An American Experiment in Democracy

He that will apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

FRANCIS BACON¹

The rise of the United States to occupy a continental hegemony in North America is the greatest development of the nineteenth century. The immense development of resources, the construction of towns and cities in such a short period of time, and the setting in place of durable and workable political and judicial institutions were staggering achievements. The forging of a democracy over great distances, over widely varying terrain, and amid environmental contrast, was novel and unprecedented. And the longer the system was able to mature, the firmer and stronger it became. ‘The gentle but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces…. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence’, wrote the historian of the Roman Empire, and his words are equally apposite of the United States in the 1820s.²

This new nation-state had managed to exert a continental hegemony over the virgin territory of North America and had frustrated the efforts of European states to restrict its expansion to that of a coastal client hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains.³ Yet though the security of the United States was reasonably secure by 1796, with penetration into territories which became Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, and a northern frontier resting on the Great Lakes, that security encountered a formidable challenge, and American prestige was bruised by the war of 1812 with Great Britain (which the belated victory at New Orleans in 1815 only partly rectified). Yet her great distance from the focal point of the European balance of power virtually guaranteed American security. American preoccupations were invariably of marginal interest to the European great powers; in 1812–14 Great Britain gave a higher priority to her struggle with Napoleon. And the great space of the North American continent frustrated any predatory European invader rash enough to attack the United States. It was immensely difficult for any state, however powerful, to achieve a rapid and decisive victory in any war fought on American soil. ‘All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined’, declared the young Abraham Lincoln in his first substantial public address in January 1838, ‘with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years’.⁴ Geographic and strategic isolation was not only a preferred American policy stance but also an ineluctable reality: ‘since history and experience prove’, George Washington reminded his listeners during the Farewell Address in 1796, ‘that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government’. He urged that the United States concentrate on internal development so that it would muster its own vast latent potential. The United States enjoyed such an advantageous position that foreign states ‘will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by our justice shall counsel’. This policy was based on a sure-footed strategic calculation of the greater strength of the parts of the continental state vis-à-vis smaller states:

‘While then every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union’, Washington continued:

all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resources, proportionately greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries, not tied together by the same government; while their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments and intrigues would stimulate and imbitter.⁵

A sense of the indivisibility and accumulation of power compared with other polities is central to American identity and the evolution of the Republic. So long as the American experiment is nurtured and protected then ultimately the wealth and power of the United States would surpass that of her enemies. Nonetheless, many Americans were afflicted by short-term worries as to whether they could resist external threats. Yet long-term confidence is given explicit recognition in the Constitution of the United States. The drafters in 1787 were prevailed upon to substitute ‘the United States’ for ‘national’. In unity arose security and potential power; in disunity lurked the calamities of vulnerability and European intervention in American affairs. The experiment in North America thus rested not just on the introduction of a novel form of republican government but on an acute appreciation of the cumulative effects of power. They were indivisible. This did not prevent substantial opposition to unifying tendencies in large sections of the republic in 1787–88. But as this was overcome, the realization developed in the early nineteenth century that democracy demanded absolute security from the threat of European intervention to prosper, and such security demanded the absolute banishment of the European balance of power from North America. A policy had to be found which would reduce the danger of intervention – especially from Great Britain, but after 1798 from France as well – from states which, even in the western hemisphere, were infinitely more powerful than the United States.⁶ In unity, therefore, was invested not only the prosperity of the present but also soaring hopes for the future. As the opening declaration of the Constitution opines:

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.⁷

Growing Pains

But given the enormous extent of the United States – even on independence in 1783 – in practice the assumption of cultural and ethnic uniformity made by the Constitution would not work itself out without difficulty. The United States has escaped some of the intractable and enduring problems of the Latin American countries. Since their independence they have been crippled by tensions between the urban coastal centres and the more remote hinterland, the iron grip of reactionary oligarchies based on landed wealth, and the alienation of the bulk of the population because of rigid class (and sometimes racial) barriers, all accentuated by great geographical obstacles and poor communications, which foster provincialism, and the rise of local, private armies mustered by and loyal to the caudillo. The rule of law was not always self-evident in these countries.⁸ In many Latin American countries urban and industrial development has been restricted to narrow coastal plains hemmed in by great mountain ranges. In the United States, penetration of the areas beyond the Appalachian Mountains was not difficult. Here could be found an immense fertile plain over which towns and cities spread, all nourished by a comparatively efficient communications network of waterways and railways. Along these travelled with the settlers a common set of values and ideals and a universally accepted legal system that enforced American mores. Nonetheless, though this developing society enjoyed a measure of homogeneity, clearly the spread of United States civilization was greatly influenced by the geographical contrasts which marked its great expanse. Geography, and an understanding of geography, is central to our understanding of any nation-state, however strong or weak. Social organization determines political activity, and social organization is dependent on the resources available to be exploited by any community; in turn, these are the product of geological deposits and physiographic elements, including the weather, which influence the demographic spread. And in the United States, a grand historical vision of American development based on exploiting and opening up the frontier was linked to the spread of democracy across the heartland to the Pacific. It fired the imagination of politicians and animated their speeches. This nationalistic, ideological, republican vision has been termed correctly a ‘secular religion’.

‘The influence of geographical conditions upon human activities’, wrote Sir Halford Mackinder, ‘has depended, however, not merely on the realities as we now know them to be and to have been, but in even greater degree on what men imagined in regard to them’.⁹ The expansion of American power and ideals, based on an exuberant confidence in their Constitution, a cult worshipping at the shrine of George Washington and other of the founding fathers, and an efficient judicial organization which seemed to set the need for military power at naught – this confidence in a superior political structure and phenomenal economic dynamism – what would later be termed the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the United States – in the short term made unprecedented progress. But it contained within itself severe contradictions and tensions, and these, in large part, sprang from geography. The United States was less of a prisoner of her colonial heritage than the Latin American republics (though her republican heritage was divided, or confused, as to whether centralization or decentralization would prevail), but once she had escaped from the shackles of her colonial master, she declined to make a completely fresh start and abolish all colonial institutions. The spectre which would return to haunt her, like Banquo’s ghost, was involuntary servitude.

One way in which regionalism was expressed was in the kind of labour force that was employed in a specific environment. The nature of the work-force determined not just the crops that were grown, and therefore the local economy, but the relations between the labourers and their masters. In colonial America much labour was unfree, and the relations between white indentured servants and black slaves were close to a degree that would have surprised their nineteenth-century descendants. Much of the prosperity of the American colonies before the 1760s was due to the importation of indentured servants. These were Englishmen or women who, for whatever reason, paid for their passage across the Atlantic by contracting for a period of bondage terminated by a certain date, usually seven years; this act was not always voluntary. Perhaps 50 per cent of all colonists in the eighteenth century consisted of indentured servants, redemptioneers or convicts. Involuntary servitude was therefore an important feature of American life before Negro slavery became a pressing issue. ‘The planters’ fortunes here’, a governor of Maryland happily observed in 1755 ‘consist in the number of their servants (who are purchased at high rates) much as the estates of an English farmer do in the multitudes of cattle’.¹⁰ The tropical conditions prevailing in the southern states, the swamps, diseases and humidity increasing in both number and effect as the settlers advanced southward, favoured the spread of plantation agriculture. This required the clearing of inhospitable areas and required labour in which the involuntary aspect had to be increased, mainly because of the reluctance and general unsuitability of white labourers for this kind of work and the withering of the indentured labour system – although it did not finally die until the nineteenth century.

An alternative source of labour well suited (according to the conventional wisdom of the day) for working under the sweltering southern sun and clouds of mosquitos was slaves transported from Africa. The booming markets for southern plantation crops, rice, tobacco and later cotton, led to a considerable expansion of the Negro population; not just to work on the existing plantations, but because of wasteful methods and the rapid exhaustion of the soil, to open up new, virgin lands for exploitation. This process occurred remarkably quickly. In 1700 the Negro population in America has been estimated at 28,000; that is to say, something in the order of 11 per cent of the entire population. In 1770 this proportion had increased to 21.8 per cent. In the course of almost three-quarters of a century the percentage of the slaves transported from Africa had doubled, and their total number can be estimated at 459,000.¹¹

Resistance among blacks sometimes occurred. These were desperate and forlorn insurrections. In New York City in 1712, for instance, some two dozen slaves deluded themselves into thinking that they would be rendered invulnerable by magic spells, and they set fire to a building and attacked those who sought to extinguish it. They were suppressed with extreme brutality. ‘Some were burnt,’ the Governor assured his masters in London, ‘others were hanged, one broken on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town, so that there has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could possibly be thought of. In the same city in 1741 there occurred a number of unaccountable fires which excited anxiety that they presaged a massive slave revolt. In 1793 Albany experienced another bout of arson, which resulted in the execution of three slaves. Such action was usually covert – it was aimed against oppressive owners or overseers – and organized by small bands ranging from three or four slaves to groups of up to a dozen. Whites feared ‘Horrid Murder’ committed by poisoning. In Virginia in the years 1783–1814 owners of 434 executed slaves received compensation after their execution by the state authorities for such offences – a rate of about 14 per annum. Consequently, the spread of slavery can be associated with the spread of coercive, para-military force to enforce the peace (although perhaps it should be added that American democratic display has a military character, with a penchant for honorific military titles; fire brigades, police forces, and even sports teams all delighted in para-military overtones). These measures were the more severe where slaves were most numerous. There can be little doubt that the protection of slavery in the United States rested on force, or the threat of force. Increasingly, in her zeal to use police methods to intimidate the resident slave population, the South would be demarcated from the other regions. Such a fear of Negroes existed elsewhere, but their comparatively small numbers did not provoke the same ferocious response; it was a question of degree admittedly, but the degree was not insignificant.

