Origins of the American Civil War
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The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex problems of slavery, expansion, sectionalism, parties, and politics of the antebellum era. As territorial expansion forced the United States to confront the question of whether new areas of settlement were to be slave or free, as the power of the slaveholders in national politics waned, and as the North and the South developed starkly divergent economies and societies, the divisive issues of sectionalism catapulted the nation into the Civil War (1861-1865).
Overview
See also the Timeline of key events leading up to the Civil War.
On the eve of the Civil War, the United States was a nation divided into four quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system and (in some areas) declining economic fortunes as well; and the Southwest, a booming frontier-like region with expanding cotton economy.
The economic and social changes across the nation's geographical regions - based on free labor in the Northeast and Northwest and on slave labor in the Southeast and Southwest - underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by the mid-nineteenth century in the North and in the South. But by the 1840s and 1850s sectional tensions would change in their nature and intensity.
With the emergence of the United States Republican Party as the nation's first major sectional political party by the mid-1850s, politics became the stage on which sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery in the West was played out. The acquisition of new lands in the 1840s catapulted the nation into civil war.
Before the Civil War, the Constitution provided the basis to define the terms in which debate over the future of government would continue, and had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. But many other factors had changed from 1820 to 1860 that would bring about civil war rather than the gentlemanly compromises of the Missouri Compromise or the Compromise of 1850, including the rise of mass democracy in the North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, and increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies.
Through the agency of the Republican Party (bolstered by the panic of 1857 and its skilled radical politicians and activists), the industrializing North was committed to the ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism, and the resolution of sectional conflict - culminating with the American Civil War - was perhaps the nation's principal social revolution, a watershed in the rise of modern industrial society in the United States.
Depression sharpened economic and class divides in a society undergoing both a sectional confrontation and an economic revolution. In other words, the realignment of cleavages and cooperation among geographical regions, social classes, and party affiliations in politics between the depression of 1857 and the election of 1860 led to the election of a president so objectionable to Southern slave-owing interests that it would trigger Southern secession, and consequently a war to save the integrity of the Union.
Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery
The rise of abolitionism
For details see the main article abolitionism.
Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan
The anti-slavery movement of the 1830s and 1840s could not have emerged without the transformation of Northern society. The era saw stark changes in American life, which was undergoing the early stages of industrial development and urbanization. Anti-slavery movements gained momentum along with a fervor of reformism in the 1830s and 1840s. Often, the era's reformist impulse was one of nostalgia for a bygone era. However, it also inspired efforts to create or streamline new institutions of social order and control suited to the changing realities of a new era. For example, reform movements were the impetus for the prison- and asylum-building of the era.
To understand the rise of anti-slavery, it is important to get a sense of the how the "peculiar institution," as it was called, was perceived among most Northern activists at the time. The legacy of the Second Great Awakening, which largely stressed the reform of individuals, was still relatively fresh in the American memory. Consequently, the principal reform movements in the North were tinged with the ethos of Yankee Protestantism. While including many conflicting ideologies, the reformism of the second quarter of the nineteenth century largely focused on transforming the human personality by internalizing a sense of discipline, order, and restraint. Because of this, reformers of the era generally blamed poor Northern factory workers, alcoholics, and criminals for their own misery. If they were impoverished, it was because they wasted their meager salaries on alcohol (not because of their wages that were barely above subsistence levels) or failed to curb their sexual passions and bore too many children.
With the same mentality, most abolitionists - William Lloyd Garrison the most influential among them - urged internalized self-discipline. They condemned slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and the fruits of one's labor, but defined freedom as more than a simple lack of restraint. The truly free man, in the eyes of antebellum reformers, was one who imposed restraints upon himself.
The context of the changing structures of the American society and economy was noteworthy. The structural changes of the era included the rise of an integrated economic and political structure, the shift from labor-intensive toward capital-intensive production, and the spread of market-oriented capitalist relations. The socio-economic pressures reaching the surface required a value system viewing continuous social change as natural and desirable.
Social mobility was strongly intertwined with the era's economic development. As the Industrial Revolution advanced not only in the United States but on a worldwide scale, property rights, consumer goods, and laborers were gradually breaking free from the traditional bonds and restraints of their old agarian societies (e.g., aristocratic traditions, quasi-feudal arrangements, and personalistic and other multi-bonded relations). It is thus interesting to note that in the 1830s and 1840s, the rise of the anti-slavery movement coincided with the height of Jacksonian democracy, feeding on the same "anti-aristocratic" and egalitarian ethos. Anti-slavery men exalted "free labor," meaning labor working because of incentive instead of coercion, labor with education, skill, the desire for advancement, and also the freedom to move from job to job according to the changing demands of the marketplace. Behind such expectations, the changing economic structures of the era helped to encourage the growing appeal of "free labor" ideals.
