See also: Historiographic issues about the American Civil War.
A consensus of historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the eleven Southern states (seven states before the onset of the war and four states after the onset) that declared their secession from the United States (the Union) and united to form the Confederate States of America (known as the "Confederacy").[1] However, while historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of slavery in the conflict, they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict (ideological, economic, political, or social) were most important, and on the North's reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede.[2] Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view that has been disproven by the overwhelming historical evidence against it, notably some of the seceding states' own secession documents.[3]
The principal political battle leading to Southern secession was over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the Western territories destined to become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, one slave and one free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in numbers of eligible voters.[4] Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown. Another factor leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy was the development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades.[5] The primary reason for the North to reject secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.[6]
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South, all of whose riverfront or coastal economies were based on cotton that was cultivated by slave labor. They formed the Confederate States of America after Lincoln was elected in November 1860 but before he took office in March 1861.
Nationalists in the North and "Unionists" in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish its forts that were in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war itself began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded the Union's Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war."[7] Historian David M. Potter wrote: "The problem for Americans who, in the age of Lincoln, wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not logically be reconciled."[8]
Background factors in the run up to the Civil War were partisan politics, abolitionism, nullification versus secession, Southern and Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the antebellum period.
By the mid-19th century the United States had become a nation of two distinct regions. The free states in New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest[9] had a rapidly growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce, and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population. Their growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany. The South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery; there was some rapid growth taking place in the Southwest (e.g., Texas), based on high birth rates and high migration from the Southeast; there was also immigration by Europeans, but in much smaller number. The heavily rural South had few cities of any size, and little manufacturing except in border areas such as St. Louis and Baltimore. Slave owners controlled politics and the economy, although about 75% of white Southern families owned no slaves.[10]
Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to dominate the national government. By the time the 1860 election occurred, the heavily agricultural Southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing Northern states. Abraham Lincoln was able to win the 1860 presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states. Southerners felt a loss of federal concern for Southern pro-slavery political demands, and their continued domination of the federal government was threatened. This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region, due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output.
In the interest of maintaining unity, politicians had mostly moderated opposition to slavery, resulting in numerous compromises such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 under the presidency of James Monroe. After the Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the Slave Power (the power of slaveholders to control the national government on the slavery issue). Part of the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to assist Southerners in reclaiming fugitive slaves, which many Northerners found to be extremely offensive.
Amid the emergence of increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in national politics, the collapse of the old Second Party System in the 1850s hampered politicians' efforts to reach yet another compromise. The compromise that was reached (the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act) outraged many Northerners and led to the formation of the Republican Party, the first major party that was almost entirely Northern-based. The industrializing North and agrarian Midwest became committed to the economic ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism.
Arguments that slavery was undesirable for the nation had long existed, and early in U.S. history were made even by some prominent Southerners. After 1840, abolitionists denounced slavery as not only a social evil but also a moral wrong. Activists in the new Republican Party, usually Northerners, had another view: They believed the Slave Power conspiracy was controlling the national government with the goal of extending slavery and limiting access to good farm land to rich slave owners.[11] [12] Southern defenders of slavery, for their part, increasingly came to contend that black people benefited from slavery.