The use of militia forces in activities that were not primarily military in character began early in the history of the South. Police duties, such as the Negro Patrol, were an urgent matter. This included the scouring of neighbourhoods from 8 p.m. onwards, to prevent crime and arson, and arrest any loitering Negroes. In South Carolina, provisions for the Patrol had been inserted into the militia laws as early as 1690. Great agitation was caused in the years 1739–40 by attempts by slaves to fight their way out to the Spanish colonies in the Floridas, urged on by the Spanish governor’s proclamation which promised freedom for any slave who escaped to his territories. In New York a provision for a Negro Patrol was hurriedly added to the militia laws after the insurrection of 1712. A Virginian law of 1723 prohibited Negroes from serving in the militia, save as ‘drummers and trumpeteers in servile labour but not to bear arms’. Indeed, the increase in the use of the Negro Patrol was welcomed by most militiamen because it ensured that they remained within their own neighbourhoods.¹²

Even before the drafting of the Constitution was completed in 1787, chattel slavery was already a vital ingredient of southern prosperity. Yet a fear of the dangers of slave revolts was becoming a pervasive anxiety that permeated southern life, and a less pressing worry in other parts of the country. The debates over the Constitution marked the first major confrontation between states from the northern and southern sections, though of a very mild kind. Since about 1760, aided by the pressure of urbanization, the roots of slavery were withering in the North. Indeed, at the very moment the Constitutional Convention was sitting and reviewing its procedures in Philadelphia in May 1787, Congress, then resident in New York, passed the North West Ordinance, which prohibited slavery north and west of the Ohio River.¹³ This, like many other measures that followed it over the next three-quarters of a century, judged the existence of slavery in the regions below this line the business of the various state legislatures. At Philadelphia, discussion focused around the tax powers of Congress, calculated by the number of free persons, plus ‘three fifths of all other persons including Indians not taxed’. This would have the effect of counting slaves in a poll count as though they were represented in Congress, when as chattels they were disenfranchised. The wording implied a constitutional sanction, which later defenders (and some critics) of slavery extension demanded should be enshrined in a constitutional amendment.

The other contentious matter concerned congressional powers to regulate trade with foreign countries, among the states themselves and ‘with the Indian tribes’. Southerners argued that this favoured the North, and especially the New England shipowners, who could monopolize the southern export trade in staple crops. James Madison, a Virginian and later fourth president, secured a compromise and southern objections were dropped. But it serves to illustrate at this early date a revealing characteristic of American constitutional development: that so much of the tension between the northern and southern sections revolved around economic issues; but given the rapid economic development of the United States this is not very surprising. But it is characteristic, too, that the whole slavery question, a legacy of the colonial regime and of the harsher moral climate of the eighteenth century, begat fragile compromises that continually had to be patched up in the century of more disturbed emotions and tender consciences that followed it.

Even in 1787 such emotions could be engaged. Southerners proposed that Congress should be denied the power of levying a tax on the slave trade and prohibiting its exercise. George Mason of Virginia shocked some but impressed others with his declaration: T hold it essential to every point of view that the General Government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery’. This would be the dominant issue, at least among politicians, intermittently yet consistently for the next forty years after 1820. Needless to say, southern delegates from South Carolina and Georgia decreed they could not enter into any union in which their capacity to import slaves was endangered. Even at this stage spokesmen from the Deep South expressed themselves more vehemently than those from the Upper South against any restrictions on slavery. The pragmatic appeal of compromise now asserted itself for the first time. Reaching an accommodation on the slavery issue had an instant charm for harassed politicians, repelled by the thought of civil commotions and determined to make the Constitution work. Yet the placatory, smiling charm of compromise issued from a shallow and beguiling visage, rather like the picture of Dorian Gray, revealing hideous deformities and poisons beneath. Northern delegates were divided on the slavery issue. Some believed that a moral stand should be made to extirpate slavery; others did not consider the issue worth the trouble, certainly not on the Negro’s account. Some ‘middle ground’ was preferable, and indeed the whole political system they were fashioning trained them to seek such an accommodation. All delegates eventually agreed that Congress should be prevented from legislating or prohibiting the slave trade before 1808. Southerners were pleased by a provision preventing the Federal government from levying duties on exports in return for which southerners dropped their opposition to import duties. This question, however, would be another matter of contention between the sections over the next three-quarters of a century. In these controversies, and in their seeming resolution, is offered to us a model of future disputation and the kind of solution favoured in the years ahead. Indeed, in these agreements, plus the important concession which permitted the return to their masters of ‘persons held to service or labour who crossed state lines’ (Article IV, Section 2) and thus upheld a duty to return escaped slaves, they cemented the disparate parts of the early Union together; but the masonry was fissile, and dammed up forces which could be released only by war.¹⁴

Such a compromise was important in validating the southern system of racial chattel slavery. The northern delegates, as so often in this saga, were unaware of its full significance at the time, which became clear only later. Plantation agriculture based on slavery received a fillip in October 1803 with the greatest territorial addition gained by the American republic resulting from the sudden, and for the Jefferson Administration, quite unexpected, cession of the entire French colony of Louisiana in return for $15million. The Jefferson Administration was fearful lest this territory’s resources be mobilized by Napoleon against the United States. By acquiring this territory, Jefferson ensured the safety of the American experiment from perhaps the only potential foreign menace which truly imperilled its existence. Should Napoleonic monarchies be created in North American territories contiguous to the United States (like Napoleon Ill’s short-lived adventure in Mexico in 1862–66), then republican democracy would be in grave danger. ‘We have lived long’, Robert R. Livingston exulted to James Madison, ‘but this [the Louisiana Purchase] is the noblest work of our lives’.¹⁵ But the most important result of this territorial expansion by purchase would be an immense extension, if not revival of plantation agriculture based on chattel slavery beyond the Mississippi River. Again geography would restrict such expansion, but nonetheless, by the 1830s the Louisiana Purchase raised the fundamental question of what form the American experiment would take? Would it be part of western civilization, then dominated by the liberal (if monarchical) values of Great Britain, or would it increasingly resemble the conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian empires of Latin America, like Mexico and especially Brazil (where chattel slavery thrived)?

A footnote to the Jefferson Administration concerns the conspiracy of Aaron Burr. Burr was Jefferson’s first vice president. He was a man of considerable ability and eloquence; but he was also an intriguer with soaring ambitions. From about 1804 Burr cherished a treasonous design to detach the western states of the Union, and with British support, create a personal empire in this region. Such an effort would have invited intervention from outside the western hemisphere and reintroduced the balance of power to North America. Burr’s plot was foiled easily, but incidents such as this are a reminder that we cannot take the inevitability of United States’ domination of a continental republic in North America for granted. The true significance of Burr’s conspiracy lies in the danger to the infant United States of convulsions unleashed by adventurers whose ambitions outweighed their common sense. Aaron Burr was the first ‘filibuster’. The point is worth reiterating. For the United States to garner and protect the full benefits of the experiment she was pursuing – in developing her constitutional democracy and federal system as an alternative to European ‘tyranny’ – she needed to dominate without challenge the temperate zones of North America and fashion an economy suitable to that region. This required unity: only the United States could maintain sufficient power to protect herself against European intervention. Only continental expansion could defend republican democracy unsullied by the corruption of European monarchies and their attendant systems of balances of power, military aristocracies and standing armies. Philip Schuyler expressed in 1808 with exemplary clarity a fear that would surface half a century later. T dread a dissolution of all union. Immediate quarrels between the states will ensue. These quarrels will beget armies, these armies a conqueror, and this conqueror may give as much government as prevails at Constantinople’. Thus continental expansion marched hand in hand with the spread of democracy towards the Pacific Ocean; in the American experiment the two were inseparable. Yet with this spread arose the divisive issue of the future character of the republic as it expanded to the Mississippi and beyond. This lurked only half-recognized initially. In an optimistic mood in 1844, John A. McClernand of Illinois believed an advance northwestwards was but a matter ‘of border safety, of territorial limits, and of relative political … influence, wealth and power’. The matter would not be quite so simple.¹⁶

However, the first evidence we have of the influence of centrifugal forces in the early Republic occurs not in the South, or South West, but in the North. Disaffection in New England was especially acute, and had festered within a decade of independence in Shay’s Rebellion (1786). New England had also been disproportionately hit by the indeterminate embargo announced by Jefferson on trade with Britain and France in 1807 as a way of striking back at their naval depredations – especially Great Britain’s attempts to break the Napoleonic Continental System aimed at her commerce. This frequently involved the seizure of neutral vessels, including many flying the American flag. When war itself spread to North America in 1812, the anxieties of New England were further agitated by the British occupation of Maine. By 1813–14 New England began to fear that it would be marginalized within the Union (as did the South during the 1850s). In October 1814 calls were heard for the meeting of a constitutional convention of the New England states at Hartford, Connecticut. At first these did not mention the possibility of secession but were concerned with specific constitutional grievances which might involve ‘a radical reform in the national compact’. Consequently, the agenda for the meeting was preoccupied with parochial issues rather than with strategic, coordinated action on the part of the New England states against the policies of the Federal government. Perhaps the delegates to the Hartford Convention were intimidated by calls in Washington for the raising of a substantial force which could drive the British out of Maine and deal with them en route. At any rate, two regiments (of New Englanders) were billeted in Connecticut for the winter in case urgent action against the Convention had to be taken.

When the Hartford Convention met in December 1814 its tone was equivocal rather than defiant. It was too timorous for ‘open rebellion’, and attempted rather to give ‘tone, confidence and system to an opposition which shall continue its equivocal course, possessing all the moral qualities of treason and rebellion and at the same time avoiding a liability to their penalties’, as the military commander in Hartford sardonically described their proceedings. Although only fragmentary evidence of the discussion survives, it is clear that the Convention not only lacked the confidence or appetite for drastic action, but also lacked unanimity among the disaffected states as to their future course. Indeed delegates from Vermont and New Hampshire did not attend. Even delegates from Connecticut recoiled against the evils of secession. Thus the Convention lacked dynamic leadership, a burning issue around which to focus its energies, and most important of all, a network of sympathetic states which could be wielded into an effective coalition. These were the three essential factors in any successful secessionist move against the Federal government. The report of the Hartford Convention merely reiterated New England’s grievances (for instance, calling for constitutional changes such as restricting the president to a single term and prohibiting the natives of one state holding the office for more than one consecutive term). Far from advocating secession, it seemed to be calling for a truce in sectional hostility. Indeed it would perhaps teach ardent secessionists of the future what not to do.¹⁷

Nevertheless, this incident is significant. It does indicate the path to be taken by disaffected states in dispute with Washington. The Madison Administration could not be complacent in its dealings with the Hartford Convention. Secession of the New England states was not a possibility to be ignored in the midst of a foreign war, and the possible involvement of Great Britain in supporting a secessionist movement was a spectre to be feared. If the New England states had been granted time to organize themselves, then their combination of wealth, population, maritime power and sizeable militias was a formidable one should they have attempted to create an independent state. European intervention was crucial in ensuring the success of any secessionist movement in North America. Yet in 1814 the New England separatists lost their appetite for a confrontation with the central government. Timely action by the Madison Administration (and the news of the belated American victory at the Battle of New Orleans) prevented any momentum for secession developing among discontented citizens. This was an aspect of the crisis which should not be neglected. The outcome of the Hartford Convention does resemble the proverbial dog who not only fails to bark but merely whimpers in its kennel at night. It was a timorous gathering, yet we are apt to overlook its significance in the later sectional crises. The Hartford Convention indicates the potential of centrifugal forces within thirty years of independence and only forty-five years before the outbreak of the Civil War. In historical terms these are trifling periods of time. The Hartford Convention marks out the later path to be taken towards secession for particularists from a different region, with different grievances, and of a more audacious timbre.

