Causes of the American Civil War: Politics, Slavery, and Sectionalism

Introduction: A Nation on the Brink

"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, economics, 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. 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 pitted the Confederate States of America against the northern states joined 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 hold 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 drawn "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 of 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 had been able to provide a cohesive legal center for political discourse, putting to work the judicial branch of the American triumvirate with the help of its justices — particularly Justice Roger B. Taney, whom Potter identifies as a major driving force behind 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 regulating conflict and competing visions for a rapidly expanding country. Where moral arguments against slavery had played an important role on the international spectrum and in growing urban centers, particularly in the Northeast, new party loyalties and the growing significance of national unity weighed heavily on the legal framework.

Sectionalism, Geography, and the Collapse of the Two-Party System

Mass democracy came to the forefront of Northern politics in the 1850s, challenging the entrenched two-party tradition. Polarized political separations highlighted socioeconomic concerns, stressed by the industrial issues James McPherson addresses in Battle Cry of Freedom. He attributes the sectionalization of the American landscape to cultural oppositions that further galvanized specific economic theories within different parties, particularly as witnessed on the industrial front. With economics as a driving catalyst, the vastly different manufacturing capabilities of the North and the South escalated hostility between the two warring camps. More importantly, the traditional separation of politics in the 1850s — evidenced particularly by 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 — particularly Gillette and Potter — agree that the political involvement of the average land-owning male citizen was critical to the social fabric. Politics was big business, and the characters and spectacles it incorporated 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 record turnout at political rallies in 1856. (Potter 1973, 186.)

The year 1854 witnessed the emergence of new parties onto the scene, further depleting the stability of the standard two-party system with a deluge of unique options: Republicans, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings, Hard Shell Democrats, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, and even Maine Lawites. The options available to the average citizen were nearly unlimited, offering a chance for personal political assertion but undermining the power of the central government, as the two-party system for which it was built was left in disarray.

Sectional tensions were thrown into sharp relief by political episodes such as the Nullification Crisis as the war grew closer. The Southern-sympathetic Democratic Party was well-represented in federal interests and gained control of all three branches of government. Slaveholders enjoyed unchecked prosperity, but the economic growth witnessed in the South was surpassed in the North and in some border territories with pro-abolitionist sentiment and anti-Democratic ideals. Expansion westward, the international political assertion embodied in the Ostend Manifesto, and even the agrarian principles of Jeffersonian Democracy were all 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 tension in the problem of the family farm, expressing its decline as "inevitable." (Potter 1973, 187.) Geographic differences and uneven demographics, perpetuated by the influx of immigrants in the North, meant that the large-scale commercial farms of the South posed questions of economic insecurity for the small farms of the North. Nevertheless, he ultimately framed the agricultural concern as one of slavery and moral issues. In this narrower view, McPherson and Potter isolate these issues as social and slavery-based; but Gillette's Jersey Blue illuminates the more precise question of timing. In many ways, the how of the Civil War's evolution is a pseudo-chicken-and-egg question: which issue supported the other? Did the slave labor of the South spawn the abolitionism rampant throughout Union ideology, or did the economics of one-sided success and agricultural threat pose a fundamental sense of insecurity? 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 was buoyed by its military capabilities and the perceived nobility of its ideals, the economic tensions between the North and South were irreparably strained. The plantation system that defined the structure of Southern society placed white, land-and-slave-owning men at the top, with enslaved people at the bottom and the "plain folk" occupying the rungs of the ladder in an external market economy. The economic dynamism of the North might have offered relief to the destitute middle class of the South, but cultural differences made a broad Union movement deeply unpopular in the Deep South. Instead, the cotton country was rife with militant defense of slavery, even as the South grew 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, as Southerners marshaled 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 ultimately forced to denounce the institutions and ideologies central to the Southern way of life.

The Rise of the Republican Party and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

Among the most important of the newly formed parties was the Republican Party. Convinced that Northern society was far superior to its Confederate counterpart in the South, Charles Sumner and other unionists rallied together following the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. As the Act was cemented and the Missouri Compromise was 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 all opponents of the Nebraska Act to join forces. At the forefront, Horace Greeley and the Tribune called for the creation of a new political party in the North.

In the historically significant halls of America's traditional Congregational Church on February 28, 1854, thirty opponents of the Nebraska Act resolved to create a new political party, dubbing it the Republican cause. Throughout the summer, the Republican Party spread across the Northern states. Meanwhile, the political middle — those who opposed the Act but had not yet fully committed — simply called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise or a prohibition on the further 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 loudly advocated for abolition and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Laws, pushing the apolitical and undecided further toward the more centrist Know-Nothing campaign. Stephen Douglas, a mainstay of the Democratic regime, soon began to focus less on the Republicans and more on the political threat posed by the Know-Nothings. Nevertheless, the Republican Party pressed forward; it appealed to the middle class as its base of support and celebrated the virtuous life of free labor. Their Tory counterparts in Britain served as an earlier prototype — imperialist and cosmopolitan, yet socially intolerant. The Republicans called for temperance and abolitionist legislation, while the Democratic Party projected 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 posed a significant challenge to President Buchanan once he assumed office.

In contrast to the political episode of John Brown's Raid as framed in The Impending Crisis, Potter strives to establish James Buchanan as an inextricably significant political figure. While other historians have largely dismissed the president, Potter's revisionist approach sheds new light on both Buchanan and the Republican Party. Through his analysis, the Republicans adroitly manipulated their platforms, using political façade to win over nativist counterparts and even the Know-Nothings. Buchanan posed the only feasible alternative to Frémont, the Republican candidate. "Wide Awake" clubs and chants of "Free soil, free labor, free men, Frémont!" placed the Confederacy and its supporters — even those uncertain of their own positions on abolition and slavery — in clear-cut opposition; Buchanan, in turn, benefited by winning the highest office.

Conclusion

McPherson, Gillette, and Potter all provide a cultural analysis for the causes that led to the Civil War, and despite other issues, their point is clear, if sometimes revisionist. The multi-faceted situation that Lincoln faced when he assumed office was one the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, and the very nature of the American regime was put into question. It was through social and cultural assertion in politics and national policy that the Civil War was born and the ideas so central to American identity were cemented.

The war was not the product of any single cause but of an interlocking web of geographic divisions, economic divergence, political fragmentation, demographic change, and the foundational moral controversy over slavery. From the collapse of the Missouri Compromise and the formation of the Republican Party, to the Dred Scott decision and Lincoln's election, each episode compounded the last — making the eventual conflict, in retrospect, appear as close to inevitable as history allows.

References

Gillette, William. Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–1865. New Brunswick, NJ: 1995.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.

Potter, David M. Division and the Stresses of Reunion. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1973.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.