Part I

The War and Its Causes

In this part . . .

This part gives you an understanding of the times in the United States that led to the outbreak of war. Wars, especially civil wars, just don’t happen on their own. They result from a complex relationship of events, ideas, and passions. Civil wars, because of their character, are unique in the history of warfare and have long-lasting consequences. Today, people in the United States continue to experience the consequences of the Civil War.

Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Taking a look at the big picture

Defining a “civil war”

Understanding the distinction between North and South

T oday, different sections of the country have interests and priorities that compete with the interests and priorities of other sections. These conflicts are resolved through politics (usually congressional deal making).

In the 1850s, the process for resolving these disputes was the same as it is today. However, the differences between sections of the country were so great 150 years ago that the country’s future was in danger. Peace depended upon compromise and conciliation between congressional leaders. This chapter examines the sectional differences that led to such a dangerous situation and provides some background to the sectional controversies that led to the Civil War.

The Big Picture: War and Politics

Wars have many causes. No one should ever forget that wars are fought for political reasons and objectives. Essentially, people or nations go to war to protect a vital interest, defend territory from an aggressor, or to achieve a moral purpose (such as defending the innocent and punishing an evil). The Civil War included all of these rationales. Each side used all three justifications for fighting the other during the four years of war. And, interestingly enough, each side had a strong, valid, substantial argument. Ironically, the war never really decided who was ultimately right or wrong.

What do I mean by North and South?

To keep things clear, here is what this book means when speaking of North and South in regional or sectional terms:

The North consists of the states north of the Ohio River: Minnesota, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massa- chussetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut).

The South consists of the eight states south of the Ohio River (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky), in addition to Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and the three states west of the Mississippi River and below Missouri — Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

What’s a civil war?

You hear the word civil in such terms as civil rights, civilian, and civil liberty. All are related to the concept of a common citizen, a member of society. So, a civil war is a war between citizens representing different groups or sections of the same country. Civil wars don’t just happen. They are unique in the history of warfare and usually quite difficult to start. After they do start, though, they are quite bloody and often extreme. People have to be pretty angry and threatened to take this kind of drastic step.

The setting: 1850–1860

To understand the causes of the Civil War, you must be aware of some important events in American history — from roughly 1850 (the Missouri Compromise) to 1860 (the election of Abraham Lincoln) — that culminated in the secession of 11 Southern states. Don’t let the academic-sounding language fool you, though; the point of this chapter is to illustrate how specific events during this decade raised fears and made Americans so angry at their countrymen that they were willing to kill each other as a result.

The North and South: Two Different Worlds

Until the expansion of the population into the rich lands of the lower South, slavery had been a dying institution. The North had slaves, but freed most of them (except New Jersey) because the institution was too expensive to maintain. With the growing demand for cotton on the world market, the availability of an easy way to separate seeds (via the cotton gin), and a vast new region now available for growing the crop, slavery became essential for the South’s economic future.

In the nineteenth century, before mechanization, the growing and harvesting of cotton required the labor of many people. From the time the seed is put into the ground until the time the cotton boll is picked, run through a gin, and baled, the crop requires almost constant attention. To produce any sizable cotton crop, slaves were essential. As the most available source of labor, slaves themselves became more and more valuable, allowing fewer and fewer people to own them. Out of 51/2 million Southerners in 1860, only 46,000 planters owned 20 slaves, less than 3,000 owned 100 or more slaves, and only 12 Southerners owned 500 or more slaves. Thus, only a tiny minority of people owned slaves in the South. Why, then, did the South feel tied so closely to slavery?