The struggle for stability

All political systems require precedent and longevity to guarantee their continuance. The longer they continue the more substantial their achievements appear, and the more such institutions are admired. In peace, as in war, nothing succeeds like success. The object of the administrations following the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war of 1812–15, was to control centrifugal forces by wielding the United States together by economic development, internal improvements and the growth of infant political mechanisms laid down in the Constitution. This was not achieved easily, and historians now recognize that a period once characterized by the Whig cachet, the ‘Era of Good Feelings’, was a period of intense stress, political transition and reorganization. In short, the administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams sought to enshrine, cherish and nurture political stability but they encountered much opposition. ‘Political stability’, Sir John Plumb has pointed out, ‘is a comparatively rare phenomenon in the history of human society. When achieved it has seldom lasted’.¹⁸ Americans in the 1820s thought that their combination of universal manhood suffrage, the election of officials and representatives at stipulated intervals, and independent judicial regulation, gave them a unique and unprecedented instrument for civilizing the North American continent. This view looks persuasive when one compares the record of the United States with its neighbour Mexico, or indeed with Argentina, during this period riddled with anarchy and the rule of the caudillo. Professor Plumb defines political stability as ‘the acceptance by a society of its political institutions, and of those classes of men or officials who control them’. He adds that conspiracies, plots, revolutions of various kinds and civil war – which have been a continual feature of the history of the United States before 1865 – ‘in modern times, are obviously the expression of political instability’.¹⁹ The paradox of American efforts in securing political stability was that earnest, enthusiastic efforts obsessed with observing the form and spirit of the Constitution, although initially unanimous, resulted only in disillusion, and a rejection of those institutions and the men who operated them. One reason for this extraordinary and petulant rejection of the Federal system, and resultant political instability and civil strife, can be found in the rapid economic development of the United States after 1820.

The United States during the nineteenth century enjoyed the fruits of one of the world’s most dynamic economies. The conversion of a primitive subsistence economy and production of primary raw materials to the creation of a market economy in both agricultural and manufactured goods is tantamount to the ‘market revolution’ proclaimed in some recent accounts. This process was accelerated by the spread of communication networks, railways, roads and canals. In 1825 the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes; in 1852 easy travel between New York City and Chicago was made possible by the construction of a railroad. The railway line and the steam locomotive made possible the forging of some measure of social and cultural homogeneity in this new, massive country and facilitated social and economic movement and interchange. For it is not only people and goods that travel by train but also news, social comment and ideas. The railway was both a symptom of and a stimulus to economic expansion. Its expansion was most notable in the decade before the Civil War: in 1850 8,500 miles had been built, by 1860 this had increased to more than 30,000 miles.

The years between 1830 and 1860 witnessed a veritable explosion of agricultural production. In Milwaukee, for instance, 317,000 bushels of wheat were exported in 1851; a decade later this total had expanded to 13 million. The annual traffic along the Mississippi-Ohio had a value in commerce of $140 million in the 1850s. Industrial production broke out of the constraints imposed by the local, domestic system. The north eastern states, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and along the Erie Canal were the main sources of this industrial plenty, based on coal and iron, shoes and other leather goods, textiles, agricultural equipment, shipbuilding, industrial equipment, and a host of machine tools and consumer goods. The capitalist financial structure was set in place and along with it came the excitement, the reckless gambles, and exaggerated anticipations of the ‘boom’ years, and the abject despair and financial sluggishness bordering on collapse characteristic of the ‘bust’ years.

This expansion was accompanied (as elsewhere in those countries of the western world which experienced the agricultural and industrial revolutions) with a staggering growth of both population and urban construction. The population of Minnesota grew by no less than 2,760 per cent in the decade 1850–60. This reflects the significant westward movement of the population, so that by 1860 more than half of the citizens of the United States lived on the plains west of the Allegheny Mountains. In 1830 Chicago consisted of a few shacks amid green fields; by 1860 it was a thriving, wealthy city of 100,000 people.²⁰ This westward move would have significant political consequences.²¹ The other noteworthy feature of demographic change was the great influx of immigrants in all parts of the United States, mostly from the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia. New York state, for example, included 469,000 people born in Ireland and 218,000 born in Germany. Protest against waves of immigration became one of the most significant political issues of the ante-bellum years and was to provoke the formation of the American Party.

The overall population growth in the 1850s was as follows: nationally 35 per cent every decade; in the country 30 per cent; in the cities 75 per cent. New York had the biggest population with 515,000 (612,000 if Brooklyn was included), Philadelphia with 340,000,²² Baltimore 169,000 and Boston 136,000. This fecundity and dramatic urbanization would generate major social problems in a country, to use Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, which ‘was born in the country and has moved to the city’. And which was simultaneously wedded to an idealized Jeffersonian vision of a rural idyll as the prime source of vitality for its fledgling democracy, and to the advantages offered by boundless ‘progress’ in human affairs. Novel ideas and challenges arising from a dynamic economic system, and the prosperous educated bourgeois it bred, were to pose dilemmas which no quarter of the Union could avoid. Nonetheless, despite this rapid industrialization and the growth of towns and cities, it is important not to forget that the United States before 1861 was a predominantly rural society.²³

The American political system in the first half of the nineteenth century was, more than anything else, the creation of an agricultural society. Paradoxically, however, the dynamic centres of American political culture since the seventeenth century have invariably been urban. In his book, People of Paradox, Michael Kammen observes of Stuart England that it was characterized by an ‘unremitting ideological tension, and always the forces of mobility and growth were pulling against the strength of inertia, the forces of enterprise against those of custom’. Applying this insight to the early history of the United States, which inherited a good deal from Great Britain (more than is often acknowledged), Kammen comments, ‘At several stages of our history, population growth has outstripped institutional change. The result in many cases has been violence, vigilante movements, or economic unrest, all with the special coloration of unstable pluralism’. Kammen does not consider unstable pluralism – that is to say, a number of agencies or interest groups competing within the body politic – a distinctly American development. ‘But I do believe that unstable pluralism on a scale of unprecedented proportion is especially American’.²⁴

Kammen’s eye is on the twentieth-century results of these tendencies. But one in particular of his themes is germane to this analysis. ‘Even the American conception of sovereignty is pluralistic’, Kammen observes, ‘for federalism is the institutional embodiment of political pluralism’.²⁵ The nature of the American political system, the environment in which politicians and bureaucrats operate, is a central consideration in any discussion of the forces that contributed to a political crisis that could be resolved only by war. It is a fairly common assumption in general surveys of American history that the process of Civil War causation is triggered off only after the ending of the Mexican War of 1848. Yet this approach conceals the fact that a period of turbulent political change had taken place over the comparatively short period of forty years. Therefore to compartmentalize it further, and restrict a general survey of the origins of the American Civil War to the twenty years or so prior to the war, is short-sighted and artificial. Far from accepting that the Federal Union emerged from the Jeffersonian ‘Revolution’ in pristine condition, complete and fully armed, like the goddess Athena from the head of Zeus, the argument advanced in this book will turn such an approach on its head.²⁶ In the first place, the United States was an artificial edifice, she constructed herself (the term nation, for instance, does not appear in the Declaration of Independence). Secondly, American nationalism was the fruit of war not its cause, and a real sense of national belonging with all its attendant myths had perforce to be nurtured (or manufactured) not only during the Revolutionary War itself but also in the quarter of a century or so that followed it.²⁷ The presumptive authority based on historical legends bathed in the sanctity of antiquity and the Middle Ages – Vercingetorix, Caratacus, Boudicca, King Alfred and his cakes, Robert Bruce and his spider, Joan of Arc, to name but a few, which bound together Britain and France, could not be extended to the United States. An intense process of myth-making followed during and after the Revolutionary War. Mr Gore, in Henry Adam’s novel, Democracy, observes of George Washington, ‘we idolize him. To us he is Morality, Justice, Duty, Truth; half a dozen Roman gods with capital letters’.²⁸ American social, patriotic and cultural bonds had to be woven in an enormous country, which in Professor Parish’s words ‘lacked a fixed geographical definition …. The shape of the country on the map was constantly changing and growing’. Indeed, the idea of growth can be viewed as a substitute for the fixed, often unwritten customs of Europe.²⁹

Given these circumstances, a general argument can be asserted, namely, that far from being the product of special circumstances that pertained after about 1840, separatism was inherent in American history and political development after 1783. The whole ante-bellum period, not just part of it, exhibits centrifugal features, which gradually increased in strength. This is not to suggest that civil war was inevitable, only that it was far more likely than either contemporaries or later historians have been prepared to admit. We must surely agree with Carlyle when he asks of another Constitutional Convention: will it not settle all issues? ‘Alas, a whole tide of questions come rolling, boiling; growing ever wider, without end!’³⁰ For secession to present a serious threat to the Union, all that was required was, first, the establishment of an ideology with a sufficient following among the educated middle classes for a group of them to lead a separatist movement; secondly, a region or section of the United States that enjoyed sufficient unity to form a new, breakaway republic; and thirdly, a political event sufficiently provoking to spark off the secessionist process; and finally, the high probability of foreign intervention on the side of the secessionists. As has already been noted, Jefferson was convinced that the New England states would try to secede in 1814, and he worried lest he lacked the resources to suppress them. He also thought that secession movements would spring up in the new states and territories; the old states of the eastern seaboard, therefore, should be protected and cherished as the bastion of Unionism. But this was only one incident. There is not a decade before the Civil War which lacks discussion somewhere at some time of the possibility of secession and the consequent commotion. In other words, a sense of national identity is very tenuous throughout the period before 1850. A further generalization can be hazarded: that the more vocal the exclamations of loyalty and esteem for the Union, the more shallow were its roots entrenched; whereas it was often sincere one suspects that many Americans protested their love of country too much.³¹