See also: Three-fifths Compromise. At the time of the American Revolution, the institution of slavery was firmly established in the American colonies. It was most important in the six southern states from Maryland to Georgia, but the total of a half million slaves were spread out through all of the colonies. In the South, 40 percent of the population was made up of slaves, and as Americans moved into Kentucky and the rest of the southwest, one-sixth of the settlers were slaves. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the New England states provided most of the American ships that were used in the foreign slave trade, while most of their customers were in Georgia and the Carolinas.[13]
During this time many Americans found it easy to reconcile slavery with the Bible, but a growing number rejected this defense of slavery. A small antislavery movement, led by the Quakers, appeared in the 1780s, and by the late 1780s all of the states had banned the international slave trade. No serious national political movement against slavery developed, largely due to the overriding concern over achieving national unity.[14] When the Constitutional Convention met, slavery was the one issue "that left the least possibility of compromise, the one that would most pit morality against pragmatism."[15] In the end, many would take comfort in the fact that the word "slavery" never occurs in the Constitution. The three-fifths clause was a compromise between those (in the North) who wanted no slaves counted, and those (in the South) who wanted all the slaves counted. The Constitution (Article IV, section 4) also allowed the federal government to suppress domestic violence, a provision that could be used against slave revolts. Congress could not ban the importation of slaves for 20 years. The need for the approval of three-fourths of the states for amendments made the constitutional abolition of slavery virtually impossible.[16]
The importation of slaves into the United States was restricted in 1794, and finally banned in 1808, the earliest date the Constitution permitted (Article 1, section 9). Many Americans believed that the passage of these laws had finally resolved the issue of slavery in the United States.[17] Any national discussion that might have continued over slavery was drowned out by other issues such as trade embargoes, maritime competition with Great Britain and France, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812. A notable exception to this quiet regarding slavery was the New Englanders' association of their frustration with the war with their resentment of the three-fifths clause that seemed to allow the South to dominate national politics.[18]
During the aftermath of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Northern states (north of the Mason–Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania and Delaware) abolished slavery by 1804, although in some states older slaves were turned into indentured servants who could not be bought or sold. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress (at that time under the Articles of Confederation) barred slavery from the Midwestern territory north of the Ohio River.[19] When Congress organized the territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, there was no ban on slavery.[20]
See main article: Missouri Compromise.
With the admission of Alabama as a slave state in 1819, the U.S. was equally divided, with 11 slave states and 11 free states. Later that year, Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. of New York initiated an uproar in the South when he proposed two amendments to a bill admitting Missouri to the Union as a free state. The first would have barred slaves from being moved to Missouri, and the second would have freed at age 25 all Missouri slaves born after admission to the Union.[21] The admission of the new state of Missouri as a slave state would give the slave states a majority in the Senate, while passage of the Tallmadge Amendment would give the free states a majority.
The Tallmadge amendments passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate when five Northern senators voted with all the Southern senators.[22] The question was now the admission of Missouri as a slave state, and many leaders shared Thomas Jefferson's fear of a crisis over slaverya fear that Jefferson described as "a fire bell in the night". The crisis was solved by the Missouri Compromise, in which Massachusetts agreed to cede control over its relatively large, sparsely populated and disputed exclave, the District of Maine. The compromise allowed Maine to be admitted to the Union as a free state at the same time that Missouri was admitted as a slave state. The Compromise also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri along parallel 36°30′ north. The Missouri Compromise quieted the issue until its limitations on slavery were repealed by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.[23]
In the South, the Missouri crisis reawakened old fears that a strong federal government could be a fatal threat to slavery. The Jeffersonian coalition that united southern planters and northern farmers, mechanics and artisans in opposition to the threat presented by the Federalist Party had started to dissolve after the War of 1812.[24] It was not until the Missouri crisis that Americans became aware of the political possibilities of a sectional attack on slavery, and it was not until the mass politics of Andrew Jackson's administration that this type of organization around this issue became practical.[25]
See main article: Nullification crisis.
The American System, advocated by Henry Clay in Congress and supported by many nationalist supporters of the War of 1812 such as John C. Calhoun, was a program for rapid economic modernization featuring protective tariffs, internal improvements at federal expense, and a national bank. The purpose was to develop American industry and international commerce. Since iron, coal, and water power were mainly in the North, this tax plan was doomed to cause rancor in the South, where economies were agriculture-based.[26] [27] Southerners claimed it demonstrated favoritism toward the North.[28] [29]
The nation suffered an economic downturn throughout the 1820s, and South Carolina was particularly affected. The highly protective Tariff of 1828 (called the "Tariff of Abominations" by its detractors), designed to protect American industry by taxing imported manufactured goods, was enacted into law during the last year of the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Opposed in the South and parts of New England, the expectation of the tariff's opponents was that with the election of Andrew Jackson the tariff would be significantly reduced.[30]
By 1828 South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. When the Jackson administration failed to take any actions to address their concerns, the most radical faction in the state began to advocate that the state declare the tariff null and void within South Carolina. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and his vice-president John C. Calhoun, the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification through his 1828 "South Carolina Exposition and Protest".[31]
Congress enacted a new tariff in 1832, but it offered the state little relief, resulting in the most dangerous sectional crisis since the Union was formed. Some militant South Carolinians even hinted at withdrawing from the Union in response. The newly elected South Carolina legislature then quickly called for the election of delegates to a state convention. Once assembled, the convention voted to declare null and void the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 within the state. President Andrew Jackson responded firmly, declaring nullification an act of treason. He then took steps to strengthen federal forts in the state.
