The Fate of Their Country. A Look Forward and Back
- By Michael Stillman
The Fate of Their Country, with image on cover of caning in the Senate of Senator Charles Sumner in 1856.
By Michael Stillman
The Civil War may be the most avidly collected period of American history. The twists and turns of this horrible, internecine conflict remain the subject of discussion and debate long after the last participant departed this Earth. However, some of us find the period before, antebellum America, even more fascinating. This is the period which led to the terrible war which fascinates us to this day. Could it have been prevented, or was war inevitable? That is the question posed by a recent book that I just got around to reading. I am not particularly convinced of its underlying hypothesis, but it is still a most important read, because its theory may have more relevance to what is happening today than it does to 1840s and 1850s America.
The book is The Fate of Their Country, by Michael F. Holt. Holt's thesis follows a track with three stopping points, and I can agree with the first two. The problem starts with slavery. It may be nicer to talk about "states rights," or even differing economic needs. However, the one irresolvable issue was slavery. Everything else was subject to compromise, as it had been with the Nullification crisis of 1832. The North was willing to bend on disputes such as tariffs to avoid war.
However, Holt maintains that it was not slavery per se that was the fatal issue. It was extension of slavery to the new territories. He provides ample evidence of this. No laws were ever passed attempting to abolish slavery in the South, nor was such even advocated, except by ardent abolitionists, a minority even in the North. Holt points out that even Lincoln promised to preserve slavery in the South. Even the Emancipation Proclamation did not outlaw slavery. It only outlawed it in states in rebellion against the Union. It was more a political move to weaken the Confederacy than a statement of principle. After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. However, Holt points out that a prior 13th Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority in 1861, just as the southern states were seceding. It provided that no amendment could be passed which would interfere with "domestic institutions" within the states, the institution in mind being the "peculiar" one of slavery. Even Lincoln, in his inaugural address, expressed that he had no objection. It was never adopted as events on the ground made it irrelevant before the amendment could reach the state legislatures for ratification.
While, Holt maintains, slavery itself was not the issue, the expansion of slavery into new territories was. While the North could tolerate slavery where it already existed, it could not accept its expansion. The South, on the other hand, saw an influx of new, non-slave states as diluting its power, and perhaps inevitably one day leading to total abolition. The result was such things as the Wilmot Proviso, that never-passed legislation, hated in the South, which would have prevented the extension of slavery to the territories acquired through the Mexican War. Then there was the Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter as a free state in turn for letting other new states in the southwest decide the issue for themselves.
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The Fate of Their Country. A Look Forward and Back
- By Michael Stillman
Close-up of cover image shows how this senate "debate" stirred northern anger
Next came Stephen Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed for popular sovereignty in territories previously barred from having slavery by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Bleeding Kansas, which resulted from Kansas-Nebraska, where northern and southern sympathizers battled for control, became one of the most immediate causes of the war. Once Lincoln was elected, the southern states proceeded to secede, not because the new president wanted to terminate slavery in their own states, but because he was adamantly opposed to its extension to new territories. Holt is right on concerning this point.
However, the author goes one more step where I have difficulty following along. He lays much of the blame on politicians. Politicians then, like politicians today, had no problem dividing the nation's people when they saw it as benefiting themselves. Us against them is a wonderful tool for getting votes. Retaliation for political slights is human nature. Holt saw these as motivating factors in politicians' behavior during the two decades leading up to war, and it is hard to argue the point. The question is whether more attempts to resolve the differences, rather than make political hay out of them, could have prevented the Civil War. My own suspicion is that the divide was so great, the importance of these principles so crucial, that better behavior by politicians could have done no more than put off the inevitable a bit longer.
Holt makes his case as early as the annexation of Texas. Newly elected Democratic President James Polk unexpectedly upholds his predecessor's policies toward Texas, to the chagrin of many in his own party. It opens the door for a larger than expected slave state. Polk is interested only in expansion, not slavery, but the result is that political divisions, previously based more on party lines, start to become regional. Northerners seethe under Polk's slight and never forget. A few years later, they gather the strength to respond with the Wilmot Proviso, banning slavery in the territories soon to be taken from Mexico. Southerners angrily respond, and the Proviso, though passing the House does not make it through the Senate. Still, it remains the center of a growing factional dispute.
Holt makes us stop at this point. Politicians are stirring up anger over the issue of expansion, but Holt tells us it is really not an issue at all. He cites politicians on both sides as recognizing this is a non-issue. Maintaining free choice on the issue of slavery, as demanded by the South, is of no real consequence as these territories were not about to choose slavery anyway. Beyond East Texas, the arid climate is not suitable for plantations and slaves, and the land's past history is free, Mexico having outlawed slavery years ago. Huge fights are generated, and resentments developed among the populace, over the issue of extending slavery when everyone knows this will not happen. The battles are all for political show, but the divisions they cause are real.