The national symbols above all others were the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The first enshrined a form of very limited government by European or East Asian standards, ‘limited’ not only in the sense of restricting the concentration of power in the hands of certain men of decision, but also in the duties ‘government’ was expected by its citizens to carry out. The division between the executive and legislature, a delicate system of checks and balances, negated either efficient or intrusive administration of government. The two-party system that operated, in various guises, from 1787 onwards ‘had to be invented’ despite the best intentions of the founding fathers (who continually inveighed against ‘party spirit’, notably in George Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’) in order to make the loose, federal system of central government work at all. It was, however, easier for American politicians to agree on what they were against, than on what they were for. Immense ambitious programmes of reform, like the ‘American System’ of Henry Clay, and the equally ambitious schemes of John Quincy Adams, were all to founder on the electoral appeal that the best form of government was no government.³² Thus the Constitution operated as an essentially negative but binding reference point that served a dual purpose: it allowed the cultivation of a concept of a perpetual Union, which could be nourished only over time; and it permitted the growth of a legitimate political opposition without a recourse to arms (which was a constitutional development which was not common in Latin America). The only difficulty with such a system was that it assumed a certain mode of conduct and, moreover, that the issues it should settle were amenable to accommodation and agreement. When certain groups were gripped by radical fervour, and refused to accept that doing nothing was a better substitute than trying to do the impossible, then this system was ill-equipped to cope and failed to provide stable government. In short, it worked best when politicians behaved cautiously whatever the rhetorical sweep of their speeches; it worked poorly when spokesmen of certain interest groups had the audacity to demand a measure and refused to accept a compromise let alone a rejection. Under such circumstances, an obsessive focus on ‘the Constitution’ as a nationalistic symbol proved counter-productive. Political disagreements automatically became vexed constitutional controversies, which required judicial intervention. Furthermore, both defenders of congressional authority and states rights enthusiasts were able to encrust the arguments advanced during these crises with legal enactments and language which not only obfuscated the political and moral issues under consideration, but also carried the imposing implication that somehow adjudication by the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, would settle the question with a grand flourish of finality. It is, of course, arguable that this deflected conflict into legal channels, thus inhibiting wider disturbance, yet the limits of this view were revealed by the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Legal decisions, it seemed, were more binding than political action. This was a fatal illusion.³³

The courts played a most significant role in the dramatic series of crises that were to culminate in the secession of the slave states in 1860–61. When discussing the legal basis for the secessionist case, historians are prone to mock the ‘hair-splitting logic and its forced analogies’ as ‘remote to us’; this may be true of the states rights question in particular but hardly of American political intercourse generally.³⁴ The judicial temper of American political life is central to its proper understanding. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his study of Jacksonian America, is at pains to point out that judges were not political functionaries. But as in ‘the United States the Constitution governs the legislature as much as the private citizen’ (whereas in Britain Parliament makes the laws and the constitution), the American political system invokes the right of judges to found decisions pregnant with political significance ‘on the Constitution rather than on the law’. Thus they are empowered ‘not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional’. Such a system which breeds a compulsively litigious and a tiresomely narrow and inflexibly legalistic approach to politics (and a profession dominated by lawyers), contributed decisively to Kammen’s concept of unstable pluralism because it not only introduced another agency which intervened in ante-bellum politics, but itself provided a forum in which manoeuvre, argumentation and disillusion after defeat were all experienced. As Tocqueville observes, ‘In truth, few laws can escape the searching analysis of the judicial power for any length of time, for there are few that are not prejudicial to some private interest or other, and none that may not be brought before a court of justice by the choice of parties or by the necessity of the case’. Tocqueville himself praises such a system as a bulwark against the legislative tyranny of elected assemblies. Yet it had one irredeemable weakness during the ante-bellum years. It was a delusion throughout this period that, in a country which increasingly lacked a consensus on the direction in which her democracy should turn, that the judicial mechanism could somehow produce a formulation acceptable to all parties. On the contrary, although the bewitching half-light emanating from its beacons of constitutional wisdom certainly attracted admirers, the Supreme Court also repelled those scornful of the degree of illumination it offered. Rather like the Delphic Oracle, if the right answer was expected, then attention had to be devoted to asking the right question. But no agreement could be reached on what was the right question to ask. Thus the Supreme Court especially furnished compromises around which the conflicting groups manoeuvred; after a rebuff each side would wait for a suitable moment to mount a counter-attack based on a different point of law.³⁵

An excessive faith in judicial intervention in politics is characteristic of the United States. Although applauded as a bastion against tyranny, the courts can serve as a means of guaranteeing tyranny, or at any rate protecting forces and institutions that are ademocratic, or potentially anti-democratic. Judicial pronouncements, however grandiloquent, cannot be the guarantee of a stable society. They cannot serve as a substitute for consensus if that consensus does not exist. Indeed a legalistic approach to politics can be considered a cause of the Civil War to the extent that both sides were prone to accept legal verdicts as having the potency of force in establishing a case. This was a dangerous potion for politicians (the vast majority of whom were lawyers) to imbibe, because it overstimulated the South and persuaded it to dangerously overrate its strength, and recklessly put that power, expressed in a constitutional interpretation of states rights, to the test.³⁶ Thus legal interpretation cannot be considered a substitute for effective policy or a firm will; it cannot serve as a substitute for force; nor can it necessarily justify the use of force – as in attempting to justify secession by the reiteration of otiose legal niceties. In short, valuable as they are in a civilized and democratic society, the courts cannot serve as their own political justification. The limits of judicial power in a political crisis must be recognized – as they clearly were in 1860–61.

But how did this crisis arise, and why was the pluralism of the American political system inherently unstable? In the first place, the federal system was permeated by localism. Therefore, the state government had a greater impact on the lives of its citizens than the Olympian missives of the Federal government. The division of sovereignty between Federal and state government often left an impression of fumbling ineffectiveness coupled with obeisance to an impotent overlord reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire. Certainly like this medieval relic, the Federal government exerted little authority in the traditional areas of a nation-state’s power: in ensuring the run of legal writ at home and protecting its citizens from foreign invasion. The maintenance of law and order, for example, was the prime concern of the state governments, as was the furthering of economic development. Clearly, such a division would have severe repercussions should the Federal government feel the need to assert its authority vis-à-vis a state government. The Federal government raised no direct taxes, confined itself to promotional and distributional duties, and employed 36,000 staff (of whom 30,000 were district postmasters).³⁷

Yet though the sinews of federal power were feeble and underdeveloped, by comparison, party political activity was vibrant and healthy. Throughout the years before 1865 party political machinery, and especially that organized and financed by the Republican Party, was more dynamic and efficient than the system of federal administration. This contributed to a paradox that could be resolved only by war, even though the ultimate result of the Civil War was to reinstate the kind of loose federal structure that had in part caused it. The slavery controversy was surely the kind of issue that the federal system was calculated to solve, or at least repress by making parties intersectional. Yet this did not happen. On the contrary, the very vitality of party political life ensured that the arguments relating to this problem not only were elaborated but also grew more dogmatic and impassioned. Furthermore, the structural rigidities of the federal system, because they were designed to promote inertia as an antidote to overmighty central government, provided a virtually impregnable limes behind which chattel slavery in the South – which most agreed was the exclusive business of the states concerned – could shelter. Thus an alternative interpretation of ‘liberty’ developed there – a freedom to own human beings as property. An aggressive, defensive ideology eventually grew up, which formed a perversion of nineteenth-century liberal ideals. In American abolitionist circles this led to a measure of frustration which was not shared by their British counterparts. In the United States the political obstacles that had to be surmounted before the emancipation of slavery could be achieved were a good deal more numerous and hazardous than they had been in Great Britain. Thus the combination of frenetic activity on the one hand, and stalled constitutional machinery on the other, ensured that an explosion of one kind or another would result. Professor Parish is surely right in suggesting that it was ‘precisely because it had grown accustomed to that particular kind of highly decentralized federalism, the United States lacked the safeguards and stabilizers – the institutional safety net – to cope with the great sectional crisis when it came’.³⁸

It has often been asked by historians why the Union secured any loyalty from its citizens at all? As Tocqueville says, ‘The Federal government is far removed from its subjects, while the state governments are within the reach of them all and are ready to attend to the smallest appeal’. Yet such a system excited the approval and loyalty of huge numbers of Americans. The encomiums lavished on its genius were to a very large extent justified; it had been tremendously successful in steering American political and economic development deftly. This loyalty was tenacious and was to survive in some parts of the southern states throughout the Civil War. Indeed the greatest tribute that can be paid to the system was accorded in March 1861 when the Confederacy tried to replicate it, making minor modifications to accommodate the special interest of slavery.³⁹

Yet one of the basic problems of the years before the Civil War was more complicated than a mere question of loyalty, important though this was. In a pessimistic passage (so characteristic of American historical writing in the 1970s), Michael Kammen observes that ‘Throughout our history we find, all too often, ironic contrasts between noble purpose and sordid results’.⁴⁰ No greater irony can exist in any country’s history than the contrast between the sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence (1776), namely, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and the spread in the southern states for eighty years after the issue of that Declaration of an economic system founded on chattel slavery, and, moreover, the denial of basic political or civil rights to free Negroes who resided in the northern states. Not only did this constitute a blatant contradiction of a dictum that had been granted an authority comparable with Holy Writ in the years before 1861, but also it led to a perverse distortion of the meaning of the word ‘liberty’. To southern politicians, the greatest ‘liberty’ they could enjoy, protected by the Constitution, was the freedom to own human beings as property. Property rights had been accorded a sacred status by liberal political theory. Yet it was a liberty that was increasingly difficult to enjoy in the nineteenth century, especially after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Although Tocqueville commented on a further irony, namely, ‘America is the land of freedom where, if he is to avoid giving offence, the foreigner cannot speak freely’,⁴¹ the significance of this embarrassing contradiction is perhaps twofold. It surely accounts for the savagery of the denunciation (notably by southerners) of the comparatively mild criticisms offered by books, such as Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) of the evils of slavery and the limitations of ‘liberty’. Dickens did not like the United States, as his novel Martin Chuzzlewit makes clear; but the American Notes, unlike Frances Trollope’s The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), is not a peevish or bad-tempered book, and much of Dickens’s criticism is directed towards the system of slave labour. It also accounts for some of the strands in the backcloth of rabid anti-British feeling which dominated these years.⁴²

Anti-British feeling was especially strong in the southern states who feared a British annexation, or at least penetration, of Texas, as offering an opportunity for introducing abolition to North America by the backdoor. Any expansion of the British Empire in the Caribbean basin would mean the extension of a political system to the region which had eradicated slavery. An examination of the rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine in the years 1830–60 must emphasize the assumption that one of the ‘freedoms’ it was designed to protect against European interference, was the maintenance of chattel slavery. This is a supreme irony, given the Confederacy’s later faith in the imminence of British intervention in the Civil War.⁴³