Violence seemed a real possibility early in 1833 as Jacksonians in Congress introduced a "Force Bill" authorizing the President to use the federal Army and Navy in order to enforce acts of Congress. No other state had come forward to support South Carolina, and the state itself was divided on its willingness to continue the showdown with the federal government. The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun worked to devise a compromise tariff. Both sides later claimed victory. Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina claimed a victory for nullification, insisting that it had forced the revision of the tariff. Jackson's followers, however, saw the episode as a demonstration that no single state could assert its rights by independent action.
Calhoun, in turn, devoted his efforts to building up a sense of Southern solidarity so that when another standoff should come, the whole section might be prepared to act as a bloc in resisting the federal government. As early as 1830, in the midst of the crisis, Calhoun identified the right to own slavesthe foundation of the plantation agricultural systemas the chief southern minority right being threatened:
On May 1, 1833, Jackson wrote of this idea, "the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question."[32]
The issue appeared again after 1842's Black Tariff. A period of relative free trade followed 1846's Walker Tariff, which had been largely written by Southerners. Northern industrialists (and some in western Virginia) complained it was too low to encourage the growth of industry.[33]
See main article: Gag rule (United States).
From 1831 to 1836 William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society initiated a campaign to petition Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia and all federal territories. Hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent, with the number reaching a peak in 1835.[34]
The House passed the Pinckney Resolutions on May 26, 1836. The first of these stated that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states and the second that it "ought not" do so in the District of Columbia. The third resolution, known from the beginning as the "gag rule", provided that:
The first two resolutions passed by votes of 182 to 9 and 132 to 45. The gag rule, supported by Northern and Southern Democrats as well as some Southern Whigs, was passed with a vote of 117 to 68.[35]
Former President John Quincy Adams, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, became an early and central figure in the opposition to the gag rules.[36] He argued that they were a direct violation of the First Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". A majority of Northern Whigs joined the opposition. Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to offend Americans from Northern states, and dramatically increase the number of petitions.[37]
Since the original gag was a resolution, not a standing House Rule, it had to be renewed every session, and the Adams' faction often gained the floor before the gag could be imposed. However, in January 1840, the House of Representatives passed the Twenty-first Rule, which prohibited even the reception of anti-slavery petitions and was a standing House rule. Now the pro-petition forces focused on trying to revoke a standing rule. The Rule raised serious doubts about its constitutionality and had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108. Throughout the gag period, Adams' "superior talent in using and abusing parliamentary rules" and skill in baiting his enemies into making mistakes, enabled him to evade the rule and debate the slavery issues. The gag rule was finally rescinded on December 3, 1844, by a strongly sectional vote of 108 to 80, all the Northern and four Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 55 of the 71 Northern Democrats.[38]
There had been a continuing contest between the states and the national government over the power of the latterand over the loyalty of the citizenryalmost since the founding of the republic. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, for example, had defied the Alien and Sedition Acts, and at the Hartford Convention, New England voiced its opposition to President James Madison and the War of 1812, and discussed secession from the Union.
Although a minority of free Southerners owned slaves, free Southerners of all classes nevertheless defended the institution of slavery[39] threatened by the rise of free labor abolitionist movements in the Northern statesas the cornerstone of their social order.
Per the 1860 census, the percentage of slaveholding families was as follows:[40]
Mississippi was the highest at 49%, followed by South Carolina at 46%Based on a system of plantation slavery, the social structure of the South was far more stratified and patriarchal than that of the North. In 1850 there were around 350,000 slaveholders in a total free Southern population of about six million. Among slaveholders, the concentration of slave ownership was unevenly distributed. Perhaps around 7 percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. The largest slaveholders, generally owners of large plantations, represented the top stratum of Southern society. They benefited from economies of scale and needed large numbers of slaves on big plantations to produce cotton, a highly profitable labor-intensive crop.
