The American Civil War: A Hands-On History - Softcover

Excerpted from The American Civil War: A Hands-on History by Christopher J. Olsen. Copyright © 2006 by Christopher J. Olsen. Published in August, 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

ONE

Political Sectionalism Before 1850

When the majority of white Southerners opted to secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861 it signaled a failure of the American political system and its renowned ability to compromise difficult problems. For most of the antebellum period, nearly all politicians tried to avoid a national discussion of slavery or slavery expansion, believing such a debate would be too divisive for the country. At times, though, the questions were unavoidable, and threatened to destroy the Union. In turn, Northerners and Southerners negotiated a series of compromises, a practice that stretched back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and that over the decades engaged the efforts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and others. These well-known figures effected compromises at the national level, but the debate over slavery eventually reached into America’s communities and entered the conversations and feelings of ordinary folks, too. Most men and women across the country ultimately took positions on the growing sectional divide, and those individual choices determined the coming of the Civil War.

What provoked these moments of national crisis? First, it is important to acknowledge that the vast majority of white Americans considered the practice of slavery a very different political or legal issue from slavery’s expansion into territories where it nominally existed or did not exist. There was widespread agreement that slavery in the individual states was a local issue to be decided by residents of those states. In other words, even if the national government—that is, the majority of the voting public acting through Congress—wanted to abolish slavery, it could not, because abolition was not permitted under the Constitution. But the expansion of slavery was something else. Territories were governed directly by Congress, and therefore the issue of whether or not slavery would be allowed to expand was a matter for the national government in Washington.

Even before the Constitution was written, in fact, slavery in the West was an issue for the national government. America’s earliest governing body, the Confederation Congress (constituted under the Articles of Confederation), approved the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, barring slavery from the Northwest Territory. In 1784 the Congress had considered a proposal from Thomas Jefferson (as part of his ordinance to grant early statehood) that would have prohibited slavery in all western lands, including the Southwest. When the antislavery provision failed by one vote, Jefferson famously lamented that “the fate of millions unborn” hung “on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.” In the mid-1780s, Jefferson, like many of the Founding Fathers, was in the flush of revolutionary rhetoric about equality and liberty, and whatever antislavery impulses he had ever felt were at their most intense.

The expansion of slavery caused heated division for a variety of reasons. For some it was a matter of morality—slavery was wrong and therefore should be limited as a first step toward abolition; others saw it as an economic matter, part of the competition for good land and resources; many Northern whites wanted to restrict slavery in the hope of creating an “all-white” society in the West. All of these factors, and others, helped to energize Northerners and Southerners and made the question of slavery expansion an explosive national issue. Ultimately, the compromises effected in Congress between the North and South involved basic questions of political power in the national government—votes in the House and the Senate, votes in the Electoral College, votes to help decide the makeup of the Supreme Court. Thus—and this is the critical point—for the large majority of all whites, whether or not slavery expanded to the West involved a series of questions unrelated to the fate of black people. In short, the expansion of slavery was a vital and urgent issue for whites, even while most of them did not care whether or not slavery itself continued in the South. This explains why the Civil War was “somehow” about slavery, as Abraham Lincoln said, even though the vast majority of whites had no interest in abolition—and neither cared nor probably even thought much about slaves.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegates from Northern and Southern states discovered that two issues related to slavery divided them. First was the question of counting slaves for representation and taxation. Most Southerners wanted to count slaves as people when it came to proportional representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College, but not when figuring each state’s tax liability. Most Northerners wanted it the other way around. In the end, it was primarily a matter of finding an acceptable ratio that counted slaves as a portion of a person, for both representation and taxation, with delegates finally settling on 5:3—each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. The question of slavery’s legitimacy was not part of the discussion, which was strictly a political debate.

The other issue at the Constitutional Convention, which had far more potential to divide the new nation, was the international slave trade from Africa. The trade was still legal, although abolitionists in Great Britain were already turning public opinion against the practice as unchristian and immoral. Most of the constitutional delegates also opposed the overseas trade, including many slaveowners such as Virginia’s George Mason, who spoke passionately against it. The trade was easier to attack than slavery itself: the death rate was appallingly high; often mothers and children were separated; slaves were torn from their families and culture. On the other hand, most whites believed that slavery itself “uplifted” black men and women by bringing them in contact with Christianity and “civilization.” If they survived the trade and made it to the United States, the argument ran, slaves were infinitely better off than they would have been in Africa. However, many Southerners considered opposition to the international trade a slippery slope, and any discussion that included words such as immoral in the same sentence asslavery made them uncomfortable. Representatives from Georgia and South Carolina insisted that the international trade remain open for economic reasons: their economies were just beginning to take off, and the planters in those states believed they needed a reliable, fresh supply of workers straight from the Old World. They even threatened to leave the new country if the international slave trade was disallowed. True to form, the Founders compromised: the overseas trade could not be banned in fewer than twenty years (in 1808, Congress did outlaw it). In those two decades, planters from the Deep South imported tens of thousands of men and women from Africa.

These compromises largely removed the issue of slavery from national politics for more than three decades. In that time, free and slave states were added to the Union in nearly matched pairs: Indiana (1816) and Mississippi (1817), and Illinois (1818) and Alabama (1819), for instance. In 1819, however, the population of Missouri Territory exceeded sixty thousand, the minimum required for statehood. The land was part of the Louisiana Purchase, in which slavery was legal under French...