But the most enduring significance of this profound contradiction between aspiration and practice lies in the tension it introduced in the American internal debate over American national character and ideals, and the future direction to be taken by American democracy itself. Garry Wills has commented in a number of places on American exceptionalism. Americans ‘think ourselves as a nation apart,’ he avers, ‘with a special destiny, the hope of all those outside America’s shores’.⁴⁴ (Kammen’s comment quoted above is no rejection of this exceptionalism, only a complaint that it has not worked out as expected.) The language adopted by American politicians and publicists in their numerous speeches was rooted in the Bible and has strong religious overtones. Understanding the spoken word, and its inspirational power, is fundamental to an assessment of American political culture before the Civil War.⁴⁵ So, too, was the power of popular written material, especially newspapers and pamphlets, for the United States enjoyed high levels of literacy. So, too, was the strength and vibrancy of American idealism and confidence that they were directing an audacious democratic experiment (which generated so much national pride) in the right direction. Yet interpretations over that direction became increasingly at variance. Frequently, the United States has experienced disillusion over the progress of the direction taken, especially among her intelligentsia. Such dejection is not a rejection of the notion that the United States is an exceptional country; exceptionalism may assume an inverted form (for instance, in the years 1968–75 it was a common assumption in liberal circles that the United States was exceptionally wicked).⁴⁶

The religious undertow of American political life very quickly came to focus on the glaring contradiction of chattel slavery enshrined in a republic dedicated to the furtherance of liberty. As in Great Britain, the growth of radical political and social reformist movements in intellectual circles in the nineteenth century reflected the shift from a mainly rural to an urban and industrial society. Although these groups came under increasingly secular influence, their attitudes and tone were nonetheless dominated by an inspirational and millenarianistic if not apocalyptic appeal.⁴⁷ And even those of a conservative disposition who had little sympathy for the more extreme eruptions of idealistic fervour, like that evinced by the Abolitionists, came to agree that the basic character of American democracy had to be protected from the iniquitous spread of slavery with its attendant restrictions of freedom of expression and movement of labour. These were seen as inimical both to the spirit and the letter of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In 1861 Lincoln admitted, ‘I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence’.⁴⁸ If one idea, or sentiment, came to be associated with being ‘American’, it was subscribing to the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence; alas, the meaning of those aspirations was subject to increasingly divergent opinions.⁴⁹

Ideas rarely take a clear-cut form in politics. Politicians, and especially American politicians, pride themselves on being practical people concerned first and foremost with practical problems. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the problem of accommodating slavery in an expanding body politic was considered mainly as a problem amenable to all the arts of compromise. Yet some of the features of the impassioned anti-slavery debate, that were to become so strident in the 1850s, were already apparent in the debates which resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (indeed even earlier). The struggle to secure stability in the American political system resulted paradoxically in further instability. By 1819 there were already one and a half million slaves in the southern states, worth more than $300 million; this capital could not be transferred into other investments.⁵⁰

It is important to remember that the controversy over the admission of Missouri as a slave state took place only five years after the calling of the Hartford Convention. However, the controversy assumed a quite different form and was concerned with different matters than those which agitated the minds of the good gentlemen of Connecticut. In 1819 Congress had signalled its willingness to admit Missouri as a state of the Union with a state constitution embracing slavery.⁵¹ A prolonged period of turbulence followed. Congressman James Tallmadge added two amendments to the Missouri enabling legislation. The first prohibited the transference of any further slaves to the state; the second required that all children born to the existing slaves should be emancipated on reaching the age of 25. This constituted nothing less than emancipation by stealth and was furiously denounced by southern representatives.

It is very likely that Tallmadge’s motives were a mixture of the elevated and the self-interested. He was personally repelled by slavery, certainly; but equally important was the resentment felt by Tallmadge and his allies for the ‘three-fifths’ clause of the Constitution, which they felt was responsible for the southern domination of Congress and the electoral college. Though northerners, like Tallmadge, believed that slavery abused the cherished ideals of the Declaration of Independence, they were also keenly aware that many of the new states which would follow Missouri into the Union would be located in the north and west; they wished to limit slavery to its southern boundaries and not allow it to penetrate into the northern hinterland.

Stronger in numbers in the House of Representatives (105 to 80), the northern group secured the passage of the Tallmadge Amendment in February 1819. The Senate refused to accept it and deadlock ensued. The kind of war of words that would become such a common feature of political discussion over the next forty years erupted. Southern representatives claimed that the Tallmadge Amendment struck directly at slavery in the states and their freedom to direct the labour of their property, their slaves. It also prevented any spread of their liberties westwards. This provoked Senator William Smith of South Carolina to declare a counter-argument. Slavery, he opined, was a positive contribution to American civilization. This was an auspicious event, because it signalled the first public statement of an alternative interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Older spokesmen of the South, especially those from Virginia, were always prepared to admit the evils of slavery. Smith’s argument was significant in indicating that increasingly henceforth the ‘southern’ viewpoint would invariably bear the imprint of the opinions of the Deep South, and that mark would not be a very moderate one.

At any rate, ‘outside’ interference was deprecated by all southerners, no matter how little they were persuaded by the notion that slavery was a beneficent instrument of social control. The real change in attitude was felt in the North, increasingly responsive to the tender sensibilities of the reforming, liberal conscience. Public assaults on the peculiar institution (a popular euphemism by which southerners were wont to describe the distinctness of slavery without explicitly stating what this was) in the North were countered by a dogmatic and impassioned southern defence. The latter argued that state governments should be permitted to govern in defence of their institutions without fear of the imposition of special conditions, such as the Tallmadge Amendment. Hence ‘states rights’ now assumed its pro-slavery flavour. The compromise finally agreed upon by Congress in March 1820 laid down the parameters within which all subsequent discussion revolved. Missouri was admitted as a slave state, and Maine as a free state; a line was drawn through the great territories of the Louisiana Purchase, 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude demarcating the boundary between the free and slave states.

During the controversy it was noted that ‘in the private circles the topic of disunion was frequently discussed and with as little emotion as an ordinary piece of legislation’. In 1819–20 it seemed that the South placed greater priority on securing a slave state than admission to the territories. It would also appear that at this date, southern spokesmen admitted the power of Congress to intervene and regulate slavery in the territories. Yet this was a compromise that satisfied few. The Missouri Compromise line indicated that slavery would be free to expand westward, so long as it remained south of 36°30′, which would not satisfy the northerners who wished to restrict slavery; and congressional regulation of slavery in the territories was not acceptable to southerners who wished to see the peculiar institution flourish well beyond the Mississippi River. Southerners had failed to notice how limited was the scope for the westward expansion of slavery after 1820. The rhetoric of secession, furthermore, had been used to intimidate wavering northern votes and ensure that they supported the southern view. Few northerners were happy with the vague and open-ended nature of the compromise, but without this ambiguity the issue could not have been settled. The southerners exulted that they had won: it had prevented the intrusion of an ‘outside’ agency, like the Federal government, into the regulation of slavery.

This compromise, like all the others that followed it, settled nothing – in the long term. It succeeded in deferring to a later date the differences of perspective and outlook that underlay the necessity for reaching the agreement in the first place. The only really durable legacy of the Missouri Compromise was wholly negative – southern unity of action in the halls of Congress. From unanimity of thought and deed in the legislature, to considering themselves as representatives of a self-conscious section with individual interests at loggerheads with central authority, was a short step. The only question remaining was whether individual states should protect those interests or whether the slave states should combine to do so? Within twelve years South Carolina’s impulsive actions would provide the answer.⁵²

South Carolina and the Nullification Crisis, 1831–33

The most thoroughgoing assault on the powers of the Federal government before the secession crisis occurred during the Nullification Crisis precipitated by South Carolina in 1832. This was an auspicious event. Charleston was widely regarded during the Civil War as the cradle of secession and the first shots were fired there less than thirty years later. The Nullification Crisis concerned the capacity of the South Carolina legislature to ‘nullify’ measures passed by Congress, should its members deem this legislation opposed to the interests of their state. The association of Charleston with secession is unfair in this earlier crisis because the majority of the unionist leaders were Charlestonians, and the city voted for opponents of the nullification convention. There was certainly not a straight line of progression of secessionist advance between 1833 and 1861, but we should nonetheless accentuate at this point an important feature of ante-bellum history: the very rapid hardening of attitudes opposed to the Union, which was achieved by a rationalization of attitudes towards slavery. Some of these attitudes received an ambivalent airing during this crisis. A respectable argument can be made that ‘Nullification should be viewed not so much as a harbinger of future radicalism as the logical, though not inevitable, culmination of the continuing debate over how best to defend the republican principles inherited from the Founding Fathers against the centralizing and corrupting tendencies of the age’. According to this view, nullification was backward-looking and genuflected towards Jefferson rather than grimacing approvingly towards Yancey and the secessionist rhetoric of the 1850s. But of course, very few historical events have a one-way historical significance, especially when the time-lag between events – a mere thirty years – is so small. The secessionists of 1860–61 also looked back for vindication to the Founding Fathers; but the lessons drawn from the Nullification Crisis, especially those bearing on increased cooperation between the slave states, indicate a tempered and enduring link between it and the later secessionist movements.⁵³ In 1832–33 South Carolina advanced the case for slavery in a halting and incomplete manner, but there can be no doubting its importance in inflaming the crisis in the first place. The Nullification Crisis was, in more ways than one, a rehearsal for the secession crisis of 1860–61 and the outbreak of civil war.

