Chase, Sumner, and other radicals spoke out for the union of all opponents of the Nebraska act. Chase's "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" did much to arouse popular opinion. In New York William Seward finally took it upon himself to organize a rally against the Nebraska bill, since none had arisen spontaneously. The radical press, such as the National Era and the New York Tribune, and the local free-soil journals, condemned the bill right away. Its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, was involved in calling a caucus of anti-slavery Whig and Democratic Party Congressmen in May. Meeting in a Ripon Wisconsin Congregational Church on February 28, 1854, some thirty opponents of the Nebraska act called for the organization of a new political party and suggested that Republican would be the most appropriate name (to link their cause with the Declaration of Independence). The radicals also took a leading role in the creation of the Republican Party in many northern states during the summer of 1854. While conservatives and many moderates were content merely to call for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise or a prohibition of slavery extension, the radicals insisted that no further political compromise with slavery was possible.
But without the benefit of hindsight, the 1854 elections would seem to indicate the possible triumph of Know-Nothingism rather than anti-slavery, with the Catholic/immigrant question replacing slavery as a issue capable of mobilizing mass appeal. Know-Nothings, for instance, captured the mayoralty of Philadelphia with a majority of over 8,000 votes in 1854. Even after opening up immense discord with his Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas began speaking of the Know-Nothings, rather than the Republicans, as the principal danger to the Democratic Party.
After the establishment of the party, when Republicans spoke of themselves as a party of "free labor," they appealed to a rapidly growing, primarily middle class base of support, not permanent wage earners or the unemployed. When they extolled the virtues of free labor, they were merely reflecting the experiences of millions of men who had "made it" and millions of others who had a realistic hope of doing so. Like the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States would emerge as the nationalists, homogenizers, imperialists, and cosmopolitans. Intolerant of any social diversity within their societies, the attempted to impose their values on dissident groups—temperance legislation on the Irish immigrants, anti-slavery on the South—while the party of the regional and ethnic minorities (Democrats in America, Liberals in Britain), called for cultural pluralism and local autonomy.
At the moment, those who had not yet "made it" included Irish immigrants, a large, growing share of Northern factory workers. Republicans often saw the Catholic working class as lacking the qualities of self-discipline, temperance, and sobriety essential for their vision of ordered liberty. In this sense, Republicans also insisted that there was a high correlation between education, religion, and hard work—the values of the Protestant ethic—and Republican votes. Ethnoreligious, socio-economic, and cultural fault lines ran throughout American society, but were becoming increasingly sectional, pitting Yankee Protestants with a stake in the emerging industrial capitalism and American nationalism increasingly against those tied to Southern slaveholding interests.
For example, acclaimed historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, in his Prelude to Greatness, Lincoln in the 1850s, noticed how Illinois was a striking microcosm of the national political scene, pointing out voting patterns that bore striking correlations to regional patterns of settlement. Those areas settled from the South were staunchly Democratic, while those by New Englanders were staunchly Republican. In addition, a belt of border counties were known for their political moderation, and traditionally held the balance of power. Intertwined with religious, ethnic, regional, and class identities, the issues of free labor and free soil were thus easy to demagogue.
Events during the next two years in "Bleeding Kansas" sustained the popular fervor aroused among some elements in the North by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Those from the North were encouraged by press and pulpit and the powerful organs of abolitionist propaganda. Often they received financial help from such organizations as the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Those from the South often received financial contributions from the communities they left. Southerners sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse 'hostile and ruinous legislation.'
While the Great Plains were largely unfit for the cultivation of cotton, informed Southerners demanded that the West be open slavery often — perhaps most often — with minerals in mind. Brazil, for instance, was an example of the successful use of slave labor in mining. In the middle of the eighteenth century, diamond mining supplemented gold mining in Minas Gerais and accounted for a massive transfer of masters and slaves from Brazil's Northeastern sugar region. Southern leaders knew a good deal about this experience. It was even promoted in pro-slavery DeBow's Review as far back as 1848.