Per the 1860 Census, in the 15 slave states, slaveholders owning 30 or more slaves (7% of all slaveholders) owned approximately 1,540,000 slaves (39% of all slaves).[41] (PDF p. 64/1860 Census p. 247)
In the 1850s, as large plantation owners outcompeted smaller farmers, more slaves were owned by fewer planters. Yet poor whites and small farmers generally accepted the political leadership of the planter elite. Several factors helped explain why slavery was not under serious threat of internal collapse from any move for democratic change initiated from the South. First, given the opening of new territories in the West for white settlement, many non-slaveowners also perceived a possibility that they, too, might own slaves at some point in their life.[42]
Second, small free farmers in the South often embraced racism, making them unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South.[43] The principle of white supremacy, accepted by almost all white Southerners of all classes, made slavery seem legitimate, natural, and essential for a civilized society. Racial discrimination was completely legal. White racism in the South was sustained by official systems of repression such as the slave codes and elaborate codes of speech, behavior, and social practices illustrating the subordination of blacks to whites. For example, the "slave patrols" were among the institutions bringing together southern whites of all classes in support of the prevailing economic and racial order. Serving as slave "patrollers" and "overseers" offered white Southerners positions of power and honor in their communities. Policing and punishing blacks who transgressed the regimentation of slave society was a valued community service in the South, where the fear of free blacks threatening law and order figured heavily in the public discourse of the period.
Third, many yeomen and small farmers with a few slaves were linked to elite planters through the market economy.[44] In many areas, small farmers depended on local planter elites for vital goods and services, including access to cotton gins, markets, feed and livestock, and even loans (since the banking system was not well developed in the antebellum South). Southern tradesmen often depended on the richest planters for steady work. Such dependency effectively deterred many white non-slaveholders from engaging in any political activity that was not in the interest of the large slaveholders. Furthermore, whites of varying social class, including poor whites and "plain folk" who worked outside or in the periphery of the market economy (and therefore lacked any real economic interest in the defense of slavery) might nonetheless be linked to elite planters through extensive kinship networks. Since inheritance in the South was often unequitable (and generally favored eldest sons), it was not uncommon for a poor white person to be perhaps the first cousin of the richest plantation owner of his county and to share the same militant support of slavery as his richer relatives. Finally, there was no secret ballot at the time anywhere in the United Statesthis innovation did not become widespread in the U.S. until the 1880s. For a typical white Southerner, this meant that casting a ballot against the wishes of the establishment meant running the risk of being socially ostracized.
Thus, by the 1850s, Southern slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike felt increasingly encircled psychologically and politically in the national political arena because of the rise of free soilism and abolitionism in the Northern states. 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 faced the prospects of a growing abolitionist movement in the North.
Historian William C. Davis refutes the argument that Southern culture was different from that of Northern states or that it was a cause of the war, stating, "Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both." He stated that culture was not the cause of the war, but rather, slavery was: "For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic."[45]
With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slaveryincreasingly committed to a way of life that abolitionists and their sympathizers considered obsolete or immoralarticulated a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for secession upon the election of a Republican president. Southerners 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. Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton textile industry in the North and in Europe, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy.[46]
Southern spokesmen greatly exaggerated the power of abolitionists, looking especially at the great popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe (whom Abraham Lincoln reputedly called "the little woman that started this great war"). They saw a vast growing abolitionist movement after the success of The Liberator in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison. The fear was a race war by blacks that would massacre whites, especially in counties where whites were a small minority.[47]
The South reacted with an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery. J. D. B. De Bow of New Orleans established De Bow's Review in 1846, which quickly grew to become the leading Southern magazine, warning about the dangers of depending on the North economically. De Bow's Review also emerged as the leading voice for secession. The magazine emphasized the South's economic inequality, relating it to the concentration of manufacturing, shipping, banking and international trade in the North. Searching for Biblical passages endorsing slavery and forming economic, sociological, historical and scientific arguments, slavery went from being a "necessary evil" to a "positive good". Dr. John H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Conditionsetting out the arguments the title would suggestwas an attempt to apply scientific support to the Southern arguments in favor of race-based slavery.[48]
Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery which emerged into sectional ideologies. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life and leisure. This supported their argument that slavery provided a more humane society than industrial labor.[49] In his Cannibals All!, George 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. He advocated enslaving Northern factory workers, for their own benefit. Abraham 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 diametrically opposite, static society in which the slave system maintained an entrenched anti-democratic aristocracy.