In four years from 1803, South Carolina legalized the slave trade and purchased 40,000 slaves from Africa. This eased the shortage of labour in the dank and inhospitable coastal belt, but it also added to that morbid sense of insecurity which characterized South Carolinians when surrounded by Negro slaves. Such paranoia was just as strong a part of the idle if tense planter outlook as their ‘aristocratic’ refinements: residing in mansions adorned with decanters of port wine, crystal goblets, tinkling pianos, and well-stocked libraries. South Carolina prided herself in the elegance and refulgence of her society, though it was of a shallow, provincial kind.⁵⁴ Nonetheless, the spread of nouveaux riches pretensions ensured that South Carolina politics would be influenced by the changing fads and churlish moods associated with the employment of slave labour. But South Carolina was an extreme case, and her lead was not followed by the rest of the south. It has been well said that by the 1830s, ‘No other state in the Deep South had achieved such complete unification by the years of the Nullification Controversy’. It should be emphasized that just as national identity was nurtured and elevated during these years, so too was state identity. The development of affection for and attachment to the Union and the state was a simultaneous process and frequently they were in competition for the loyalty of their citizens. In the South the state became more quickly the focus of more parochial and passionate loyalties which jostled out an initial enthusiasm for the Federal Union. It was the ability of either the state or the Federal government to protect slavery which was to decide who won that competition in the South. South Carolina’s planters were divided into two groups, those in the upcountry, who deeply resented Congress’s tariff policy, and the tidewater (or lowcountry) nabobs, who were more nervous about northern anti-slavery mumblings. Their different perspectives, however, combined into one shared cause; this vigorous coalescence ‘lashed each other into an increasingly frenzied campaign’.⁵⁵

There can be no doubting the significance of the fiscal powers in these conflicts between the Federal government and the states before 1861. The raising of taxes and tariffs and the collection of duties and imposts invariably brought to a head festering grievances and tensions. Without revenue, governments are like aircraft without fuel; they may have pretensions to soar but their operating parts remain locked and grounded. These conflicts, moreover, have shadowed some of the graver economic and social crises in American history. Almost all federal coercive measures have been undertaken as a response to complications arising out of the administration of slave labour.⁵⁶ By the late 1820s cotton was being grown on the tidewater plantations with the expectation that capital investment there would in the future reap splendid returns; but capital was in short supply and the upcountry planters were over-extended and vulnerable to market fluctuations. In the years 1818–29 the price of upcountry cotton fell by 72 per cent, but the cost of living fell by only 49 per cent. Planters were frustrated by the protective tariff because it contributed to a rise in consumer prices but did not contribute to an increase in the price of cotton. Capital thus flowed out of South Carolina, especially to the virgin lands of the South West, and the new states of Mississippi and Alabama, who presented formidable competition. The customs officers collected over $500,000 more in customs revenues than were lavished on the state by the legislators in Washington. The tariff seemed to resemble a spider which sucked out capital from South Carolina’s decaying corpse, while keeping prices high. It became a scapegoat for the state’s ills. This frustration reached a fever pitch pushing the state towards violent measures which most southerners, whatever their view on the tariff question, deplored.⁵⁷

The other source of rage was the quite extraordinarily explosive South Carolinian over-reaction to the slightest hint of abolitionist sympathies. Citizens of this state could not conceive of civilization surviving any form of emancipation, and they indulged in a bizarre series of fantasies worthy of H. G. Wells. The Nullification Crisis, therefore, serves as a snapshot not only of the relations between federal and state authorities and the intervention necessary to regulate those relations, but also of the mentality which provoked the crisis. In 1829 David Walker, a free Negro from North Carolina resident in Boston and holding belligerent opinions, issued his Appeal, calling upon slaves to rebel. Two years later, William Lloyd Garrison sent to the press the first number of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Here in print was a deadly and insidious danger. Walker had exhorted the slaves: ‘will you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power?’ South Carolinians decided to employ that ‘crushing arm’ themselves to prevent the appalling prospect of a slave rebellion. The state contained $80 million worth of slave property, all of which seemed imperilled by irresponsible abolitionist chattering. Indeed such provocation amounted to a far more formidable economic challenge than any protective tariff. Such worries were given a further nervous edge after two slave conspiracies, Denmark Vesey’s in Charleston in 1822, and Nat Turner’s insurrection in Virginia in 1831. These seemed to reveal to slaveowners the unpalatable truth that those slaves who had received the most kindness and consideration were the most likely to kill and mutilate their owners. The result was a belligerent effort to justify slavery and to stamp out abolitionist propaganda – though it was half-hearted by comparison with twenty years later. Sometimes violence erupted. When Maynard Richardson, editor of the Sumterville Southern Whig, pleaded Tor a liberal and guarded discussion of slavery’, his good intentions led to a brawl with a pro-slavery editor and his supporters, who included a judge. Such were the violent passions even such caution could arouse; yet others may have been less convinced of the moral virtues of slavery. As Freehling observes, ‘one of the crucial appeals of crusading for nullification on the tariff issue was that a weapon could be won to check the abolitionists without discussing slavery’.⁵⁸

South Carolinian planters had always been in the forefront of those calling for free international trade. Yet the first major step towards enforcing state authority vis-à-vis the Federal government was taken, not in the economic sphere, but in that of slavery, with the creation of the South Carolina Association. This body enforced state legislation to restrict the movement of Negroes both slave and free after the Vesey Conspiracy. The latter might include ‘agitators’ who would rouse the slaves to rebellion. A number of black seamen from British ships found themselves imprisoned by zealous members of the association. Such action violated a treaty between the United States and Great Britain permitting free access to their respective ports. One such Jamaican born victim, Harry Ellison, applied in 1823 to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus and an immediate hearing on the grounds that all treaties ratified by Congress ‘shall be the Supreme law of the land’. Although the South Carolina Associations’s action was illegal, its lawyers argued that the treaty was unconstitutional. The national government’s power to make such agreements, they argued, was merely delegated; the states, preserving their sovereignty, retained the reserve powers. If the South could not preserve herself from insurrection, her sovereignty would disappear. Consequently, any action that reduced South Carolina’s sovereignty by impairing her police powers could not be constitutional. Acts to prevent sedition or violence within South Carolina were thus of a higher legal order than any treaty ratified by the powers in Washington DC.

This spurious argument, which sketches in the kind of thinking used to justify nullification, confirmed that local concerns took precedence over the national. The Supreme Court rejected the plea on the grounds that the Constitution plainly stated that laws and treaties enacted by Congress were ‘the supreme law of the land’. Yet if they could be controverted at the whim of individual states, this supremacy would be worn away piecemeal. ‘Where is this to lead us?’ asked the presiding justice, William Johnson. ‘Is it not asserting the right in each state to throw off the federal Constitution at its will and pleasure’. Indeed this was the inexorable logic of nullification and states rights. It was like a corrosive acid that fragments layer after layer of the brittle rock of sovereignty, leaving small and disjointed splinters.⁵⁹

Yet this setback did not discourage the putative nullifiers. ‘The duty of the state’, the upper house of the South Carolina legislature reaffirmed, ‘… to guard against insubordination or insurrection … is paramount to all laws, all treaties, all constitutions’. That is to say, the duty of each individual state. South Carolina was not legislating for, or indeed considering the problems of other Southern states. South Carolina was considered by them to be extreme and headstrong. In this parochialism lay her strength – a neurotic desire to protect her citizens from further brutal rebellions led by the likes of Vesey – and her weakness: because she was isolated, and lacked the resources unaided to withstand the might of the Federal government. But a legal decision taken in the Supreme or any other Court cannot be by itself a representation of the mobilized power of central government if it is divorced from a capacity to enforce it with armed force. Because of such a disinclination South Carolina defied the ruling for years. Senator Robert Y. Hayne, later governor during the Nullification Crisis, asserted that South Carolina had successfully nullified the treaty, and this encouraged the nullifiers to take more audacious steps.⁶⁰

Some of these emboldened souls tended to be those most anxious about the future security of slavery and the parasitical effects of northern tariffs on southern agriculture. They read The Crisis, a series of essays written by a lowcountry planter, Robert J. Turnbull, dubbed by some ‘the first bugle call to the South to rally’. Turnbull argued that tariffs were an insatiable drain on the South’s wealth. He contributed to an outlook that began to doubt the value of the Union to South Carolina: the slaves were dissatisfied and restive; the economy continued to falter; section, and certainly state, seemed more worthy of loyalty. Men distant from home could be viewed as enemies and parasites; what was important in life was near to home. The ‘nationalism’ which had promoted good feelings rapidly seemed to be threatening rather than enlightened. The unionists also nursed anxieties about slavery. South Carolina was shaping a pattern to which other southern states would conform over the next two decades. Tariffs were interpreted in sectional terms, as they always had been, which is not surprising given their differential effect. Because Congress was unquestionably empowered by the Constitution to collect duties, nullifïers were forced to construe the intent behind the resulting legislation. They concluded that the Founding Fathers had never intended such powers to be used to promote an expansion of manufacturing industry. Hence the denunciation which was hurled at the authors of the ‘tariff of abominations’, who increased tariff duties from 37 per cent in 1824 to 45 per cent in 1828. South Carolinian congressional representatives sought to put together a southern group to mount a concerted defence. Other southern representatives were not enthusiastic. In Congress, as outside, South Carolina willingly pursued political solitude.⁶¹

Some of her politicians were aware that nullification ran a grave risk of involving the state in civil war. Nullifier leaders, like George McDuffie, called for a state tariff to be levied on northern goods. In the campaign of 1828 the denunciation of ‘tyranny’ became more vitriolic. The nullifïers, like the secessionists, who were their spiritual progeny, placed fire to their lips. They gambled: they willed violent opposition and radical action in pursuit of a conservative cause. They risked national prominence, as did later southern leaders, for local suzerainty. The role in the crisis of South Carolina’s favourite son, Vice President John C. Calhoun, was more ambiguous. He supported nullification but still nursed a lingering ambition to win the presidency. Openly siding with the nullifiers would scuttle the barque of his exalted ambitions. In Exposition and Protest (1828), he drew up an elaborate theory of the tyranny of the majority; other interests should be able to concur with legislation before it was passed, thus giving each state a crippling veto over central government. The result of such an absurd theory would be fragmented, crippled governance.⁶² This is a harsh judgement and can perhaps be qualified, to the extent that Calhoun at least had the intellectual honesty and discernment to grasp that the outcome of any political defence of slavery would be conflict of some kind. If compromise served only to postpone the hour of reckoning – and here he was prescient – then the South had to strive to ensure protected guarantees for slavery within the Union, which would allow it to accept or reject legislation unilaterally; by then it would not be a Union at all. As he wrote to Francis W. Pickens in 1831, ‘as much time should be afforded as … possible before the State & the Union … takes sides finally’. The only result of Calhoun’s theory that could be guaranteed was anarchy – the prime cause of revolution and civil war – the twin horrors he strove to avoid.⁶³

The anarchy inherent in nullification was not always obvious to many of the protagonists. Calhoun’s own motives were a mixture of the self-interested and the abstract. Calhoun had given the somewhat ambiguous doctrine of nullification a cutting edge, an intellectual respectability. His argument did enjoy a certain logic, and the nullifiers could not be dismissed as a group of ranting fanatics with the (as yet) tacit support of the vice president. Yet they could not avoid the harsh reality that by formulating federal and state authority as a duality, their system was unworkable. First, the Federal government had just as much authority to ‘nullify’ state legislation as vice versa. Calhoun rejected the suggestion that the Supreme Court was empowered to adjudicate disputes, since control of this tribunal could be seized by the tyrannous majority. The state constitutional convention should remain supreme, even though such a power to block laws would inevitably transform the very character of the Constitution – and at the instigation of individual states, not by a majority of three-quarters of them. Later secessionists drew the obvious lesson that such a formulation could work against the South as well as for her. Secondly, despite all the references to justice and the judiciary, the nullifiers overlooked ‘the fundamental political law’, as Martin Wight terms it, ‘that the first condition of justice is an enforced order’. He further explains: ‘It is possible to conceive an unjust order; it is possible to conceive, and even slowly to create, a just order; it is impossible (except for the theoretical anarchist) to conceive a just disorder’. Yet this is what the nullifiers demanded. The chaos and instability warranted by a bid to build a just disorder into the workings of the United States Constitution would have spawned conflict between the individual states as they attempted, in various shifting groupings, to jostle and compete with one another. They would transform the United States into an elected but impotent polity like the Holy Roman Empire, in which the name ‘United States’ would be reduced to a geographical expression. Within this region groups of states would seek supremacy and invite outside, stronger powers, to assist them in this object. That is to say, the mechanisms of an international rather than a national society would develop. ‘Anarchy is the characteristic’, Wight reminds us, ‘that distinguishes international politics from ordinary politics’. Under such pressure the twin goals of continental dominion and the spread of democracy would be thwarted. Finally, it was this anarchy that later secessionist writers deplored; the means must be sought to unify the South, otherwise disparate parts of a slaveowning republic might fight one another. Such a process could not be sustained on the basis of South Carolina’s singular feud with the Federal government.⁶⁴