"Bleeding Kansas" and the elections of 1856
In Kansas the slavery issue reached a condition of intolerable tension and violence for the first time. But this was in an area where an overwhelming proportion of settlers were merely land-hungry Westerners indifferent to the great public issues looming large in the 1850s. The majority of the inhabitants the actually were not concerned with sectional tensions or the issue of slavery. Instead, the tension in Kansas began as a contention between rival claimants. During the first wave of settlement, no one held titles to the land he was squatting, and settlers rushed to occupy newly open land fit for cultivation. While the tension and violence did emerge as a pattern pitting Yankees and Missourians against each other, there is little evidence of any lofty ideological divides on the questions of slavery. Instead, the Missouri claimants, thinking of Kansas as their own domain, regarded the Yankees squatters as invaders, while the Yankees hated the Missourians for grabbing the best land without honestly settling on it, and stigmatized them as half-savage "pukes."
However, the 1855-56 violence in "Bleeding Kansas" did reach an ideological climax after John Brown — regarded by followers as the instrument of God's will to destroy slavery — entered the melee. His assassination of five proslavery settlers (the so-called "Pottawatomie Massacre"), resulted in some irregular, guerrilla-style strife. While John Brown's heroism and courage have been a source of inspiration to fighters for justice and equality since, the strife in Kansas often just involved armed bands more interested in land claims or loot.
But of greater importance than the civil strife in Kansas, however, was the reaction against it nationwide and in Congress. In both North and South, the belief was widespread that the aggressive designs of the other sections were epitomized by (and responsible for) what was happening in Kansas. Whether or not such beliefs were entirely correct is less important than that they became passionately held articles of faith in both sections. Consequently, "Bleeding Kansas" would emerge as a symbol of this sectional controversy.
Even before news of the Kansas skirmishes reached the East coast did a related violent escapade occur in Washington on May 19 and 20. Charles Sumner's speech before the Senate entitled "The Crime Against Kansas," which condemned the Pierce administration and the institution of slavery, singled out in particular Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, a strident defender of slavery. Its markedly sexual innuendo cast the South Carolinian as the "Don Quixote" of slavery, who has "chosen a mistress [the harlot slavery]...who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world is chaste in his sight." Several days later, Summer fell victim to the Southern gentleman's code, which instructs retaliation for the impugning the honor of an elderly kinsman. Bleeding and unconsciousness after a nearly fatal assault with a heavy cane fell by Butler's nephew, U.S. Representative Preston Brooks — and unable to return to the Senate for four years — the Massachusetts Senator emerged as another symbol of sectional tensions. For many in the North, he illustrated the barbarism of slave society.
Indignant over the developments in Kansas, the Republicans — the first entirely sectional major party in U.S. history — entered their first presidential campaign with confidence. Their nominee, John C. Frémont, was a generally safe candidate for the new party. Although his nomination upset some of their nativist supporters (his mother was a Catholic), the nomination of the famed explorer of the Far West with no political record was an attempt to woo ex-Democrats. The other two contenders— William Seward and Salmon P. Chase — were seen as too radical.
Nevertheless, the campaign of 1856 was waged almost exclusively on the slavery issue—pitted as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy—focusing on the question of Kansas. They condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery, but advanced a program of internal improvements combing the idealism of anti-slavery with the economic aspirations of the North. The new party rapidly developed a powerful partisan culture, and energetically cultivated armies of party activists surging voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Constituents reacted with fervor Young Republicans organized the "Wide Awake" clubs and chanted the catchphrase "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Frémont!" With Southern fire-eaters and even some moderates uttering threats of succession if Frémont won, Buchanan benefited from apprehensions about the future of the Union.
The reactionary South
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| Picking cotton in Georgia |
Southerners, on the other hand, waged a vitriolic response to political change in the North. Slaveholding interests sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse "hostile" and "ruinous" legislation.
