This entry is a subentry of Civil War (1861 – 65).
The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860 triggered a chain of events that within six months shattered the Union and culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War. The coming to power of a Republican and Northern administration committed to prohibiting the expansion of slavery struck at the vital interests of the slave South; it was the signal eagerly awaited by the proponents of Southern independence to launch a secession movement. Tensions over slavery and the struggles to perpetuate or end the institution that dated back to the incomplete American Revolution of 1776 had now become so polarized along sectional lines that the North and South lacked common ground on which to compromise the issue.
The Roots of Sectional Conflict
The democratic revolution in which the United States gained its independence from Britain rested on a profound paradox. The Revolution produced both the world's leading model of political democracy and one of its greatest slaveholding powers. Freedom for whites coexisted uneasily with bondage for African Americans, some 20 percent of the population. The federal Union crafted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 also embodied this contradiction when the U.S. Constitution recognized the right of a state to regulate slavery within its jurisdiction. Indeed, without this express acknowledgment of their sovereign power over slavery, the slave states would never have joined the proposed Union. Thus, white liberty and black slavery were constitutionally joined in the very creation of the federal Union.
Within a generation of the Revolution, all the states north of Maryland embarked on programs of gradual emancipation. By the early nineteenth century, slavery was almost exclusively a sectional institution confined to the South, home to over 90 percent of American blacks. At the same time as the North was moving away from slavery, the invention of the cotton gin and rising demand in English textile factories for raw cotton were stimulating the westward expansion of slavery throughout the southeastern United States.
As social and economic patterns of development diverged sharply along sectional lines, the South's national share of political power began to slip. From a rough balance of power with the North in 1790, the South held only 42 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives by 1820. Worried over their growing minority status, and enraged over the attempt of the North to force emancipation upon Missouri when it applied for admission as a slave state in 1819, white southerners for the first time threatened secession during the debates that resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The heart of the compromise was the drawing of a line through the Louisiana Purchase territory that prohibited slavery north of the latitude 36°30′ and allowed it to the south.
In addition to proclaiming their right to an equal share of the expanding West, southern proponents of slavery protested protective tariffs that they insisted sacrificed the agricultural export economy of the South on behalf of northern manufacturers. This issue precipitated the sectional crisis of 1832–33 in which South Carolina planters, led by John C. Calhoun, held that a state could constitutionally nullify federal legislation that it determined violated its interests.
President Andrew Jackson forced the Nullifiers to back down, but of greater concern in the 1830s to southerners anxious over the future of slavery was the sudden emergence of an abolitionist movement in the North. Inspired by northern evangelical Protestantism and a belief in the right of African Americans to freedom and self‐betterment, the abolitionists denounced slavery as the nation's greatest moral abomination and urged all Americans to begin immediately the work of emancipation. Skillful at spreading their message, the abolitionists launched a major propaganda campaign in the mid‐1830s and deluged Congress with antislavery petitions.
The agitation of the slavery issue by the abolitionists predisposed many northerners to see in the admission of the slave republic of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 the fearful designs of a conspiracy of slaveholders—the “slave power”—to expand slavery throughout new regions in the West and thereby deprive northern farmers and workers of the opportunity to settle the West for their social and economic advancement. When northern congressmen rallied behind the Wilmot Proviso in 1846 in an effort to bar slavery from any territories gained in the Mexican War, southerners formed their own sectional bloc and forced the ultimate defeat of the proviso. The divisive issue of the expansion of slavery had moved to center stage in American politics and would continue to dominate it through the 1850s.
Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s
Whether measured by rates of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, or the cultural willingness to embrace reforms such as public education aimed at promoting social improvement, the free and slave states were set apart far more significantly by the mid‐nineteenth century than at the birth of the Union. The North was growing and evolving at a more rapid pace than the predominantly agrarian South. Most ominously for slaveholders, a northern majority was forming that viewed slavery as a moral wrong that should be set on the road to extinction. Northerners also now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free labor aspirations of northern society.
Since slavery within the states was protected by the Constitution, antislavery sentiment focused on keeping it out of the territories. Southerners, arguing that the territories were the common property of all the states, insisted on what they deemed their constitutional right to carry slaves into the territories. Furthermore, slaves and land were the major sources of wealth in the South, particularly with the cotton boom. The result was a decade of sectional strife.
A complex sectional agreement, the congressional Compromise of 1850, permitted California to enter the Union as a free state. The remaining land won in the Mexican War was divided into the territories of Utah and New Mexico with no conditions placed on the status of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas‐Nebraska Act reopened the entire controversy. In order to gain essential southern support for his bill organizing the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30′, Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois had to revoke the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. Northerners reacted by charging that the Slave Power was moving to monopolize the territories for slavery at the expense of free labor.