According to historian James M. McPherson, exceptionalism applied not to the South but to the North after the North ended slavery and launched an industrial revolution that led to urbanization, which in turn led to increased education, which led to various reform movements, especially abolitionism, gaining strength. The fact that seven immigrants out of eight settled in the North (and the fact that most immigrants viewed slavery with disfavor), compounded by the fact that twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa, contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior. The Charleston Mercury wrote that on the issue of slavery the North and South "are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples."[50] As De Bow's Review said, "We are resisting revolution.... We are not engaged in a Quixotic fight for the rights of man.... We are conservative."
Allan Nevins argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict, adopting a phrase from Senator William H. Seward. 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 pointed out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples, a point made also by historian Avery Craven. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well. More specifically, the North was rapidly modernizing in a manner some perceived as threatening to the South. Historian McPherson explains:
When secessionists protested in 1861 that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to preserve their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern threat to overthrow them. The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North's had. ... The ascension to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary future.
Harry L. Watson has synthesized research on antebellum southern social, economic, and political history. Self-sufficient yeomen, in Watson's view, "collaborated in their own transformation" by allowing promoters of a market economy to gain political influence. Resultant "doubts and frustrations" provided fertile soil for the argument that southern rights and liberties were menaced by Black Republicanism.[51]
J. Mills Thornton III explained the viewpoint of the average white Alabamian. Thornton contends that Alabama was engulfed in a severe crisis long before 1860. Deeply held principles of freedom, equality, and autonomy, as expressed in Republican values, appeared threatened, especially during the 1850s, by the relentless expansion of market relations and commercial agriculture. Alabamians were thus, he judged, prepared to believe the worst once Lincoln was elected.[52]
The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in the 1820s and 1850sthe most important of which being the stability of the two-party systemwere being eroded as this rapid extension of democracy went forward in the North and South. It was an era when the mass political party galvanized voter participation to 80% or 90% turnout rates, and a time in which politics formed an essential component of American mass culture. Historians agree that political involvement was a larger concern to the average American in the 1850s than today. Politics was, in one of its functions, a form of mass entertainment, a spectacle with rallies, parades, and colorful personalities. Leading politicians, moreover, 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. Voter turnouts even ran as high as 84% by 1860. An abundance of new parties emerged 1854–56, including the Republicans, People's party men, Anti-Nebraskans, Fusionists, Know Nothings, Know-Somethings (anti-slavery nativists), Maine Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindus, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells and Adopted Citizens. By 1858, they were mostly gone, and politics divided four ways. Republicans controlled most Northern states with a strong Democratic minority. The Democrats were split North and South and fielded two tickets in 1860. Southern non-Democrats tried different coalitions; most supported the Constitutional Union party in 1860.
Many Southern states held constitutional conventions in 1851 to consider the questions of nullification and secession. With the exception of South Carolina, whose convention election did not even offer the option of "no secession" but rather "no secession without the collaboration of other states", the Southern conventions were dominated by Unionists who voted down articles of secession.
Historians today generally agree that economic conflicts were not a major cause of the war. While an economic basis to the sectional crisis was popular among the "Progressive school" of historians from the 1910s to the 1940s, few professional historians now subscribe to this explanation.[53] According to economic historian Lee A. Craig, "In fact, numerous studies by economic historians over the past several decades reveal that economic conflict was not an inherent condition of North-South relations during the antebellum era and did not cause the Civil War."[54]
When numerous groups tried at the last minute in 1860–61 to find a compromise to avert war, they did not turn to economic policies. The three major attempts at compromise, the Crittenden Compromise, the Corwin Amendment and the Washington Peace Conference, addressed only the slavery-related issues of fugitive slave laws, personal liberty laws, slavery in the territories and interference with slavery within the existing slave states.[55]
Historian James L. Huston emphasizes the role of slavery as an economic institution. In October 1860 William Lowndes Yancey, a leading advocate of secession, placed the value of Southern-held slaves at $2.8 billion (~$ in).[56] Huston writes:
The cotton gin greatly increased the efficiency with which cotton could be harvested, contributing to the consolidation of "King Cotton" as the backbone of the economy of the Deep South, and to the entrenchment of the system of slave labor on which the cotton plantation economy depended. Any chance that the South would industrialize was over.
