Gettysburg College



Introduction to “Causes of the American Civil War”

The causes of the Civil War are complex and layered, needing to be studied in detail using numerous primary sources before even a basic understanding comes into focus. These causes are crucial to the understanding and appreciation, by both interpreters and visitors, of the long ranging effects the war has had and continues to have on American society. Today we live with the fruits of the American Civil War, in a nation changed fundamentally by the war's outcomes. Understanding and acknowledging the causes of that war can help us as a people to better appreciate the choices our nation has made in the subsequent 150 years.

The study of the coming of the war, for public interpreters of the past, also needs to understand the evolution of historical memory of the war, particularly that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Lost Cause interpretation. Perhaps the most contested aspect of popular American history today is related to the causes of the American Civil War. As the Civil War Sesquicentennial approaches, National Park Service interpreters will have to be prepared to help visitors appreciate why a defense of slavery, and not states’ rights, was at the core of Southern unrest. They will equally need to be prepared to explain that the objective of the United States in 1861 was not the abolition of slavery, but the reunification of the Union.

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Understand the nuances of the causes of the American Civil War.

• Identify the “Lost Cause” school of Civil War interpretation and understand its place in the evolution toward modern scholarship.

• Effectively and respectfully convey the causes of the war to visitors of varying knowledge levels and backgrounds.

Prologue: Interpreting the Civil War – New Scholarship and Old Battles

The American Civil War, and particularly its causes, is one of the most controversial topics which interpreters face at Cultural and Historic sites today. When visitors approach with questions and challenges to the meaning of the Civil War, often times the interpreter is left fumbling for words.

[Interp. Video – Interviews: Interpretive Anecdotes]

Much of the misconception of the causes of the Civil War grow from the memory making period which immediately followed the war’s end, as two sides sought to come together and reconstruct not only the American South, but the memory of the war itself. As an interpreter, you face the tough challenge of combining evolving scholarship, primary evidence and your resource to help visitors better understand the complexities underlying the American Civil War. By returning to the root documents and words of the men and women who brought about the war, we can come to a richer understanding of why conflict erupted, and for what reason 600,000 American lost their lives.

Chapter 1: The Long Road to War – 1840s

The American Civil War has a long lineage of causes. This course could return to the Missouri Compromise (1820) to track the course of slavery's expansion. It could just as easily delve further back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Three-Fifths Compromise or even the Declaration of Independence. The American Civil War, and its root cause of slavery, is deeply embedded in the intellectual and political fabric of the United States itself. For the sake of brevity, however, this study will begin with the Annexation of Texas following the Mexican War. Still, it is important to keep in mind that your specific site may have deeper, older connections to the Civil War's causes than those which grew from the 1840s.

Chapter 1: The Long Road to War – 1840s (Continued)

[Political Tab]

“The contest in which we are now engaged is not a new one. It is of twelve or fifteen years’ standing. It assumed new proportions when we acquired Texas. Texas, under the laws of Mexico, was then free. We insisted that slavery should not be recognized there. You claimed that it should–that slavery should go into all the common Territories of the Union. You succeeded. You procured what you claim is a decision of the court in your favor. But the people would not give the question up. The issue was formed–Slavery or Freedom; and on that issue we went into the [1860] election.”

David Wilmot, February 22, 1861, Washington Peace Conference

The outcome of the Texas War of Independence in 1836, with the American settlers of the region gaining independence from the Mexican government, all but ensured that the United States would be poised to fight a war with Mexico over territorial rights. The western border of the now-free Republic of Texas was not determined at the war's end. The Treaties of Velasco, ending the Texas War of Independence, was never ratified by the Mexican Government and, indeed, Mexico never acknowledged Texan sovereignty. In 1845, as the United States prepared to annex Texas, Mexican authorities claimed that President James K. Polk was attempting to steal Mexican Territory. Through his desire for western lands, Polk provoked a war with Mexico.