The rarified air of highly sophisticated historical minds harbors many intricate pet theories to account for the South’s connection with slavery, but this book focuses on the two most likely reasons. First, the slave owners were the men of social and political power. They were the ones who ran the state legislatures and elected men of their kind to Congress. The second reason is that slave owning became the road to status and success for Southerners who were ambitious for wealth and power. A small farmer, if he was so inclined (and many were not), could make enough money from a small cotton farm to buy one or two slaves. With this extra manpower, he could put more land into production, make more profit in the booming cotton market, and buy more slaves. With 20 slaves, he could become a planter, and rise to social and political influence. The father of Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, began this way and became one of the richest and most powerful men in Mississippi. The South chose to remain an agricultural region; therefore, it had strong reasons for seeing that slavery as an institution continued without limits or interference.

The North, during this same time period, was setting the stage for the industrial revolution that would transform the nation in the next hundred years. Technology harnessed to both agriculture and industry, plus a huge influx of immigrants to serve as a ready labor force, created a new dynamic economy. Textile mills (run on Southern cotton), steam engines, railroads and canals, and iron and steel factories came to dominate the landscape of New England, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. In 1860, the North held about 140,000 factories, which employed nearly a million and a half workers who produced almost $2 billion worth of goods. New cities in the northwest such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee became the engines of change in the national economy. St. Louis and New Orleans became the centers of a dynamic interregional trade. Within this atmosphere of economic change and readjustment, the controversy of slavery grew to become first a political, then a moral reform issue.

Wilmot’s Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso was a resolution made by an obscure Pennsylvania Congressman, David Wilmot, who, in 1846, attached the proviso (a conditional clause inserted into legislation or a contract) to an appropriations bill. Wilmot’s proviso stated that any territory acquired in the war with Mexico would not be open to slavery. The bill passed the House of Representatives, where the North had a majority, but it died in the Senate, where the South held the balance of power. The controversy over the Wilmot Proviso illustrated to both sections how important po-litical control in Congress was to furthering their interests. The proviso became a political hot potato throughout the 1850s.

The Opposing Sides

The road to war began with a political struggle between the North and South over control of territory in the west not yet organized into states. Most of this territory had been won from Mexico after the Mexican-American War in 1846, and Northerners and Southerners disagreed over the future organization of this territory into states. Southerners desired and expected to be able to bring slaves into the new territory. Slavery was protected in the Constitution (the Fifth Amendment protected property). Slaves were legally considered property; therefore, the extension of slave owners and slaves into the new territories was legal and could not be constrained. Northerners, among them a vocal minority of New England and Midwest abolitionists — those who opposed slavery on moral grounds — sought to reform America by having the institution abolished. The abolitionists felt that containing slavery to only where it currently existed (so that it would eventually die out) was a step in the right direction. As long as slavery existed, they believed, it represented a danger to the health of the republic. Allowing slavery to expand would only lengthen the life of the institution. These abolitionists grew ever more vocal in opposing slavery as a moral evil — tainting not only the slaves, but the owner as well. In response, Southerners increasingly looked to Congress for protection of their rights under the Constitution.

Playing a Part in the Controversy: The Constitution

As stated in the Constitution, seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned by population. Prior to the Civil War, slaves were considered 3/5 of a person in determining total population of a state. Why 3/5 of a person? In the 1780s, the total White and Black population of the South outnumbered Northern Whites, which meant that the South would essentially always have a permanent majority in the House of Representatives. To prevent this, Northerners claimed that Blacks should not be counted. Southerners would not accept this idea because, without the Blacks being counted in some way, they would become the permanent minority in the House of Representatives! Eventually, North and South compromised by deciding to count Blacks as 3/5 of a person for determining representation in the House (Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution — later amended after the war).

Since the founding of the United States, the South had maintained a strong political leadership of the country. This situation often insulated the South and kept the slavery question out of the national dialogue, while also allowing Southerners to shape the national agenda. Over time, however, the growing population (nearly half of which lived across the Appalachian Mountains in 1860) gave Northern states proportionately more representatives in the House. In addition, between 1846 and 1855, three million immigrants came to America; nearly 90 percent of them settled in states that did not have slaves.

