American Civil War

American Civil War - Causes.

Historians customarily write about past events as if each one occurred in isolation, neatly encapsulated in a sealed container, or chapter." (Potter 1977, 177.) So wrote historian David Potter, whose multi-faceted approach to America's political history weaves together historical fact with social significance. At play in American reality from the middle of the 1850s onward were a variety of divisive issues that tore the country to the quick; political tension, nativism, geography, demography, immigration, legal concerns, inscription, economy, and the slavery on which the nation's fiscal viability rested. Nat Turner's Rebellion, John Brown's Raid, the Know-Nothing movement, and the Dred Scott decision all fueled the national schism, adding to the pre-existing tension between the Whigs and Republicans as, suddenly, the nation was turned on its head and split down the center. The Confederate/Union schism perpetuated the already heated political temperature, funneling the nation into its own Civil War, and emerging as a Union-led United States of America.

The American Civil War posited the Confederate States of America against the northern states tied together as the Union, throwing all of the border states into new sociopolitical angst.

While the war began officially in 1861, after the eleven southern states' pronouncement of secession the previous year, the real problems had already taken control of the country years earlier. Before the ignition of bloody battle, the American nation was already divided geographically, highlighting the Northeast, Upper South, and Deep South, in the newly posited "slave states" and "free states." While moral opposition to slavery had long existed, the independence of the states and the economic necessity of cheap labor further distinguished the already divergent economies and societies between the states that characterized the mid-nineteenth century. Sectionalism boomed, and the only legal basis for discussion between the regionalized northern Union and southern Confederacy was the Constitution.

Until then, the Constitution was able to provide a cohesive legal center for political means, putting to work the judicial center of the American triumvirate with the help of the justices - particularly Justice B. Taney, whom Potter asserts as a major driving force in the Dred Scott decision that would so color the political landscape of its time. However, the growing nation put the Constitution to its test, and it soon proved ineffective in the regulation of conflict and visions for the rapidly expanding nation. Where moral arguments in opposition to slavery had played an important role on the international spectrum and in growing urban centers, particularly in the Northeast, the new party loyalties and growing significance of national unity played heavy on the legal keel.

Mass democracy came to the forefront of Northern politics in the 1940s, challenging the hackneyed two-party tradition. Polarized political separations highlighted socio-economic concerns, stressed by the industrial concerns McPherson addresses in Battle Cry of Freedom. He attributes the sectionalization of the American landscape to the cultural oppositions that further galvanized specific economic theories in different parties, particularly as it was witnessed on the industrial front. With economics as a driving catalyst, the manufacturing capabilities that differed so greatly in the North and the South escalated the hostility between the two warring camps. More importantly though, the traditional separation of politics in the 1850s, evidenced particularly by the border states like New Jersey, rapidly eroded what historical stability existed in the United States.

As today, the divisive nature of polarized politics brought the country to a political precipice; unlike today, however, the threat and its answer were internal. Historians agree, particularly Gillette and Potter, that the political involvement of the average land-owning, male citizen were critical to the social tapestry. Politics was big-business, and the characters and spectacles it incorporated into its fold were only part of the push for values and interests it fed. Additionally, religious revivalism fostered its own set of political ideals that led to a record turnout at political rallies in 1856. (Potter 1973, 186.) 1854 witnessed an emergence of new parties onto the scene, further depleting the stability of the standard two party system with a deluge of unique options, like Republicans, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings, Hard Shell Deomcrats, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, and even Maine Lawites. The options available to the average citizen were nearly unlimited, offering a chance of political assertion in a personal fashion but undermining the power of the central government as the two-party system for which it was built was left in the lurch.

Among the most important of the newly birthed parties was that of the Republicans. Convinced that the society of the North was far superior than its Confederate peers to the South, Charles Sumner and other unionists embraced each other after the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. As the Act was cemented, and the Missouri Compromise thus repealed in favor of popular sovereignty governing slavery, political leaders throughout the country redrew their organizational lines. Henry Wilson declared the Whig Party dead; Wade, Chase, and Sumner called for the opposition to the Nebraska Act to join arms. At the head, Horace Greeley and the Tribune called for the birth of a new political party in the North.

In the historically hallowed halls of a America's traditional Congregational Church on February 28, 1854, thirty opponents to the Nebraska Act decided the creation of a new political party, dubbing it the Republican cause. Throughout the summer, the Republican Party spread throughout the Northern states. While they did, the political middle that opposed the Act simply called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise or a lock on the expansion of slavery.

Sectional tensions," wrote Gillette, "which ultimately led to war, escalated sharply following January 4, 1854, when Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed a bill authorizing settlers of the Nebraska country to decide by popular vote whether to allow slavery there. Since 1820, the Missouri Compromise had excluded slavery from this region. Douglas's bill challenged the prohibition and reopened the controversy over the expansion of slavery. That expansion threatened to upset the delicate balance between the free North and the slave South." (Gillette, 26.)

At the same time, political radicals advocated loudly for abolition and the end of the Fugitive Slave Laws, pushing the apolitical and undecided further to the blind-eyed, more central Know Nothing Campaign.