Slavery quickly became an important issue in the Mexican-American War. David Wilmot, a Democratic member of the House of Representative from north-eastern Pennsylvania, made himself the center of the debate. In August of 1846, Wilmot proposed an amendment to a war appropriations bill, later called the Wilmot Proviso, designed to prevent slavery in any territories acquired from Mexico. From Wilmot's action in 1846 until the outbreak of civil war in 1861, the subject of slavery in the western territories formed the core of sectional unrest.

[Map of West Circa 1845-46] [Wilmot Proviso Text] [Portrait of David Wilmot]

As the war with Mexico drew to a close in 1848, American political discourse was creeping toward Civil War. With the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the United States acquired the territory now comprising the American Southwest. General Zachary Taylor, riding high on his status as war hero, unseated Democratic control of the White House. The Whigs now held the highest office in the land. Taylor would face opposition on Capitol Hill from a Democratic congress. Most foreboding for the Whig party was their losses in the House of Representatives. A new third party, flying the banner of “Free Soil,” seized upon the fissures created by David Wilmot’s Proviso to win nine seats on the floor of the House. By the end of the 1840s, Slavery, and its extension into the new territories, was poised to be the central point of controversy on Capitol Hill.

[Smoke Him Out at P&P, LOC]

Further Reading:

Joel H. Sibley, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2005)

Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (2004)

Mark J. Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, & the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute & Sectional Crisis (1996)

[Social Tab]

By the 1840s, New Orleans emerged as one of the most prominent cities of the American south. It boasted a population of over 100,000 citizens. Using the natural corridor of the Mississippi River, New Orleans’ merchants helped ship cotton and other raw materials from the interior south to markets in New England and abroad. By the next decade, New Orleans would see over 150 million dollars worth of goods from the inner south pass through its ports. New Orleans also became a hub for the burgeoning internal slave trade, sporting the south’s largest collection of slave markets. Elsewhere in the South, rail lines and turnpikes were fashioned in a radial pattern to maximize the South’s ability to distribute its slave produced raw materials to costal ports for shipments to manufacturing facilities worldwide.

On March 9th, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled on a landmark case in the evolution of Abolitionism in America. Two years before, 57 slaves aboard the Cuban ship “La Amistad” escaped their captivity and held the crew of the ship hostage, demanding return to Africa. The ship was eventually seized by the United States Navy, and the vessel and its cargo (slaves included) claimed as salvage. Spain demanded the slaves’ return as stolen cargo, but the Supreme Court, after arguments headed by former President John Quincy Adams, upheld the decision that the Africans were, “unlawfully kidnapped, and forcibly and wrongfully carried on board,” the Amistad, and that Spain had no rights to claim them as property.

When the Home Mission Society was met with the request of James E. Reeve, a Georgia Baptist and slave owner who wished to operate as a missionary among Native Americans, it was not immediately apparent just how consequential their response would prove. The Society refused to ordain Reeve, their sole reason his complicity in slavery. Within months, the Baptist church in America split along the biblical implications and interpretations of slavery. The Triennial Convention dominated northern Baptist theology, and preached a doctrine of the Bible’s condemnation of slavery. The new splinter group, the Southern Baptist Convention, preached a doctrine of biblical support for America’s “Peculiar Institution.” Over the next two decades, these schisms would help to divide religious and social spheres along increasingly sectional lines.

Further Reading:

Gospel of disunion: religion and separatism in the antebellum South

By Mitchell Snay

[Response Question]

See what others have said, and post your own response at the forums. [Link to Forum thread for this discussion question]

Chapter 2: Compromises and Concessions – 1850s

[Political Tab]

“I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion.”

John C. Calhoun, March 4, 1850, U.S. Senate

By 1850, Congress continued to hash out the details of what new states and territories could enter the union and, most importantly, whether those states would be slave or free. Compromise came, but not without flaring tempers, including Senators brandishing revolvers on the floor of Congress. While the Compromise of 1850 did settle the issue of Texas’ western boundary, the admission of California as a free state upset the delicate balance of power in the U.S. Senate. This political threat to the South, which nearly resulted in secession at the Nashville Convention, was met with a social threat to the North. The Compromise also had the effect of strengthening and extending fugitive slave legislations.