With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slavery—increasingly committed to a way of life that much of the rest of the nation considered obsolete—shifted to a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for succession upon the emergence of Lincoln. Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton industry, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy. Coloring this and heightening its intensity, it was imbued with a pattern of ideological response and counter-response between the two sections. Reactions to slave revolts such as the heroic Nat Turner uprising (1831), the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), and the growth of the abolitionist movement (pronounced after Garrison's establishment of the Liberator in 1831) inspired an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery. Franticly searing for Biblical passages somehow endorsing slavery, and conjuring up economic, sociological, historical, and scientific rationales for their case, slavery went from being a "necessary evil" to a "positive good." Foreshadowing modern totalitarian thought, especially Nazism, Dr. J.H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition — spewing arguments indicated by what the title would suggest — was an attempt to apply scientific analysis.
Regardless of some revisionist influence, Allan Nevins, in his eight volume Ordeal of the Union (1947-1971), argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict. Nevins synthesized contending accounts emphasizing moral, cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic issues. In doing so, he brought the historical discussion back to an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Nevins correctly points out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but fundamental assumptions, tastes, ad cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well.
But at the center of the two diverging societies was differences in labor systems. In the South, although those who had a proprietary interest in slavery (i.e. the plantation and slave owners) were a very small minority, slave labor was not on the brink of internal collapse due to change initiated from the region itself. By 1850 there may have been less than 350,000 slaveholders in a total white population of about six million. Within this group, only a small minority owned the majority of slaves: perhaps seven percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. This small minority, who constituted a class of plantation-owing elite known as "slave magnates" were small enough as to be comparable to the millionaires of the following century. Poor whites or "plane folk" (who resorted at times to eating clay) were outside the market economy. Many of the small farmers with a few slaves and yeomen were on its periphery. Small farmers in the South, however, generally accepted the political leadership of the slave magnates and embraced hysterical racism; they were thus unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South. Moreover, even poor whites and "plain folk" would often rally to the cause of slavery's most militant defenders. For one, small farmers depended on local planter elites for access to cotton gins, for markets for their feed and livestock, and for loans. In many areas, there were also extensive networks of kinship linking whites of varying social castes. The poorest resident of a county might easily be a cousin of the richest aristocrat, thus explaining why the South would come to defend its "peculiar" institution as the cornerstone of its way of life.
Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery emerge into full-blown sectional ideology that would enter politics. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits that they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life, and leisure. This would complement their argument that slavery provided a humane society than industrial labor. The most influential exponent of this argument was undoubtedly George Fitzhugh. In his Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh argued that the antagonism between labor and capital in a free society would result in "robber barons" and "pauper slavery," while in a slave society such antagonisms were avoided. Disturbingly enough, he would call for enslaving Northern factor workers - to their own benefit, oddly enough. Lincoln, on the other hand, denounced such Southern insinuations that Northern wage earners were fatally fixed in that condition for life. To free soilers, the stereotype of the South was one of a diametrical opposite - a static society in which slave system presented an entrenched aristocracy.
Some contemporary political sociologists, using a comparative historical framework, agree. As the Industrial Revolution was expanding on a worldwide scale, the days of wrath were coming for a series of agrarian, pre-capitalistic, "backward" societies throughout the world, from the Italian and American South to India.
This global trend explains why an anti-slavery movement emerged in the United States; one must place the Civil War in the context of the general abolition of unfree labor systems in the nineteenth century, from slavery in the western hemisphere, to serfdom in Russia and robot in the Austrian empire. But it does not point to the inevitable success of a president with anti-slavery leanings in 1860. However, this was not necessarily the case everywhere. The German historical record is suggestive. For instance, the political and economic links were there for an agreement between the landed aristocracy and industrial capitalists. The Junkers managed to draw the independent peasants under their wind and to form an alliance with sections of big industry that were happy to receive their assistance in order to keep the industrial workers in their place with a combination of repression and paternalism.
The fragmentation of the American party system
Back to conflicts pitting Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson against each other, there were certainly conflicts between Northeastern finance, manufacturing, and commerce and Southern plantations, which competed to control the federal government so as to protect their own interests. Sectional ideologies had grown more vitriolic after 1856 as well, and the growth of mass politics allowed these sentiments to enter politics with the help of pamphlets, speeches, and newspaper articles by Republican radicals; but by this point, it still cannot be said that the issue of slavery in the West rendered the Civil War inevitable.