The crisis spluttered into life only slowly. In 1830 although provoked to fury by a bill presented to the House of Representatives by Charles F. Mercer of Virginia, permitting federal subsidies for the colonization of free Negroes in Africa, the nullifiers made little progress. The other southern states ignored their calls for a convention. South Carolina was a unique southern entity in these years; secessionist radicalism flourished because the upcountry and lowcountry factions were reconciled and not in competition. This was not true of, say, Virginia and Alabama. Calhoun knew that any rupture could be resolved peaceably only ‘if the government abstained from enforcing the laws’, and that seemed unlikely given the tenor of the man in the White House. With a reputation for revolutionary fervour, the nullifiers were defeated in the legislative elections of October 1830. By a small majority (and not the two-thirds required) they succeeded in saving face by pushing through a vote for a convention. On 12 July 1831, ignoring the vague but pointed declarations of the president that he would enforce the laws, the nullifiers set up a States Rights and Free Trade Association in Charleston. Its leaders then travelled the state in a tumult of excitement, reviewing the militia and persuading the electorate of the justice and glory of their cause. Those who disagreed were called ‘submissionists’ – supine and timid and neglectful of the state’s honour. The unionists’ response was hardly dynamic and striking; and the nullifiers, by deprecating the likelihood of ‘coercion’, gained ground. Their case was given point, with a hint of further potential of spreading the conflict, when Georgia ignored a Supreme Court ruling, supporting the right of the Cherokee Indians to stay on their lands.

In the 1832 campaign the nullifiers won 76 per cent of the popular vote and secured control of the legislature with ample majorities in both houses. James Hamilton Jr declared that the battle was one ‘at the outposts, by which, if we succeed in repulsing the enemy, the citadel would be safe’. The previous year Nat Turner had gone on the rampage in Virginia. Yet the nullifiers still sought to defend slavery only indirectly by continuing to attack the tariff. Perhaps they needed a visible target on which to direct their distant and somewhat intermittent fire; the abolitionist movement was as yet so tiny and fragmentary that it was difficult to keep it in their sights or treat it as an ominous danger. But the relationship between slavery and nullification was incontrovertible. The nullification campaign was a pre-emptive strike. It would simultaneously improve the economic standing of slavery and deliver a fatal blow to the pretensions of the abolitionist agitators before they grew too strong. These calculations were worth the small risk of provoking civil war.⁶⁵

It may have spluttered into life but once it had ignited the momentum of crisis gathered pace rapidly. In the space of a month a Nullification Convention had organized itself and met in November 1832. ‘A protective tariff shall no longer be enforced within the limits of South Carolina’, it declared. Threats of immediate secession were uttered if Congress sought to intimidate South Carolina with threats of force. But these declarations were only so much bluster. South Carolina was isolated and nervous in case of a slave insurrection provoked by federal intervention. President Andrew Jackson acted quickly and decisively. General Winfield Scott was dispatched to Charleston to take command of all federal forces in the region and Forts Moultrie and Pinckney. Jackson also moved to persuade Congress to lower the tariff and reduce South Carolina’s sense of grievance.⁶⁶ By lowering the tariff, Jackson hoped, so Silas Wright confided to Martin Van Buren that ‘it may keep the other states south steady while he disciplines Messrs. Calhoun, Hamilton and Hayne’. There was a personal edge to Jackson’s resolute desire to crush the nullifiers at the first opportunity. ‘Altho I do not believe that the nullifiers will have the madness & folly to attempt to carry their mad schemes into execution’, the president explained, ‘… I must be vigilent [sic], and not permit a surprise, and to do this effectually, I must be at my post, and scan with great care the signs of the times as they may arise’.⁶⁷

On 10 December Jackson issued his Nullification Proclamation, claiming that any attempt at disunion by force amounted to treason. The Proclamation, rather like a papal bull, in its first sentence struck out in an affirmative tone, ‘Our Federal Union, it must be preserved’.⁶⁸ The United States was a nation, he declared, not a league; the nation was supreme and could demand obedience to its laws. The nullifiers responded by trying to enforce a test oath to enforce obedience to the Convention’s decrees. This move underlined, as the secession crisis was to do in 1860–61, that any move to free the citizens of any state from the tyranny of federal legislation required a restriction of that freedom within the state. The commotion thus engendered threatened to stir up disaffection from South Carolina’s vocal unionists. The nullifiers tried to overlook the violent ramifications of their acts by attempting to secure goods confiscated by the federal authorities through the South Carolina courts – hardly a rousing manifestation of the martial spirit. The Charleston mercantile class was substantially unionist and willing to pay any duties owed to the federal authorities.⁶⁹

Neither were the nullifier military forces very imposing. Twenty-five thousand volunteers were raised, but an army is not made just by calling men to the colours. They lacked discipline, training or arms; the reservoir of state funds was sucked dry before half of them were properly equipped. Threats by the nullifiers to resort to guerrilla tactics were empty; such action would have ensured the self-destruction of plantation agriculture. Tf in each District only one hundred such men could be secured’ – the mounted minute men – ‘we would have the means of throwing 2,500 of the élite of the whole State upon a given point’. An effective armed force, with a responsive chain of command and levels of training, cannot be thrown together in this casual manner. The nullifiers were absurdly optimistic. Yet the illusion, that armed force could be mustered quickly and thrown into battle to solve intractable political dilemmas decisively, grew rather than diminished over the next thirty years.

Of course, federal units standing on the defensive prevented the nullifiers from pushing matters to the proof. In a sense this was an unfortunate by-product of the peaceful resolution of the Nullification Crisis. If the nullifier volunteers had been routed then the exaggerated expectations of what force could achieve for the South might have been dissipated before 1861. In any case, the nullifiers were caught on the horns of a dilemma and they showed more prudence than would be displayed under similar circumstances thirty years later. They were in a clear minority in the South as a whole. They had to act defensively, yet defensive measures could not attain the quick, clean success that their deteriorating financial position demanded. The unwonted caution that the isolation of the state required not only meant that nullification was reduced to a mere legal expedient reliant on local courts, but weakened the armed force that the state was trying to raise. The longer the crisis continued the better organized became the ‘Washington Societies’ of 8,000 unionist volunteers. Jackson sent them 5,000 stands of arms and called them his posse comitatus – the ‘power of the community’. These expressed Jackson’s preference for dealing with the nullifiers through the processes of civil rather than martial law. Though he had full authority under the 1807 Act to employ the regular army and the militia, these two forces would still constitute a posse comitatus so long as a civilian remained in charge to enforce the provisions of the civil law. Jackson had little military power at his disposal. He was too experienced a general not to realize that the confrontation with South Carolina would be won by tilting the delicate balance of weakness in his favour. Jackson was also able to apply pressure on the nullifiers by maintaining the tariff by what amounted to a blockade of Charleston harbour. The only way the nullifiers could break this would be by a flagrantly aggressive act on the federal forts housing the customs posts. South Carolina was isolated and vulnerable; she would have to strike the first blow and escalate the crisis should she seek to escape from Jackson’s grip.⁷⁰

The success of President Jackson’s policy of isolating and strangling South Carolina was endangered by two rather impulsive acts. First, he contemplated the arrest of the leading nullifiers. Any attempt to round them up would be opposed by the unionists on the grounds that it would provoke stronger resistance. Secondly, at the end of December 1832, Jackson issued a message seeking special powers which were embodied in the ‘Force Bill’. This provided him with no substantially greater powers than he already enjoyed, but he was empowered to use the army swiftly without giving prior warning. The general tone of the Force Bill was conciliatory, stressing the need to avoid a clash of arms; but if this should occur South Carolina must make the first aggressive move. Given the bellicosity and exaggeration that greeted the mildest move by Jackson to resist South Carolina’s pretensions, the Force Bill was denounced fervently by the nullifiers. Martin Van Buren, the new vice president, agreed that military forces should be used only after South Carolina had violated federal law. The predicament that would confront Lincoln in 1861 had already been rehearsed in this crisis.⁷¹ Momentarily, it seemed that South Carolina’s isolation would be broken. A convention met in Georgia, a state which had dabbled in nullification; but its sympathizers were routed and the majority of its delegates supported the Force Bill. South Carolina remained isolated and friendless.⁷²

The crisis moved slowly towards a peaceful close. Two public gatherings, on 21 January and the ‘Fatal First’ on 1 February 1833, summed up the South Carolinian dilemma. Jackson was burnt in effigy at the latter, but this was an outburst of frustration at the state’s powerlessness; at the former it was decreed that ‘all occasions of conflict … should be sedulously avoided’. The virtual blockade of Charleston was complete; all foreign ships were permitted to enter the port only after they had paid tariff duties. Nullification had been nullified, at any rate neutered. There was much South Carolinian bluster that an ordinance of secession would follow the ordinance of nullification. Calhoun now urged prudence. As Freehling observes, the attempt to avoid war by threatening war is ‘a decided gamble’ and a colossal risk for the friendless, weaker party who could not possibly win. For the nullifiers to plunge South Carolina into a civil war would have been suicidal.⁷³ The Force Bill passed comfortably through both the House and the Senate. Simultaneously, Jackson supported a compromise tariff that reduced the duties over a period of a decade to 20 per cent. This reduced further the already remote possibility of assistance from other southern states; indeed Virginia moved to mediate. In March 1833 the Ordinance of Nullification was repealed; yet as an empty act of defiance the Force Bill was nullified. There was an element of schoolboyish mischief about this act. But it was surely another example of the exaggerated faith in legal enactment as a substitute for real military strength. Even McDuffie, an unreconstructed nullifier, observed sardonically that ‘the army and navy of the United States required something more than an ordinance to nullify them’⁷⁴ So ended, in rather farcical fashion, the most serious threat to her existence that the United States had faced since the War of 1812.