Stephen Douglas, a mainstay of the Democratic regime, soon began to ignore the republicans and instead focus on the political threat posed by the Know-Nothings. Nevertheless, the Republican party pushed forward in growth; it appealed to the middle-class as a base of support and extolled the virtuous life of free labor. Their Tory compatriots overseas were an earlier prototype of the Republican party; imperialist and cosmopolitan, yet socially intolerant. They called for unbound temperance and abolitionist legislation, while the Democratic party issued a tone of cultural pluralism and local autonomy quite to the contrary. The Republicans embodied a so-called "Protestant Ethos," one that, while losing in its executive assertion, still proffered a major challenge to President Buchanan once in office.

In contrast to the political ploy proffered by John Brown's Raid in The Impending Crisis, Potter strives to establish James Buchanan as in inextricably significant political character. While other historians have thrown the president by-the-by, Potter's revisionist approach allows for a view of the president that sheds new light on the Republican party.

Through his analysis, the Republicans blithely manipulated their platforms, using a political facade to falsely win over their nativist counterparts and even the Know-Nothings. Buchanan posed the only feasible alternative to Fremont, the Republican candidate. "Wide Awake" clubs and chants of "Free soil, free labor, free men, Fremont!" put the Confederacy and its supports, even those unsure of their abolitionist/slavery opinions, in clear-cut opposition; Buchanan, in turn, benefited by highest office.

Sectional tensions were thrown into fast relief with political episodes like the Nullifaction Crisis as the war grew closer. The Southern-sympathetic Democratic party was well-represented in Federal interests, while the party gained control of all three branches. Slaveholders enjoyed untethered prosperity, but the economic growth witnessed in the South was magnified in the north and in some border territories with pro-abolitionist sentiment and anti-Democratic ideals. Expansion westward, international political assertion of the Ostend Manifesto, and even the agrarian principles of Jeffersonian Democracy were brought to a new end with the landmark election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Lincoln came of age in the era of burgeoning free labor movements in the North that posed an ideological threat to the Southern plantation system. In his earlier work, Potter recognized this ending in the problem of the family farm, expressing its death as "inevitable." (Potter 1973, 187.) The geographic differences as well as uneven demographics, perpetuated by the influx of immigrants in the North, meant that the large-scale commercial farms of the South posed some question of economic insecurity to the small-farm of the north, although he ultimately trumpeted the agricultural concern as one of slavery and moral issues. In such narrow sight, McPherson and Potter isolate these issues as social and slavery-based, but Jersey Blue illuminates the more accurate question of timing. In many ways, the how of the evolution of the Civil War is a pseudo-chicken-and-egg question; which issue supported the other? Did the slave labor of the South spawn the abolition rampant throughout Union ideology or did the economics of one-sided success and agricultural threat pose a fundamental insecurity system? New Jersey highlighted the road in between. "Let the south be protected in all her rights but let the rights of the North also be respected." (Gillette, 27.)

The country stood divided, and while the North stood strong knowing its military capabilities were powerful and comforted by the nobility and justice in its ideals, the economic tensions between the North and South were irreparably compromised. The plantation system that defined the structure of Southern Society posited the white, land-and-slave owning men at the top of the system, with the slaves at the bottoms and the "plain folk" making up the rungs of the ladder in an external market economy. The economic driving force of the north would have comforted the destitute middle class of the south, but cultural differences made imperious the popularity of a wide Union movement in the Deep South. Instead, the cotton country was rife with militant defense of slavery, even when the South became increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods and the commercial services required to operate the large plantations of the 1850s.

At the same time, while southerners expropriated academic and then-scientific knowledge to advance their purposes, the cotton industry boomed. The stakes were getting higher, and the tension was undeniable. Each state had to take sides. In New Jersey, where Southern affiliation was reputed, the battle was real and multi-faceted. "New Jerseyans feared that the mistrust between the North and South would break the bonds holding the Union together." (Gillette, 27.) Their fear was well-placed; sectional divides took new form, and Lincoln was forced to choose sides, ultimately forced to denounce the institutions and ideologies key to the Southern way of life.

Mass politics, the much-criticized social fabric of the south, split parties, and the Industrial Revolution took the country by storm. In 1857, the tensions leading up to the war were brought to a new head, as polarized parties became more vitriolic in their ideological battle cries as the Dred Scott case took shape. Dred Scott v. Sanford brought a new contention to the forefront of American government; no longer was the split multi-political, no longer was it North-South, but now the very lifeblood of the American system - the protection of its Constitution - was put under shaky scope. The Dred Scott case came to be a fundamental cause of the Civil war, and later the source of ratification for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

Scott was an American slave who was taken first to Illinois then on to Minnesota and Missouri. Although his last state was a slave state, the first two were free, and after his master's death, he sued for his own freedom. A lower Missouri court gave him his freedom, but the Missouri Supreme Court disagreed and remanded the trial. Summarily, Scott filed suit in federal court, was denied his freedom, and with great conviction and faith in the legal system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision ruled in favor of the slaveholders, establishing that no Negroes, including those freed, could ever be citizens of the United States. In fact, it argued that they were "beings of an inferior order" excluded by the phrase "all men" in the Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution. (Potter 1977, 281.) Potter focuses his attention on the Dred Scott case on the Supreme Court Justice who penned its decision, Roger B. Taney. He arguest that, "Taney's valuable contributions to American Constitutional development remained unorganized because of the Dred Scott decision," despite his long tenure. (Potter 1977, 290.) Additionally, he added, "probably no other decision history affected the daily lives of so few people." (Potter 1977, 291.)