The internal structure and character of the Republican Party
The stability of two-party system once was a unifying force. With the Industrial Revolution gaining momentum in the North, the increasingly pro-Southern Democrats stalled then ambitions of many Northerners in the arenas of transportation, tariffs, schooling, and banking policy. The emergence of the mass politics of the age undermined the two-party mechanisms that resolved sectional disputes in 1820 and 1850, which also centered on the issue of slavery in the West. The American institutional structure had been able cope with sectional problems and disagreements in the past, but it would erode considerably as mass ideologies from the North — including free-soil and free labor - crept into politics.
The rise of the Republican Party after 1854 — aided by the popular appeal of the issue of free labor in the West — did rupture the traditional party system, which in the past had created links and alliances between parochial interests and political networks elites in various parts of the country and kept divisive issues out of the way. But while these indispensable mechanisms for regulating the balance of power between sectional interests in politics eroded considerably along with the fall of the Whig party, it does not mean that its repair was out of the question.
In fact, the moderate-to-conservative wing of the Republican Party argued for an alliance with anti-administration Southerners to create a national opposition party. Some argued that this would enable the Republicans to peal off Democratic support in the border states, where Frémont picked up little support. After all, the border states had often gone for Whigs with a Northern base of support in the past.
Among the proponents for this strategy was the New York Times, which called on the Republicans to downplay opposition to popular sovereignty for a compromise policy of "no more slave states" in order to quell sectional tensions. The Times maintained that for the Republicans to be competitive in the 1860 elections, they would need to broaden their base of support to include all voters, who for one reason or another, upset with the Buchanan administration.
Indeed, pressure was strong for an alliance that would unite the growing opposition to the Democratic administration. But such an alliance was no novel idea; it would essentially entail transforming the Republicans into the national, conservative, Union party of the country. In effect, this would be a resurrection of the Whig party.
But between 1854 and 1860, radicals in the party fought against the idea of "non-extension" and fought to keep the issue of slavery in the West—with which they were able to mobilize a great deal of popular support—at the focal point of political discourse. Chase wrote Sumner that if the conservatives succeeded, it might be necessary to recreate the Free Soil party. He was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that the controversy over slavery in the West was still not creating a sense of impending or a fixation on the issue of slavery. Certainly the old restraints on the sectional tensions were being eroded with the rapid extension of mass politics and mass democracy in the North. But the perpetuation of conflict over the issue of slavery in the West still required the efforts of certain Democrats in the South and radical Republican politicians in the North had to ensure that the sectional conflict would remain at the center of the political debate.
William Seward, in fact, contemplated this potential as far back as the 1840s, when the Democrats were the nation's majority party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, and many state offices. At the time, the country’s institutional structure and party system allowed slaveholders to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to garner a great deal of influence over national policy. With growing discontent with the unwillingness of many Democratic leaders to take a stand against slavery, and growing consciousness of their increasingly pro-Southern stance, Seward became convinced that the only way for the party to counteract the Democrats' strong monopoly of the rhetoric of democracy and equality was for the Whigs to embrace anti-slavery as a party platform. Once again, to increasing numbers of Northerners, the Southern labor system was increasingly seen as contrary to the ideals of American democracy.
Republicans believed in the existence "the Slave Power Conspiracy," which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to pervert the Constitution for its own purposes. The "Slave Power" idea gave the Republicans the anti-aristocratic appeal with which men like Seward had long wished to be associated politically. By fusing older anti-slavery arguments with the idea that slavery posed a threat to Northern free labor and democratic values, it enabled the Republicans to tap the egalitarian outlook which lay at the heart of Northern society.
In this sense, during the 1860 Presidential campaign, Republican orators even cast "Honest Abe" as an embodiment of these principles, repeatedly referring to him as "the child of labor" and "son of the frontier," who had proved how "honest industry and toil" were rewarded in the North." To remind everyone that although Lincoln had been a Whig, the "Wide Awakes" (members of the Republican clubs), used replicas of rails that he had split to remind voters of his humble origins.