[Link to Compromise of 1850 map] [News Article, Compromise of 1850, Northern and Southern Newspaper] [Image: Scene in Uncle Sam’s Senate, P&P, LOC] []

On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed a crowd in Rochester, NY. The noted orator and abolitionist had been invited by a citizen’s group to speak on the nation’s 76th birthday. But Douglass, an African-American and former slave, saw the great irony in their choice: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” Douglass’ speech, a scathing condemnation of America’s continued tolerance of slavery, struck at the heart of the question of Slavery, politically and socially:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852, Rochester, NY

By 1854, as pressure from Southern Congressmen to open the Kansas Territory to slavery was mounting, Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In order to placate the South, the act allowed for the extension of slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line established in 1820. The new states of Kansas and Nebraska, instead of having their status decided upon the floor of congress, would be admitted under a doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty.” A flood of settlers, supporting slavery and abolition, rushed to the territories to sway the decision, quickly leading to a shooting war in the Kansas Territory between pro- and anti-slavery forces.

[Link to Kansas-Nebraska interactive map]

In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the violence it sparked, the Whig party began to splinter completely. The sectional nature of the slavery debate drove a wedge between northern and southern Whigs. The result was the formation of the Republican Party, an amalgam of remaining northern Whigs who joined together with the Free Soil Party, around opposition of the extension of slavery into the territories.

[Further Reading: John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How it Changed the Course of American History (2003)]

[Further Reading: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970)]

[Social Tab]

As Congress drafted and passed the Compromise of 1850, Northern abolitionists seethed with anger. The newly enhanced and expanded Fugitive Slave Act was viewed as a travesty. Instead of simply providing for the recapture of runaways who had crossed into the north, the bill also included a clause which stated that, at the request of a U.S. Marshal, any citizen could be impressed into a slave catcher’s aid. In spite of their moral convictions, anyone on the street, abolitionist or not, was required by law to assist in the capture of an escaped slave. The law met heavy resistance. In February of 1851, the Boston Vigilance Committee liberated Shadrach Minkins, a captured fugitive slave, from the custody of U.S. Marshals. A similar instance, the rescue of a black citizen of Syracuse, NY named “Jerry,” shocked and outraged the South. That September, in Southern Pennsylvania, a bloody firefight between abolitionists and a Posse of Maryland slave-owners further proved that the Fugitive Slave Act was odious to many, and nearly unenforceable in many northern communities.

In 1851 and 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a New England abolitionist from a family of outspoken ministers and activists, penned Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, a novel depicting the harsh conditions of slavery through the eyes of the human property who were dealt the blows. Stowe’s dark, sinister depiction of slaveholding whites drew particular ire from Southern leadership. Stowe, a minor abolitionist figure, was catapulted onto the main stage. Stowe received threats and stinging criticism for her work, even so far as one southerner mailing her a severed slave’s ear.

[Link - Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture at UVA ]

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As the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the west to popular sovereignty, settlers of both slavery and anti-slavery leanings flooded to the territory to influence its constitution. These settlers quickly came to blows, as the realization dawned that eliminating a vote for your opposition was as easy as pulling the trigger of a rifle. Radical zealots, both abolitionists and slavers, rose to the surface as violence increased. Men like John Brown, a failed businessman and strict Calvinist abolitionist, struck out with their families and formed militia groups to influence Kansas’ statehood through violence. Eastern powers added fuel to the fire of violence by sending aid, money and supplies to the warring factions in the west. Most famously, Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, himself an abolitionist minister, shipped Sharps rifles westward, in crates marked Bibles, to further the destruction of slavery. The New York Tribune remarked that Beecher saw that, “there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.”

[Response Question]

See what others have said, and post your own response at the forums. [Link to Forum thread for this discussion question]

Interlude: War Approaches – 1850s

As America marched closer to war throughout the 1850s, tempers had flared. The central issue of contention was the extension of slavery into the new lands in the West. This was the driving beat to which the rest of American political discourse marched.