The tendency of monoculture cotton plantings to lead to soil exhaustion created a need for cotton planters to move their operations to new lands, and therefore to the westward expansion of slavery from the Eastern seaboard into new areas (e.g., Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond to East Texas).[57]
The South, Midwest, and Northeast had quite different economic structures. They traded with each other and each became more prosperous by staying in the Union, a point many businessmen made in 1860–61. However, Charles A. Beard in the 1920s made a highly influential argument to the effect that these differences caused the war (rather than slavery or constitutional debates). He saw the industrial Northeast forming a coalition with the agrarian Midwest against the plantation South. Critics challenged his image of a unified Northeast and said that the region was in fact highly diverse with many different competing economic interests. In 1860–61, most business interests in the Northeast opposed war.
After 1950, only a few mainstream historians accepted the Beard interpretation, though it was accepted by libertarian economists.[58] Historian Kenneth Stampp, who abandoned Beardianism after 1950, sums up the scholarly consensus:[59] "Most historians ... now see no compelling reason why the divergent economies of the North and South should have led to disunion and civil war; rather, they find stronger practical reasons why the sections, whose economies neatly complemented one another, should have found it advantageous to remain united."[60]
Historian Eric Foner argued that a free-labor ideology dominated thinking in the North, which emphasized economic opportunity. By contrast, Southerners described free labor as "greasy mechanics, filthy operators, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists".[61] They strongly opposed the homestead laws that were proposed to give free farms in the west, fearing the small farmers would oppose plantation slavery. Indeed, opposition to homestead laws was far more common in secessionist rhetoric than opposition to tariffs.[62] Southerners such as Calhoun argued that slavery was "a positive good", and that slaves were more civilized and morally and intellectually improved because of slavery.[63]
Led by Mark Noll, a body of scholarship[64] [65] [66] has argued that the American debate over slavery became a shooting war in part because the two sides reached diametrically opposite conclusions based on reading the same authoritative source of guidance on moral questions: the King James Version of the Bible.
After the American Revolution and the disestablishment of government-sponsored churches, the U.S. experienced the Second Great Awakening, a massive Protestant revival. Without centralized church authorities, American Protestantism was heavily reliant on the Bible, which was read in the standard 19th-century Reformed hermeneutic of "common sense", literal interpretation as if the Bible were speaking directly about the modern American situation instead of events that occurred in a much different context, millennia ago. By the mid-19th century this form of religion and Bible interpretation had become a dominant strand in American religious, moral and political discourse, almost serving as a de facto state religion.
The Bible, interpreted under these assumptions, seemed to clearly suggest that slavery was Biblically justified:
The pro-slavery South could point to slaveholding by the godly patriarch Abraham (Gen 12:5; 14:14; 24:35–36; 26:13–14), a practice that was later incorporated into Israelite national law (Lev 25:44–46). It was never denounced by Jesus, who made slavery a model of discipleship (Mk 10:44). The Apostle Paul supported slavery, counseling obedience to earthly masters (Eph 6:5–9; Col 3:22–25) as a duty in agreement with "the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness" (1 Tim 6:3). Because slaves were to remain in their present state unless they could win their freedom (1 Cor 7:20–24), he sent the fugitive slave Onesimus back to his owner Philemon (Phlm 10–20). The abolitionist north had a difficult time matching the pro-slavery south passage for passage. ... Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18–27). For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment.[67]
Protestant churches in the U.S., unable to agree on what God's Word said about slavery, ended up with schisms between Northern and Southern branches: the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, the Baptists in 1845,[68] and the Presbyterian Church in 1857.[69] These splits presaged the subsequent split in the nation: "The churches played a major role in the dividing of the nation, and it is probably true that it was the splits in the churches which made a final split of the nation inevitable."[70] The conflict over how to interpret the Bible was central:
The theological crisis occasioned by reasoning like [conservative Presbyterian theologian James H.] Thornwell's was acute. Many Northern Bible-readers and not a few in the South felt that slavery was evil. They somehow knew the Bible supported them in that feeling. Yet when it came to using the Bible as it had been used with such success to evangelize and civilize the United States, the sacred page was snatched out of their hands. Trust in the Bible and reliance upon a Reformed, literal hermeneutic had created a crisis that only bullets, not arguments, could resolve.[71]
The result:
The question of the Bible and slavery in the era of the Civil War was never a simple question. The issue involved the American expression of a Reformed literal hermeneutic, the failure of hermeneutical alternatives to gain cultural authority, and the exercise of deeply entrenched intuitive racism, as well as the presence of Scripture as an authoritative religious book and slavery as an inherited social-economic relationship. The Northforced to fight on unfriendly terrain that it had helped to createlost the exegetical war. The South certainly lost the shooting war. But constructive orthodox theology was the major loser when American believers allowed bullets instead of hermeneutical self-consciousness to determine what the Bible said about slavery. For the history of theology in America, the great tragedy of the Civil War is that the most persuasive theologians were the Rev. Drs. William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.[72]
There were many causes of the Civil War, but the religious conflict, almost unimaginable in modern America, cut very deep at the time. Noll and others highlight the significance of the religion issue for the famous phrase in Lincoln's second inaugural: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."
Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase (Louisiana Purchase), negotiation (Adams–Onís Treaty, Oregon Treaty), and conquest (the Mexican Cession).[73] Of the states carved out of these territories by 1845, all had entered the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, as well as the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi.[74] With the conquest of northern Mexico, including California, in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to the institution flourishing in these lands as well. Southerners also anticipated annexing as slave states Cuba (see Ostend Manifesto), Mexico, and Central America (see Golden Circle (proposed country)).[75] Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave soil. It was these territorial disputes that the proslavery and antislavery forces collided over.[76] [77]
The existence of slavery in the southern states was far less politically polarizing than the explosive question of the territorial expansion of the institution in the west.[78] Moreover, Americans were informed by two well-established readings of the Constitution regarding human bondage: that the slave states had complete autonomy over the institution within their boundaries, and that the domestic slave tradetrade among the stateswas immune to federal interference.[79] [80] The only feasible strategy available to attack slavery was to restrict its expansion into the new territories.[81] Slaveholding interests fully grasped the danger that this strategy posed to them.[82] [83] Both the South and the North believed: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."[84] [85]
By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and they all claimed to be sanctioned by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly.[86] Two of the "conservative" doctrines emphasized the written text and historical precedents of the founding document, while the other two doctrines developed arguments that transcended the Constitution.[87]
One of the "conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the historical designation of free and slave apportionments in territories should become a Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.[88]
The second doctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balancethat slavery could be excluded altogether in a territory at the discretion of Congress[88] [89] with one caveat: the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment must apply. In other words, Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846.[88]
Of the two doctrines that rejected federal authority, one was articulated by northern Democrat of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and the other by southern Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.
Douglas devised the doctrine of territorial or "popular" sovereignty, which declared that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slaverya purely local matter. Congress, having created the territory, was barred, according to Douglas, from exercising any authority in domestic matters. To do so would violate historic traditions of self-government, implicit in the US Constitution.[90] The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine.
The fourth in this quartet is the theory of state sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun doctrine" after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun.[91] Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the federal union under the US Constitutionand not merely as an argument for secession.[92] The basic premise was that all authority regarding matters of slavery in the territories resided in each state. The role of the federal government was merely to enable the implementation of state laws when residents of the states entered the territories.[93] Calhoun asserted that the federal government in the territories was only the agent of the several sovereign states, and hence incapable of forbidding the bringing into any territory of anything that was legal property in any state. State sovereignty, in other words, gave the laws of the slaveholding states extra-jurisdictional effect.[94]
"States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority.[95] As historian Thomas L Krannawitter points out, "[T]he Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of federal power."[96]
By 1860, these four doctrines comprised the major ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories and the US Constitution.[97] As a practical matter, however, slavery was practically defunct in the territories by 1860. The 1860 census showed: Utah Territory (controlled by Mormons) had 29 slaves; Nebraska had 15; Kansas had 2 (it was abolished there in early 1861 with statehood). There were no slaves in the other territories of Colorado, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico and Dakota, and none in the new states of California & Oregon. See 1860 United States census#Population of U.S. states and territories.[98] See also History of slavery in Nebraska, .History of slavery in Kansas, and History of slavery in Utah.
See main article: Abolitionism in the United States.