The Whig Party split and collapsed in the storm of northern protest over the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, and a sectionalized Republican Party quickly formed around the core principle of blocking the expansion of slavery. The major Protestant denominations had already split into sectional wings over the slavery issue, and only the Democratic Party now remained as an important national institution that represented northern and southern interests. Democratic unity, however, shattered during the administration of James Buchanan (1857–61). The ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territory further polarized sectional attitudes, and northern Democrats led by Douglas lost the trust of the southern wing of the party when they joined Republicans in blocking the admission of Kansas as a slave state.
The decade came to a close with abolitionist John Brown's raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Brown's unsuccessful attempt to incite a slave rebellion sent paroxysms of fear and anger through the South and touched off rumors of conspiracies and slave uprisings. Brown was hanged, and although the Republicans denounced him as a wild‐eyed fanatic, many white southerners were convinced that the Republican Party was dominated by abolitionists and plotting with them to unleash a bloodbath in the slave states.
Lincoln's Election and the Secession Crisis
Vowing to use federal power both to keep slavery in check and to promote the free labor economy of the North through protective tariffs, subsidies for railroads, and free homesteads in the West, the Republicans ran Abraham Lincoln of Illinois for the presidency in 1860. His victory over three rivals—Stephen Douglas for the Northern Democrats, John C. Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats, and John Bell, the candidate of former Whigs in the Upper South—was achieved with no basis of support in the South. Rather than accept Republican rule, Southern radicals immediately provoked a crisis by organizing a campaign for secession.
Pushing the constitutional doctrine of states' rights to its logical extreme, the secessionists held that individual states retained ultimate sovereignty within the Union and could peacefully leave the Union the same way they had entered it through special state conventions. Rejecting any plan of prior cooperation among the slave states, they pursued a strategy of separate state action, accurately predicting that the momentum of secession would force wavering states to join those that had already gone out.
South Carolina took the lead on 20 December 1860, and within six weeks seven states from the Lower South left the Union. Delegates from these states set up the provisional government of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861. This original Confederacy represented those states with the heaviest concentration of slaves and the highest percentage of white families owning slaves. Planters were in the forefront of secession. What opposition they encountered from the majority of nonslaveholding farmers took the form of cooperationism, the argument that secession should be delayed until a united bloc of Southern states agreed to go out together. The cooperationists polled about 40 percent of the vote in the secession elections, but in the end they followed the leadership of the secessionist planters.
Fort Sumter and the Outbreak of War
Northerners rejected the doctrine of secession. Believing that the Union was sovereign and perpetual, they viewed secession as illegal, indeed, revolutionary. They equated secession with anarchy and feared that it would lead quickly to a fragmentation of the United States and an end to America's mission of serving as a beacon of free government to the rest of the world. Still, no consensus existed on using coercion to force the seceded states back into the Union. In particular, Democrats were against coercion and favored negotiations to heal the sectional rift, even with the continuation of slavery. At the same time, the Unionists in the Upper South who had turned back secession in their slave states had hedged their Unionism by proclaiming that they would resist any Republican use of military force against a seceded state.
When inaugurated on 4 March 1861, Lincoln thus faced a dilemma. If he took no action against the Confederacy, he risked demoralizing his party and subjecting his administration to the same derision that had pilloried the outgoing Buchanan Democrats for standing by while the secessionists broke up the Union. On the other hand, any forceful step against the seceded states threatened to divide the North and drive the Upper South into the Confederacy.
Realizing that he could not afford to be locked into an endless policy of drift and delay, Lincoln decided to take a stand for the Union over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the most visible installation in the Confederacy that was still under federal control. Aware that the garrison at Fort Sumter would be forced to surrender for lack of supplies sometime in early April, he ordered a relief expedition to the fort on 6 April. He stressed that the fort would be supplied “with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.”
Lincoln in effect placed the decision for war in the hands of Confederate authorities. The government of Confederate President Jefferson Davis accepted that burden as the price it had to pay to establish the Confederacy as a sovereign power. On 9 April, Davis ordered Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. Fearful of Union duplicity and anxious to avoid any possibility of having to fight two Union forces at the same time, Davis wanted Sumter in Confederate hands before the relief expedition arrived.
In the predawn hours of 12 April 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. The capture of Fort Sumter occurred on April 13 and Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the fort on 14 April. The next day, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 state militia to put down what he defined as an insurrection. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina scornfully rejected Lincoln's call for troops and joined the Confederacy in the next five weeks. Still, Lincoln now had a Northern majority behind the goal of preserving the Union with force. The Confederacy was cast as the aggressor that had fired the first shot of the Civil War, and the Northern crusade to save the Union persisted through four agonizing years of war.
[See also War: Causes of War.]
Bibliography
- Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy, 1948.
- Kenneth M. Stampp, And War Came, 1950.
- Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 1970.
- William L. Barney, The Road to Secession, 1972.
- Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1973.
- David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
- J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 1978.
- Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 1989.
- Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free, 1992