[Interp. Video – Interviews: Reflecting on the 1850s]

Laying the proper framework upon which to build the story of the American Civil War is immensely important when interpreting the causes of the four year bloodletting. The 1840s and early 1850s laid the seeds of war, which would ultimately blossom into bitter fruit. For the interpreter, these years, and the primary documents they yielded, offer a wealth of evidence that the debate over the future of slavery was at the very core of the conflicts dividing the young American nation. Without this deep history, the breakneck paced events of 1855-1860 become nearly meaningless.

Chapter 3: An Ever Widening Gulf

[Political Tab]

“The Senator from South Carolina [Andrew P. Butler] has read many books on chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him,–though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight: I mean the harlot Slavery.”

Charles Sumner, May 19, 1856, U.S. Senate

By 1856, the debate on the floor of Congress was at a seething boil. In retaliation for offensive remarks made toward his cousin by Senator Charles Sumner, Representative Preston Brooks assaulted Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate and beat him with a gutta-percha cane. Even after the senator’s desk toppled over, pinning him to the ground, Brooks continued to beat him for impugning his family’s honor and tying it to “the harlot Slavery.” It would take Sumner three years to recover from his injuries and return to the body. Northerners were outraged. Southerners reelected Brooks and sent him dozens of commemorative replacement canes.

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The Presidential election of 1856 revolved around the perpetual issue of the extension of slavery into the territories (New Mexico and Arizona), the constitutionality of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the future of slavery. Although Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican John C. Fremont, little was solved. Furthermore, the slave states aligned themselves firmly against the Republican candidate, with just under 600 votes going to Fremont across the entire South.

[1856 Republican Platforms] [1856 Democratic Platform]

The following year, the landmark Dred Scott decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that the court had no jurisdiction over the case. But he continued in his decision, injecting the majority opinion of the court that, “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” The finding incensed Republicans and Abolitionists. In his over-reaching decision, Taney set three new precedents in American law, spurring the nation closer to war:

1) Black Americans, slave or free, were not to be considered citizens of the United States,

2) The federal government did not have general control over the territories,

3) Prohibiting slavery in the territories of the United States was unconstitutional.

In 1858, a series of senatorial debates captivated the nation, as former congressman and Republican lawyer Abraham Lincoln challenged Democrat Stephen Douglas for his seat in the United States Senate. Over the course of seven highly publicized debates, Lincoln and Douglas focused chiefly on the constitutionality of prohibiting slavery in the western territories. The emerging transportation and communications technologies of the 1850s allowed for the debates, held across Illinois, to be witnessed through news coverage across the entire nation. Lincoln, in spite of losing his bid to unseat Douglas, helped to clarify the Republican’s argument in opposing the extension of slavery in the territories and to gain national notoriety for himself and the party.

Further muddying the waters for Southern observers of the Republican stance on Slavery was John Brown, a radical abolitionist who, in October 1859 assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia to incite a slave rebellion. Although his bid to outfit an army of fugitive slaves and march through Virginia failed, Brown was a piece of evidence which southerners used to cast aspersions on the Republican platform and northern motives. In spite of the cries of prominent Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln’s February 1860 entreaty that, “John Brown was no Republican,” the attack on Harpers Ferry further convinced Southerners that Northerners, and especially Republicans, were bent on attacking and abolishing slavery in the South.

[Statement of John Brown at Trial, 1859] [Lincoln at Cooper Union]

[Further Reading: William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007), pp. 79-84]

[Further Reading: James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (2006)]

[Further Reading: David Brown, Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and the Impending Crisis of the South (2006)]

[Further Reading: David S. Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005)]

[Social Tab]

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, but particularly in the 1850s, slaves in the upper south fled their plantations via a loose series of anti-slavery advocates and supporters in the Northern states. This network, known colloquially as the underground railroad, helped ferry thousands of fugitive slaves to freedom across the border in Canada. As a direct reaction to the Fugitive Slave Acts, both that of 1850 and the previous requirements outlined in the Constitution, northerners assisted fugitive slaves to travel, often at peril of their own lives and fortunes. The narratives of these freedom seekers became widespread propaganda across the north, published by abolitionists as success stories in the defeat of slavery.