Consequently, most of the reform movements of the era focused attention in one way or another on a loose set of principles that attempted to transform the lifestyle and work habits of labor, helping workers respond to the new demands of an industrializing, capitalistic society. And mainstream abolitionists were among those helping wage laborer adjust to - rather than challenge - the demands of capitalism. For example, relations between the American Anti-Slavery Society - with its Yankee Protestant membership base - and the new, radical unions emerging in the North were by no means cordial during the 1830s and 1840s.
Only a minority of the era's reformers straddled both camps, such as radical English immigrant George Henry Evans (editor of the New York Workingman's Advocate), and the utopian socialists of the period. Small artisans - often subject to declining fortunes and hostile to big manufactures - played a central role in these groups. But prevailing abolitionist sentiment viewed those who advanced the concerns of working class toilers with scorn. Mainstream Abolitionists despised slaveholders, but rarely voiced concerns with the often-cruel working conditions to which free laborers were subjected. From their standpoint, starving child laborers, for example, were merely less more fortunate in their pursuits, or less exalted in their situation.
Instead, mainstream abolitionists were more often cordial with reform movements with another vision of society, such as the creation of prisons and asylums, temperance, and relief for the "deserving poor" (with the caveat distinguishing them from the "undeserving poor"). According to most abolitionists and members of related crusades, this was to be done through the purification of society from sins such as drunkenness, prostitution, ignorance, and above all slavery.
It would also entail inculcating in those not conforming to the ethos of middle class Yankee Protestantism (especially Southerners and the working class Irish in the North) the Protestant ethos of industry, piety, sobriety, thrift, and self-improvement through self-discipline. In this sense, abolitionists shared the fervent enthusiasm for opportunity and "free labor" common among the country's rapidly growing bourgeoisie. To many believers in the free-labor ideal, the promise of upward social mobility (opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control one's own labor) was central to American democracy.
The rise of the "free soil" movement
See also Free soil movement.
Frederick Douglas noted, "The cry of Free Man was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white."
The assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the reformers of the thirties and forties anticipated the political and ideological ferment of the 1850s. A surge of working class Irish and German Catholic immigration provoked reactions among many Northern Whigs, as well as Democrats. But nativism and anti-slavery were not the only strong forces in the 1850s. Along with anti-slavery, a powerful temperance movement emerged, achieving the adoption in Maine in 1851 of a law against the sale of liquor.
In the Northwest, although farm tenancy was increasing, the number of free farmers was still double that of farm laborers and tenants. Moreover, although the expansion of the factory system was undermining the economic independence of the small craftsman and artisan, industry in this region, still one largely of small towns, was still concentrated in small-scale enterprises. Arguably, social mobility was on the verge of contracting in the urban centers of the North, but long-cherished ideas of opportunity, "honest industry," and "toil" were at least close enough in time to lend plausibility to the free labor ideology.
In the rural and small-town North, the picture of Northern society (framed by the ethos of "free labor") corresponded to a large degree with reality. Propelled by advancements in transportation and communication, especially steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs, the two decades before the Civil War saw the rapid expansion of the population and economy of the Northwest. Combined with the rise of Northeastern and export markets for their products, the social standing of farmers in the region substantially improved. The small towns and villages that emerged as the Republican Party's heartland showed every sign of vigorous expansion. Their vision for an ideal society was of small-scale capitalism, with white American laborers entitled to the chance of upward mobility opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control their own labor. Free-soilers demanded that slave labor and the plantation system should be excluded from the Western plains to guarantee the predominance there of the free farmer and to prevent any extension of the political power of the slaveholders.
Opposition to the 1847 Wilmot Proviso helped to consolidate the "free-soil" forces. Next year, Radical New York Democrats and anti-slavery Whigs held a convention at Buffalo, New York in August, forming the Free-Soil party. The party supported former president Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams for president and vice president, respectively. The party opposed the expansion of slavery into territories where it had not yet existed, such as Oregon and the ceded Mexican territory.
Relating Northern and Southern positions on slavery to basic differences in labor systems, but insisting on the role of culture and ideology in coloring these differences, Eric Foner's groundbreaking Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) went beyond the economic determinism of Charles Beard (a leading historian of the 1930s). Foner emphasized the importance of free labor ideology to Northern opponents of slavery, pointing out that the moral concerns of the abolitionists were not the dominant sentiments in the North. Foner demonstrated that most Northerners (including Lincoln) opposed slavery largely because they feared it might spread to the North and threaten the position of free white laborers.
In this sense, Republican radicals and the abolitionists were able to unleash powerful emotions in the North through a broader commitment to "free labor" principles. The "Slave Power" idea had a far greater appeal to Northern self-interest than arguments based on the plight of black slaves in the South. As Frederick Douglass noted, "The cry of Free Man was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white."