Struggling for Power

Southerners sought to preserve the political status quo. Between 1830 and 1850, however, the political power that allowed them to do so began slipping away. By the 1850s the Senate became the only legislative body on which the South could rely to maintain its power. Because every state had two senators, regardless of population (so says Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution), Southern senators could block anti-slavery legislation coming from the usually pro-Northern majority in the House of Representatives. Increasingly, bills were introduced into the House proposing all sorts of measures to end slavery or limit its expansion any further. So, for the ten years between 1850 and 1860, the North and the South waged a political struggle to gain an advantage or maintain the current balance of power by bringing in new states allied with one region or the other.

Amassing states: The political stakes involved

The political stakes were high for both sides (something like the end of a Monopoly game): Whoever had the most states at the end of the contest would have a majority of representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Whichever side could do this could dictate the agenda for the country. For the South, political power meant ironclad protection for slavery and the agrarian way of life. For the North, gaining control of the country meant securing progress and prosperity through an urban-industrial-agricultural alliance based on free labor. As the differences between the sections sharpened, neither side believed it could afford to give up power or control. Despite many other differences between the two sections, the most obvious and critical fact that differentiated one region from the other was the existence of slavery.

Thus, the political battle increasingly centered on control of Congress. As long as the number of states in the Union remained the same, there would always be a relative balance between slave and free states. As the population of the United States moved westward and unsettled territories filled with people, however, new states were being created and admitted into the Union. The existence of these new states raised the political stakes. The focus of sectional conflict soon rested on determining which new states would be admitted as slave states or non-slave (free) states.

Entering the Union: The politics of compromise, 1850

As new settlers poured into California seeking gold in 1849, the debate began in Congress over how the new state should enter the Union. At this time, Congress was equally balanced in representation between pro-slave and anti-slave states. Thirty years earlier, Congress had avoided a crisis by admitting two states, one allowing slavery (Missouri) and without slavery (Maine). However, in this instance, California’s admission as a new state would tip the balance in favor of one region or another, most likely for the North. Some Northerners tried to use the admission of California as the means to eliminate slavery from all territories; Southerners in response spoke darkly of disunion.

California: The Compromise of 1850

The original outline of the compromise surrounding California’s admission was the product of three of the greatest senators in American history — Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Under the compromise, California entered the Union as a free state (no slavery allowed). This pleased Northerners, but they were shocked to find that California’s elected representatives supported the South. The compromise also allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to be organized as states in the future with or without slavery, depending on what the state constitution said. The South, initially pleased, soon discovered that very few people, let alone slaves, were entering into these territories; certainly not enough to organize either one as a state for some time. Eventually, both territories did allow slavery to exist, but did so on the brink of war in 1860. See Figure 1-1.

The Fugitive Slave Law

The compromise also beefed up enforcement of another Article of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2), which mandated that states return fugitive slaves to their owners. The enhanced law gave Federal officers the power to capture suspected fugitive slaves and provided severe penalties for those who harbored or protected a fugitive slave. At the time, the Fugitive Slave Law was seen as a throwaway concession to the South. After all, it was part of the Constitution and would not amount to anything. (Check out Chapter 2 to see how this law became an underlying point of great tension between the North and South in a matter of nine years.)

D.C. is free

The last part of the compromise was largely symbolic, a throwaway concession to Northerners who were offended that slavery existed within the District of Columbia, an area under Federal control. A new law mandated that slaves could not be brought into the District of Columbia to be bought or sold. On the surface, this appeared to be a clear moral victory for anti-slavery activists. The fine print, however, revealed that slaves already within the District of Columbia could continue to be bought and sold.

What did the compromise do?

The compromise gave each section what appeared to be a temporary advantage, but in the long run, it satisfied no one. Most importantly, though, it did stave off a crisis between the North and South and gave the nation a politically acceptable solution to the divisive issue of slavery in the new territories of the West.

In the long run, however, the Compromise of 1850 really accomplished very little, except to frustrate everyone and whet their appetites for another confrontation — this time to settle some scores and win a clear victory for their section.