[Henry Box Brown] [Jermain Loguen]

The antislavery settlement of Lawrence, Kansas found itself besieged by an army flying a flag of “Southern Rights,” in May of 1856. The town, a center of abolition activity, came under the gun of a thousand pro-slavery forces. In what newspapers reported as the “Sacking of Lawrence,” southern border ruffians destroyed two abolitionist presses, dumping their typesetting equipment into the river, and burned the Free State Hotel.

Incensed by continued violent censorship, both in Kansas and upon the floor of Congress, John Brown and a handful of likeminded abolitionists became intent upon meeting violence with violence. The band marched along the Pottowatomie creek in Kansas, dragging pro-slavery settlers from their homes and murdering them within earshot of their families. Brown, his sons and fellow anti-slavery forces slew a total of five pro-slavery men and former slave catchers with military broad swords. The incident made John Brown an infamous name across both the north and south, and led the abolitionist crusader to seek refuge in the north.

Communications across the Atlantic had always been a factor in the dissemination of anti-slavery ideals, as tracts passed back and forth from the British Anti-Slavery Society and various American antislavery organizations. But the prospect of instantaneous communication between Britain and the United States excited Americans north and south alike. The Trans-Atlantic Telegraphic Cable laid in 1858 brought the world one step closer to an age of instant worldwide dissemination of ideas, but also stood as a symbol of the marked divide between northern and southern technological evolution. Whereas the south still relied upon cost-intensive slave labor, the northern states had now shifted to labor and communications aided, simplified and cheapened by technological improvement. Although the cable failed shortly after its first transmission, it signaled a change in the rate of technological advance and served as another death knell for slavery’s supremacy.

As Republicans began assuming a national political role, they began attracting heat from a myriad of sources. Throughout the late 1850s, culminating in 1859, a series of books by North Carolina author Hinton Rowan Helper helped to solidify the popular conception of Republican as abolitionist. In his 1859 work, The Compendium of the Impending Crisis, Helper, a southerner, labeled slavery a “great moral, social, civil, and political evil” and urged fellow non-slave holders to abolish it because it stood as a fundamental impediment to their social and economic progress. Financed by the Republican establishment and endorsed by sixty-eight Republican congressmen, the publication of this revision of Helper’s earlier publication, The Impending Crisis in the South: and How to Meet It (1857), convinced secessionists that the Republican Party intended to destroy slavery not only in the territories, but in the already extant states as well. The Republican endorsement of this small book so outraged the South that the selection of the Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 36th Congress, 1st Session was blocked for eight weeks by furious Democrats.

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[Response Question]

See what others have said, and post your own response at the forums. [Link to Forum thread for this discussion question]

Chapter 4: Election and Destruction

“Now, sir, I do not believe that ninety-nine hundredths of the men who voted for Mr. Lincoln thought anything about the subject of slavery in the States, or had any policy on the subject. They were opposed to the introduction of slavery into the Territories.”

George E. Pugh, December 11, 1860, U.S. Senate

“What, then, could the slaveholding States expect, after the election of such a candidate upon such a platform, but that all the patronage and all the power of the Federal Government, in all its departments, would be brought to bear upon the Institution [slavery] in the South, in order to compass its destruction?”

Trusten Polk, January 14, 1861, U.S. Senate

The election of 1860 merged the social and political spheres, bringing the entire United States into the ever increasingly heated debate over slavery. Abolitionists sought to make the election a political referendum on Slavery. Southerners, too, saw the Presidential election as their last opportunity to ensure the continued existence of slavery. But at the Democratic convention in Charleston, S.C. on TK, 1860, the fragile sectional balance within the Democratic party shattered, and three splinter parties formed. These groups, with the addition of the Republicans, made the contest for President a hotly contested four-way race.