In almost every northern state, the radicals attempted to have a Republican party or an anti-Nebraska fusion movement organized in 1854. The groundswell of popular clamor fed by the issue of free soil, however, was powerful enough to thwart these aims (and ensure the nomination of a conservative Republican candidate less likely to inspire the succession of Southern states in 1860). In areas where the radicals controlled the new organization, the comprehensive radical program became the party policy. Just as they helped organize the Republican Party in the summer of 1854, the radicals played an important role in the national organization of the party in 1856. Republican conventions in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois adopted radical platforms. Republican platforms in such radical states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont usually called for the divorce of the government from slavery, the repeal of the fugitive slave law, and no more slave states, as did platforms in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts when radical influence was high.
The Republicans, Douglas, and the break-up of the Democratic Party
The controversy over the Lecompton constitution in 1858 offered the best opportunity for such a political realignment. Buchanan's attempt to pervert Douglas’ principles of popular sovereignty by urged Congress to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution (regardless of having been soundly rejected by more than 10,000 votes) prompted Douglas' break with the administration. An alliance with Douglas was then seen as a key advantage in the 1860 elections. The radicals, however, staunchly opposed any attempts to modify the Republican position on slavery. Yet, some Republican observers saw the controversy over the Lecompton constitution as an opportunity to broaden the party’s base of support to include Southern ex-Whigs.
Southern Know-Nothings such as John Bell and John C. Crittenden (key figures in the event of sectional controversies) opposed the administrations attempt to pervert popular sovereignty. Conservatives nationwide were even incensed that the people of each territory would be denied a measure of states rights, arguing that Republicans take up the demand that the be given the power to accept or reject sovereignty. Many radicals were appalled by what they considered a surrender of principle when all ninety-two Republican Congressmen voted for the Crittenden bill (which called for popular sovereignty) in order to prevent the admission of Kansas as a slave state.
However, rather than broadening the Republicans' base to include ex-Whig Southerners in the border states, it would be the Democratic Party that would be spit in sectional lines as a result. Buchanan applied the patronage whip ruthlessly, and anti-Lecompton Democrats complained that a new, pro-slavery test had been imposed upon the party. And like the anti-Nebraska Democrats, who were now members of the Republican Party, the Douglasites insisted that they commanded the support of most northern Democrats.
Meanwhile, Southern slaveholding interests felt increasingly encircled. Increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods, for commercial services, and for loans, and increasingly cut off from the flourishing agricultural regions of the Northwest, they now faced the prospects of a Republican president and the entry of new free states that would altar the nation’s balance of power between the sections. To many Southerners, the resounding defeat of the Lecompton constitution would foreshadow the entry of more free states into the Union. Dating back to the Missouri Compromise, the region desperately sought to maintain an equal balance of slave states and free states so as to be competitive in the Senate. Continuing with this tradition was growing more and more unlikely.
While conservatives at the Republicans' 1860 nominating convention in Chicago were able to block the nomination of the radical William Seward, they were unable to bring about the resurrection of "Whiggery." The convention's resolutions regarding slavery were roughly the same as they had been in 1856. Non-extension was defeated. In the following months, Republican conservatives like Tom Ewing and Edward Baker voiced public objections, which declared that the normal condition of territories was freedom. All in all, the radicals had done an effective job of shaping the official policy of the Republican Party.
The panic of 1857 and the emergence of Lincoln
Not until the 1920s had the idea of the war as an irrepressible economic conflict, rather than a moral conflict, receive full expression. Charles and Mary Beard in their 1927 The Rise of American Civilization argued that slavery was not so much a social or cultural institution as an economic one (i.e. a labor system). In addition, there were inherent antagonisms between Northern industrialists and Southern planters, who sought to control the federal government so as to protect their own interests. According to the economic determinists of the era, both groups used arguments over slavery and states rights' as a cover. While no one accepts the so-called Beard-Hacker thesis wholeheartedly these days, the economic determinism of the Beards influenced historians in important ways. Instead, the class/sectoral/sectional realignments after the panic of 1857 are not seen as inherent antagonisms per se, but ones that arose under a certain set of historical conditions at a certain time.