Antislavery movements in the North gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid transformation of Northern society that inspired a social and political reformism. Many of the reformers of the period, including abolitionists, attempted in one way or another to transform the lifestyle and work habits of labor, helping workers respond to the new demands of an industrializing, capitalistic society.
Antislavery, like many other reform movements of the period, was influenced by the legacy of the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in the new country stressing the reform of individuals, which was still relatively fresh in the American memory. Thus, while the reform spirit of the period was expressed by a variety of movements with often-conflicting political goals, most reform movements shared a common feature in their emphasis on the Great Awakening principle of transforming the human personality through discipline, order, and restraint.
"Abolitionist" had several meanings at the time. The followers of William Lloyd Garrison, including Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, demanded the "immediate abolition of slavery", hence the name. A more pragmatic group of abolitionists, like Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan, wanted immediate action, but that action might well be a program of gradual emancipation, with a long intermediate stage. "Antislavery men", like John Quincy Adams, did what they could to limit slavery and end it where possible, but were not part of any abolitionist group. For example, in 1841 Adams represented the Amistad African slaves in the Supreme Court of the United States and argued that they should be set free.[99] In the last years before the war, "antislavery" could mean the Northern majority, like Abraham Lincoln, who opposed expansion of slavery or its influence, as by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, or the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Southerners called all these abolitionists, without distinguishing them from the Garrisonians. James M. McPherson explains the abolitionists' deep beliefs: "All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution."[100]
Stressing the Yankee Protestant ideals of self-improvement, industry, and thrift, most abolitionistsmost notably William Lloyd Garrisoncondemned slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and the fruits of one's labor.
Wendell Phillips, one of the most ardent abolitionists, attacked the Slave Power and presaged disunion as early as 1845:
The experience of the fifty years ... shows us the slaves trebling in numbersslaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Governmentprostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewheretrampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. ... Why prolong the experiment?[101]
Abolitionists also attacked slavery as a threat to the freedom of white Americans. Defining freedom as more than a simple lack of restraint, antebellum reformers held that the truly free man was one who imposed restraints upon himself. Thus, for the anti-slavery reformers of the 1830s and 1840s, the promise of free labor and upward social mobility (opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control one's own labor), was central to the ideal of reforming individuals.
Controversy over the so-called Ostend Manifesto (which proposed the U.S. annexation of Cuba as a slave state) and the Fugitive Slave Act kept sectional tensions alive before the issue of slavery in the West could occupy the country's politics in the mid-to-late 1850s.
Antislavery sentiment among some groups in the North intensified after the Compromise of 1850, when Southerners began appearing in Northern states to pursue fugitives or often to claim as slaves free African Americans who had resided there for years. Meanwhile, some abolitionists openly sought to prevent enforcement of the law. Violation of the Fugitive Slave Act was often open and organized. In Bostona city from which it was boasted that no fugitive had ever been returnedTheodore 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, New York, in 1851 (culminating in the Jerry Rescue incident late that year), and Boston again in 1854. But the issue did not lead to a crisis until revived by the same issue underlying the Missouri Compromise of 1820: slavery in the territories.
William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, was motivated by a belief in the growth of democracy. Because the Constitution had a three-fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause, and a 20-year protection of the Atlantic slave trade, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell".[102] In 1854, he said:
The opposite opinion on slavery was expressed by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in his "Cornerstone Speech". Stephens said:
Most historians ... now see no compelling reason why the divergent economies of the North and South should have led to disunion and civil war; rather, they find stronger practical reasons why the sections, whose economies neatly complemented one another, should have found it advantageous to remain united. Beard oversimplified the controversies relating to federal economic policy, for neither section unanimously supported or opposed measures such as the protective tariff, appropriations for internal improvements, or the creation of a national banking system. ... During the 1850s, federal economic policy gave no substantial cause for southern disaffection, for policy was largely determined by prosouthern [''sic''] Congresses and administrations. Finally, the characteristic posture of the conservative northeastern business community was far from antisouthern [''sic'']. Most merchants, bankers, and manufacturers were outspoken in their hostility to antislavery agitation and eager for sectional compromise in order to maintain their profitable business connections with the South. The conclusion seems inescapable that if economic differences, real though they were, had been all that troubled relations between North and South, there would be no substantial basis for the idea of an irrepressible conflict.