[Chart] Election of 1860, Party Platforms’ Stance on Slavery:

|Northern Democratic Platform |Constitutional Union Party Platform |

| | |

|Slavery should not be tampered with where it already exists. The future of|The United States Constitution is the final word on all matters within the |

|slavery in the territories should be decided by the will of the citizens |United States. |

|through popular sovereignty. | |

| | |

|[Link to Northern Democratic Platform, 1860 | |

|] |[Link to Constitutional Union Platform, 1860 |

| |] |

|Southern Democratic Platform |Republican Party Platform |

| | |

|Slavery should not be tampered with where it already exists. The future of|Slavery should not be tampered with where it already exists. However, |

|slavery in the territories cannot be decided at a Federal level, as |slavery should not be extended into new territories and acquisitions of the|

|Congress has no authority over the matter. |United States. |

| | |

|[Link to Southern Democratic Platform, 1860 |[Link to Republican Platform, 1860 |

|] |] |

In November of 1860, Americans went to the polls. Results were split along deep sectional lines. The fractured Democratic party could not muster the voting bloc needed to counter the republican bid for the White House, and Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States.

The period that followed the election was a tumult of activity and strife. The Southern states began pushing toward secession, organizing conventions. South Carolina and her fellow Deep South states sent commissioners to the Upper South, urging their conventions to throw their hats into the ring with the Cotton Belt. These men helped fuel the growing fire of destruction beginning to rage across the Southern consciousness. They preached of three possible outcomes of Lincoln’s election:

1. Republicans, fresh off of victory, would impose political equality for blacks across the South.

2. Republicans freeing of Slaves across the South would result in widespread violence and race war.

3. Republicans would insist upon “equality in the rights of matrimony,” leading to racial amalgamation and destruction of white power and Anglo domination of Southern society.

[Link to one or more speeches of commissioners ]

On December 20th, 1860, South Carolina’s Secession Convention, comprising of 169 representatives from around the state, voted to leave the United States. Shortly after the vote, a Immediately following the secession of South Carolina, its secession convention drafted a justification for secession. Almost all of South Carolina’s grievances against the North revolved around perceived attacks on the institution of slavery.

[Link to Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union ]

[Further Reading: Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: South Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001)]

Chapter 4: Election and Destruction (Continued)

Following Lincoln’s election, Congress furiously worked to avert the crisis of secession and disunion yet again. Compromise after compromise was submitted to the floor to attempt to save the Union, but all to no avail. Over fifty proposals were presented and failed, including those of Senators Jefferson Davis (Louisiana) and Robert Toombs (Georgia). Even James Buchanan put forth a proposal that urged northern to simply follow the laws as written and stay out of the South’s affaris. Most famous among the proposals was that of Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. The Crittenden Compromise called for

Between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, proposals by President James Buchanan, Senator John J. Crittenden, Senator Jefferson Davis, Senator Robert Toombs (and fifty others) flooded Congress in the form of amendments to the U.S. Constitution; almost all were designed to preserve and protect the institution of slavery.

[Link to six or so compromise proposals; for example:]

President James Buchanan, December 3, 1860

1. An express recognition of the right of property in slaves in the states where it now exists or may hereafter exist.

2. The duty of protecting this right in all the common territories throughout their territorial existence, and until they shall be admitted as states into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitutions may prescribe.

3. A like recognition of the right of the master to have his slave who has escaped from one state to another restored and ‘delivered up’ to him, and of the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law enacted for this purpose, together with a declaration that all state laws impairing or defeating this right are violations of the Constitution, and are consequently null and void.

Source: 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., Congressional Globe (Appendix), p. 4.

1861 The secession of South Carolina was followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas; all before Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861.

Following the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee secede.

[Link to declarations of secession for Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas]

Secession Reconsidered

The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.

G. T. Yelverton, January 25, 1861, Alabama Secession Convention

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.