The serious financial panic of 1857, and economic difficulties leading up to it, strengthened the Republican Party. While strong economic growth was being achieved under relatively low tariffs before 1857, much of the nation concentrated on growth and prosperity. And for the few years after the Compromise of 1850, the sectional conflict abated somewhat until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The iron and textile industries, however, faced acute trouble after 1850. By 1854, stocks of iron were accumulating in each world market. Iron prices fell, forcing American mills to start shutting down in droves. Soon afterwards, Western farmers would emerge as another distressed group. The Crimean War had propped up demand for American exports of food, but when the conflict ended in 1856, demand for food fell, resulting in a steep decline in prices.
Western farmers and Northern manufacturers would come to blame the depression on the domination the low-tariff economic policies of Southern-controlled Democratic administrations. But at least when the panic started, the depression revived latent, deep-seated suspicion of Northeastern banking and trading interests not only in just the South, but also in the West. As a result of spiraling interest payments to lenders, many settlers in the West lost their land through foreclosures cursed "Boston plutocrats" and "New York Shylocks." In the South, where the impact of the panic was relatively slight, commercial centers in the North were the objects of similar derision. Some Southern commentators even regarded the plight of Northern manufacturers as evidence of the superiority of Southern economic institutions.
But instead, a deepening chasm would arise between slave states and free states. Eastern demand for Western farm products changed this situation, shifting the West closer to the North. Propelled by the "transportation revolution" (canals and railroads) and advancements in communication (especially telegraphs), there was a gradual redirection of wheat, corn, and other staples of Western produce toward the Northeast—once difficult to haul across the Appalachians.
However, the high cost of transportation caused wheat bought for $.70 in the West to be sold at a price of $1.20 in New York. In this context, the depression raised demands in the West for federal subsidies and internal improvements in transportation (e.g., roads, canals, and harbor facilities). Improvements in transportation would down prices of wheat transported by rail to the East. Above all, the depression suggested to industrialists and traders that nothing was more important than the rapid development of Western markets for goods — and homesteaders would furnish markets and respectable profits.
Meanwhile, the free soil press and the Republican Party encouraged a strong popular reaction. Noting that Southern plantation interests in the Senate had killed the Homestead Bill of 1852, free soil newspapers in the West often promulgated the dubious claim that the high prices of land sold by the government had been the main cause of the depression.
The existence of free land in the United States united workers and capitalists in the United States. First, the panic calmed the fear of Northern manufacturers of future labor shortages resulting from westward migration. As a caveat, bread lines and soup houses were emerging in the North. But as a point of comparison, just less than a decade earlier, unemployed workers across the Atlantic, with the emphatic cry of "bread or lead!", hoisted the red flag - the first time that the red flag emerged as a symbol of the proletariat — and erected barricades to overthrow the French Second Republic. While Europe saw the rise of radical movements, trade unions, and revolutionary programs, the United States saw schemes designed to provide free farms to needing Eastern workers after 1857. In sum, the American frontier strengthened the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property.
Second, Northern industrial interests were content with Republican calls for higher tariffs for industries in response to the depression. Republican proclamations that the backward, agrarian, and feudalistic South dominated the national government, of course, played well with many constituencies across the North. It was during the Democratic Polk administration, after all, that Southern votes had been chiefly responsible for the low Walker tariff of 1846.
The election of Lincoln
For details see the main article U.S. presidential election, 1860.
"Vote yourself a farm — vote yourself a tariff" was a slogan for the Republicans in 1860. In sum, business was to support the farmers' demands for land (popular also in industrial working-class circles) in return for support for a higher tariff. In this sense, the Republican platform that elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was touted as a "marriage of iron and rye." The Civil War has been called a "second American revolution." To an extent, after all, the elections of 1860 bolstered the political power of new social forces pent up by the nascent Industrial Revolution.