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The Fate of Their Country. A Look Forward and Back
- By Michael Stillman
David Wilmot's "Proviso" caused deep resentment in the South. From the Library of Congress.
Fast forward to 1854. Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushes through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing for popular sovereignty in territory previously barred from having slavery by the Missouri Compromise. There have long been questions why Douglas pushed for this controversial change, though it aligned with his political calling card, "popular sovereignty." Perhaps it was part of Douglas' desire to expand the railroads west, which would bring new settlers, and with new settlers, the desire to form new states, in turn reopening the slavery question. Whatever his intentions, this political move led to enormous discontent in the North, and the bloodshed of bleeding Kansas. Yet even in Kansas, neighbor to slave state Missouri, and the territory with the greatest likelihood of adopting the "peculiar institution," slavery was voted down, despite pro-slavery advocates' attempts to fix the vote. Once again, Holt's thesis that the popular sovereignty issue was much ado about nothing is upheld.
Holt even goes to the point of tearing down the holiest of holies in his attempt to blame political machinations for the Civil War. In his "House Divided" speech, Lincoln raises the specter that advocates of slavery may succeed in spreading it to all of the states, even the old northern ones. Holt sees this as a bit of hyperbole intended to gain northern votes by generating fears of a spread of slavery that he knew would never really happen. Perhaps, but the Dred Scott Decision, fully implemented, would effectively have done just that.
While politicians clearly made the situation worse (don't they always?), I still question whether their acting like statesmen instead would have been sufficient to stop this speeding train. Some differences are too intractable, too divisive, too irresolvable to lend themselves to normal solutions. Lincoln's claim that "a house divided against itself cannot stand" may not have been political rhetoric, but an essential truth. Slavery is too significant an issue, too much of a moral claim upon the consciences of too many people to lend itself to compromise. For too many Northerners, it was morally intolerable. To the Southern economic leadership, it was too much a way of life to give up.
The nation finessed being "half slave, half free" for seven decades, but this was never a permanent solution. Four of America's first five presidents were southerners, and even Washington was a slaveholder. However, the southern founding fathers did not look on slavery as a good thing. The nation was able to compromise on the issue as even in the South it was regarded as no better than a "necessary evil," something economically necessary at the time, but an evil to be eliminated in time by future generations. Washington himself set the tone by freeing his slaves when he died (technically, when Martha died). In the North, states where slavery existed adopted plans for its gradual elimination.
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The Fate of Their Country. A Look Forward and Back
- By Michael Stillman
Stephen A. Douglas' politically motivated Kansas-Nebraska Act sent America in a downspin toward war.
However, something very different and unexpected happened. Rather than working toward its gradual elimination, southern leaders dug in their heels. Where once southern leaders were people like Washington and Jefferson, slaveholders who nonetheless saw the injustice in the institution, half a century later the penultimate southern leader was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was no Washington. The Southern leadership came to defend slavery as some kind of moral good, God's will, better for the slaves, who were inferior beings anyway, unworthy of human rights. Rather than a necessary evil, slavery had come to be regarded as a good, to be preserved forever in the South and spread through the land. Meanwhile, abolitionists forced Northerners to stop looking the other way. They were forced to confront the issue as a moral claim, rather than an economic system. Finally, the Fugitive Slave Acts and the Dred Scott Decision not only forced Northerners to face the issue, it actually required them to take part in enforcing slavery. This, I believe, was fast becoming an untenable situation, one which would have in time required the South to at least begin on a road to emancipation. Living "half slave, half free," I believe, was a temporary solution, not a permanent one.
Would better behavior by politicians, perhaps sufficient to delay the outbreak of war, have led to the South finding its own way to emancipation? I doubt it. Post-war history suggests otherwise. The century of Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, discrimination, poll taxes and literacy tests, schoolhouse door stands and church bombings, implies not. It took a century to bring civil rights to the south, and even that only came through force. I doubt that the changes necessary to eliminate slavery would have come soon enough on their own to prevent a violent confrontation North vs. South no matter how politicians had behaved. There really is no midpoint when it comes to freedom. Compromise was only a delay, not a solution, and delay is only successful if there is an agreeable compromise on the horizon. There was none.
That said, Holt's arguments about politicians dividing the country for their own benefit is still a critically important observation for America today. Today's "wedge" issues are far less clear moral demands on such large segments of the population than slavery. Issues like flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the like cause divisions, but not ones many Americans are prepared to go to war over. Nonetheless, politicians are adept at using these for political gain, even where they have little practical impact. We may not go to war over these politically created issues, but we become divided, and as a divided nation, we are weaker at fending off threats from others. Politicians may not lead us into another Civil War, but they may make us weaker in an era when we need to be strong to survive. Holt's message could do more to save us today than it could have in the times about which he wrote.
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