Mississippi, A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union, January 26, 1861

I meant that the true way to fight the battle was for us to remain here and occupy the places assigned to us by the Constitution of the country. Why did I make that statement? It was because, on the 4th day of March next, we shall have six majority in this body; and if, as some apprehended, the incoming Administration shall show any disposition to make encroachments upon the institution of slavery, encroachments upon the rights of the States, or any other violation of the Constitution, we, by remaining in the Union, and standing at our places, will have the power to resist all these encroachments.

Jefferson Davis, January 10, 1861, U.S. Senate

Question: What percentage of eligible voters in the North could be classified as Abolitionists?

Answer: 2%

Question: Why secession before Lincoln’s inauguration?

Answer: By the election of 1860, white Southerners had convinced themselves that a Republican president was going to abolish slavery throughout the South.

Question: What were the chances that the Republican Party would prevent slavery from being extended into the territories and abolish slavery in the states?

Answer: Since the Democratic Party retained its majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives following the election of 1860 and controlled the Supreme Court, Republicans had minimal political power to interfere with, or abolish, slavery.

Question: Was secession constitutional?

Answer: Since secession was/is not mentioned in the Constitution, the constitutionality of secession could be argued either way.

Question: Is secession constitutional today?

Answer: In Texas v. White (1869) the U.S. Supreme Court decided that secession was unconstitutional.

[Link to Texas v. White in the Handbook of Texas Online]

Northern Intent

I say to you frankly, gentlemen, that while we hold this doctrine, there is no Republican, there is no convention of Republicans, there is no paper that speaks for them, there is no orator that sets forth their doctrines, who ever pretends that they have any right in your States to interfere with your peculiar institution; but on the other hand, our authoritative platform repudiates the idea that we have any right or any intention ever to invade your peculiar institution in your own States.

Benjamin Franklin Wade, December 17, 1860, U.S. Senate

I, for one, do not understand Republicanism to mean negro-stealing. If it is, then I am no Republican, and never will be one. If I believed, at the same time, that it meant abolition, so help me God! I would be the first to abandon and denounce it;....When you talk about the hostility of the people of the free States to slavery, you are greatly in error.

Benjamin F. Junkin, February 7, 1861, U.S. House of Representatives

Since the vast majority of Northerners were unconcerned about the existence of slavery and the Republican Party platform included a pledge of noninterference with the institution, the United States’ goal for the first eighteen months of the war was solely to restore the union of the states. Only after the war stretched into the summer and fall of 1862 did Lincoln decide to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure.

[Further Reading: Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams., The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (2006)]

That the Republican Party was not interested (at the beginning of the war) in the abolition of slavery in the South is documented in the following evidence:

Republican platform of 1860 - support for slavery in the states

[Link to 1860 platform]

First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) - no interest in interfering with slavery in the states

[Link to full text of Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural]

First Thirteenth Amendment (March 1861) - Declared that Congress had no authority to interfere with or abolish slavery in the states – Ratified by Republican Ohio and Illinois, and Democratic Maryland

[Link to full text of 1st 13th Amendment]

Congressional resolution in July 1861 passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress stated that abolition was not the issue in the North

[Link to text of resolution]

War and Choices

Question: Following the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, what were Abraham Lincoln’s options?

Answer: Theoretically, Lincoln had three choices: 1) Let the South go, 2) Compromise along the line of the Crittenden resolutions, or 3) Prepare to hold/retain federal property in the South. Lincoln always considered the seceded states a part of the United States and their attack on the United States an insurrection. Thus, since he had taken an oath to defend the country “against all enemies foreign and domestic,” he could not simply let the South leave the union of states simply because its man (Breckinridge) was not elected in 1860. What would have prevented California (for example) from seceding after the 1864 election if it became dissatisfied with that election’s results. The only compromise that would be meaningful to the South would be to declare the western territories open to slavery. This Lincoln could not agree to because opposition to slavery in the territories was at the core of the Republican philosophy. Thus, Lincoln’s only option was to take a stand at Fort Sumter.

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