Finally, even after 1857, the U.S. cities were not teeming with artisans and sans culottes; nor were there European-style peasant wars. Not threatened by the revolutionary sentiments of the urban proletariat and uprising peasantry, industrial and agrarian elites lacked the incentives to unite as in Germany or Italy. Instead, the connection between Northern capitalism and Western farming finally helped to make unnecessary for a time the coalition between urban and landed elites and hence the one compromise that could have avoided the war.
Meanwhile, many Southerners grumbled over "radical" notions of giving land away to farmers that would "abolitionize" the area. While the ideology of Southern sectionalism was well-developed before the panic of 1857 by figures like J.D.B DeBow, the panic helped convince even more cotton barons that they had grown too reliant on Eastern financial interests. Thomas Prentice Kettell, former editor of the Democratic Review, was one of these agitators to enjoy a great degree of prominence between 1857-1860. Kettell gathered an array of statistics in his book on Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, to show that the South produced vast wealth, while the parasitic North, with its dependence on raw materials, sucked up the wealth of the South. Arguing that sectional inequality resulted from the concentration of manufacturing, in the North, and the North's supremacy in communications, transportation, finance, and international trade, his ideas paralleled old physiocratic doctrines that all profits of manufacturing and trade come out of the land. Political sociologists have noted that these forms of romantic nostalgia tend to crop up whenever industrialization takes hold.
Such Southern hostility to the free farmers gave the North an opportunity for an alliance with Western farmers. After the political realignments of 1857-1858, manifested by the emerging strength of the Republican Party and their networks of local support nationwide, almost every issue would now become entangled with the controversy over the expansion of slavery in the West. While questions of tariffs, banking policy, public land, and of subsidies to railroads did not always unite all elements in the North and the Northwest against the interests of slaveholders in the South under the pre-1954 party system, they would now get translated in terms of sectional conflict—with the expansion of slavery in the West involved.
As the depression strengthened the Republican Party, slaveholding interests were becoming convinced that that the North had aggressive and hostile designs on the Southern way of life. The South was thus increasingly fertile ground for successionist extremism.
Controversy over the slave trade
While the Republicans' Whig-style personality-driven "hurrah" campaign certainly helped whip up hysteria in the slave states upon the emergence of Lincoln and intensify divisive tendencies, Southern "fire eaters" certainly gave credence to notions of the slave power conspiracy among Republican constituencies in the North and West. And new Southern demands to re-open the African slave trade certainly did not help to assuage sectional tensions.
From the early 1840s until the outbreak of the war, the cost of slaves had been rising steadily. Meanwhile, the price of cotton was experiencing marked fluctuations (typical of raw commodities). After the panic of 1857, the price of cotton fell, while the price of slaves had continued its steep rise. At next year's Southern commercial convention, William L. Yancey of Alabama called for the reopening of the African slave trade. Only the delegates from the states of the Upper South, who profited from the domestic trade, opposed the reopening of the slave trade — a potential form of competition to them. The convention in 1858 wound up voting to recommend the repeal of all laws against slave imports, despite some reservations.
Southern secession
With the emergence of the Republicans as the nation's first major sectional party, by the mid-1850s, politics became the stage on which sectional tensions were played out. Although much of the West - the focal point of sectional tensions - was unfit for cotton cultivation, Southern slaveholding interests were still encircled to a greater extent than ever in national politics. Before, the slave system had been buttressed to an extent by the Democratic Party, which was increasingly seen as representing a more and more pro-Southern position that unfairly permitted Southerners to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to dominate national policy before the Civil War. But they suffered from a significant disruption in the electoral realignment of the mid-1850s. 1860 was a critical election that marked a stark change in existing patterns of party loyalties among groups of voters.
Abraham Lincoln's election was a watershed in the balance of power of competing national and parochial interests and affiliations. No longer would the planter class of the South enjoy the stranglehold over the executive, legislative, and judicial apparatus of the central government. Their allies in the Democratic Party would no longer be able to manipulate power in many of the Northern states either.