What was the final significance of the Nullification Crisis? ‘Without union,’ Jackson had proclaimed, ‘our independence and liberty, would never have been achieved, without union they can never be maintained…. The loss of liberty, of all good government, of peace, plenty and happiness must inevitably follow a dissolution of the Union’.⁷⁵ Jackson had successfully prevented an attempt to dissolve the coherence of the Constitution by the unilateral action of one state. But, of course, it was perfectly possible for the Federal government to continue overawing individual states in this way so long as they remained isolated and without allies. The Compromise Tariff and the Force Act were signed together by the president on the last day of his first term of office. ‘These are but the forms in which the despotic nature of the Government is evinced’, claimed R. B. Rhett at the March convention which had signalled South Carolina’s defiant surrender, ‘ – but it is the despotism which constitutes the evil: and until the Government is made a Limited Government… there is no liberty – no security for the South’.⁷⁶ That security could be attained by drawing the southern states into closer cooperation to reduce the overweening power of the Federal government to intimidate slave states into doing its bidding. Langdon Cheves lamented that ‘The metaphysics of nullification is the worst shape in which the principle of separate action can be embodied …. I deprecate and deplore that principle in toto, as unwise, rash, dangerous, and in its effects worse than ineffectual’. The idea of establishing a cohesive southern group, first mooted by the president of South Carolina College, Thomas Cooper, in 1827 was given greater credence. Unilateral action by ‘one of the suffering States alone’, commented Cheves, ‘will be a measure of feebleness, subject to many hazards. Any union among the same States, will be a measure of strength, almost certain of success’.⁷⁷ From their initial rebuff in 1832–33 secessionists drew the crucial lesson that if they were to challenge the Federal government successfully, their strength lay, not in the power of their vocal denunciation of Washington’s iniquities, but in their numbers.

The reasons why the crisis did not explode into civil war are threefold. First, the nullifiers were too weak vis-à-vis the Jackson Administration. Jackson maintained the pressure on them unremittingly and ensured that they received no succour from other slave states. In any case, this was not forthcoming: conditions were not right in other southern states to produce a radical, united front opposed to the Federal government. Secondly, Jackson could act decisively and swiftly to contain the crisis because it was so restricted; it did not present an overwhelming challenge to the federal authorities on the scale of the secession crisis of 1860–61, during which significant numbers of commissioned officers resigned and federal installations were overrun. Jackson had acted skilfully and promptly throughout, although there are grounds for concluding that on a number of occasions the president acted correctly but his reasoning was based on faulty calculations. He underestimated the extent to which the behaviour of the nullifiers was governed by anxieties about slavery; he was inclined to explain their motives by reference to the unscrupulous behaviour of a clique of frustrated, ambitious demagogues who had conspired to sabotage the Constitution. But his actions did much to extinguish the lurking danger of civil war. Thirdly, the nullifiers themselves, for all their bluster, behaved prudently before plunging over the broken precipice of civil war. Calhoun rather than Rhett was their role model. South Carolinian unionism remained vital and acted as a brake on the more extravagant designs of the nullifiers. As the later secessionists refined their case, gathered strength and became more insistent, the steadying influence of caution and persistent unionism gradually withered away.⁷⁸

Conclusion

This chapter has advanced a number of arguments about American history in the first half of the nineteenth century. It has suggested that centrifugal and separatist forces were inherent in the establishment of a great, continental state. Although different in many other ways, the United States shared this basic structural problem with some of the large states of Latin America. Obviously, the search for the origins of a great war cannot be allowed to dictate our entire perspective on this period. If it did, then the ante-bellum period would be conceived as nothing more than the prelude to the Civil War, and all other historical experience reduced to a determinist teleology. ‘Causation, like the circulation of currency’, David Thomson once reminded us, ‘is multilateral and complex and cannot be traced in straight lines from A to B to C’.⁷⁹ We must resist all temptations to think in terms of ‘inevitability’ in history.

Political disruption in the United States, and the rise of some form of separatist movement, would take a democratic shape. A meeting of alienated states in some form of convention (much as the United States herself had confronted the oppressive measures of the colonial power, Great Britain, in 1774–75) was possible. This process would take time and the elements fermenting discontent would need space, both figuratively and geographically, in which to operate, conspire and organize in safety. It is striking how all early efforts at separatism within the United States had failed because of the speed with which the federal government had acted against them. There was also a lack of propulsion within the separatist movement which failed to persuade the doubters both within and without South Carolina. The degree of force applied to persuade the malcontents to abandon their disloyal course was remarkably small. Moreover, they were not offered the opportunity to rectify the balance of force weighed against them by inviting an outside great power to intervene and assist them, thus reintroducing the balance of power to North America.

Indeed, it was the efforts of the United States in eradicating the balance of power from North America by continental expansion to safeguard democracy, that actually brought about the conditions – disruption and disagreement – that the Founding Fathers had sought to avoid. And that expansion raised in its most stark form disagreement over the future complexion of the Union. Thus the expansion and development of the United States made it more difficult to control the centrifugal forces that were unleashed, giving greater space and more time in which they could operate. Sectionalism flourishes when it can pursue an issue that reinforces physical separation, such as slavery. As slavery became pervasive in the South, so that all other issues were coloured by contact with it, so disillusion would grow. But the South did not reject the ideology of Union; it expropriated it, and perverted it for parochial ends.

Such an argument should not overemphasize instability. There were strong factors promoting Union: the machinery of government and election, the inculcation of common political and social values and the shared (indeed exaggerated) respect for the judiciary.⁸⁰ But the main concern of this chapter is to assert the paradox of American history. Thus: even though competitive diversity was the essence of American growth, within stability lay instability; at the core of Union lay disunion. To suggest that some form of separatist movement was probable in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century is not to suggest that the Civil War itself was inevitable and bound to occur when it did. Historians (especially those of the ‘revisionist’ school) were prepared to argue that it was ‘avoidable’. This is a common assumption of those who either live through an unpleasant historical experience or live with its consequences.⁸¹ But to have provided the circumstances which would have rendered the Civil War avoidable would have demanded the creation of a quite different kind of state; and this certainly would not have afforded a guarantee that some other kind of war would not have broken out with quite different imperatives and causes.

1. Francis Bacon quoted in C. V. Wedgwood, Seventeenth-Century English Literature (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege. Oxford UP, 1950), p. 22.

2. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1897) I, p. 1.

3. On the resistance of Indian tribes, encouraged by the British, to American encroachments in what is now Ohio, see Reginald Horsman, ‘American Indian Policy in the Old Northwest, 1783–1812’, William and Mary Quarterly XVIII (1961), pp. 43–4, 47–53.

4. Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 Jan. 1838, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Letters, ed. Peter J. Parish (London: Dent, 1993), p. 10.

5. George Washington, ‘Farewell Address’, A Documentary History of the United States, rev. edn, ed. Richard D. Haffner (New York: New American Library, 1965), pp. 64, 66, 68.

6. Gordon Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 4–6, 44–6; R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), pp. 82–3.

7. ‘The Constitution of the United States of America’, in Richard H. Kohn (ed.) The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789–1989 (New York UP, 1991), p. 19, from which all other quotations are taken.

8. George Pendle, A History of Latin America, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 187–8.

9. Sir Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 2nd edn (New York: Henry Holt, 1942), p. 28.

10. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 34; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain on the Eve of the Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987), pp. 313–14, the servant swore in an addendum to his contract that he had not been ‘kidnapped or inticed, but [was] desirous to serve the above-named … or his assigns’.

11. Hofstadter, America at 1750, pp. 66–7; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993, 1995), p. 16.

12. Hofstadter, America at 1750, pp. 128–9; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes to the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore, MD: Pelican, 1969), pp. 392–3; Brian Holden Reid, ‘A Survey of the Militia in 18th Century America’, Army Quarterly CX (Jan. 1980), pp. 52–3.

13. See below, pp. 112–14, 116–18, 122–3.

14. Richard B. Morris, ‘The Origin and Framing of the American Constitution’, in Kohn (ed.) The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, pp. 46–8.

15. Morton Borden, Parties and Politics in the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (London: Routledge, 1968), pp. 68–9.

16. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 215–16; Richard Kohn, ‘The Constitution and National Security: The Intent of the Framers’, in Kohn (ed.) The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, pp. 64–5, 89nl7; note esp. on p. 79 the fears of a monarchy being set up in distant parts of the Union; Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion, 2nd edn (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 1983), p. 36.

17. Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, pp. 483–5; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy and the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton UP, 1983), pp. 471–2, 474, 477–83; Charles M. Wiltse, The New Nation, 1800–1845 (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 50.

18. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of the Political Stability in England, 1675–1715 (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. xiv.

19. Ibid; in Samuel P. Huntington’s opinion, ‘Conspiracy theories were the midwife at the birth of the American republic’, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1981), pp. 80, 96, quoted in Henry Astier, ‘Americans and Conspiracy Theories’, Contemporary Review 261 (Oct. 1992), p. 169.

20. Of course, this process of urbanization affected other parts of the western world. What differentiates the United States is the scale of development. For example, in 1821 Middlesbrough was a village of 40 people; in 1901 it had 91,000 inhabitants. See Chris Cook and Brendan Keith, British Historical Facts (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 234–5.

21. On this, see below, pp. 121–5, 156–7.

22. In 1800 New York had a population of 60,000 and Philadelphia just under 70,000. Wiltse, New Nation, p. 6.

23. These paragraphs are based on Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975), pp. 20–3; J. G. Randall and David Donald, Civil War and Reconstruction 2nd edn (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1969), pp. 1–12; Wiltse, New Nation, pp. 75–6; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 23. This ‘intimate American quarrel with history’, between a rural idyll and faith in progress, is a central theme of Hofstadter’s writing. See also The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 7.

24. Michael Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1972, 1973), pp. 131, 295; on the British provenance of many American nineteenth-century attitudes, throughout this book I have drawn on the perspectives outlined in Marcus Cunliffe, ‘New World, Old World: The Historical Antithesis’, in Richard Rose (ed.) Lessons from America: An Exploration (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 27, 36, 45.

25. Kammen, People of Paradox, p. 294.

26. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), begins in 1847–48.

27. Peter J. Parish, ‘American Nationalism and the Nineteenth-Century Constitution’, in Joseph Smith (ed.) The American Constitution: The First 200 Years (University of Exeter Press, 1988), p. 64.

28. Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 77.

29. Parish, ‘American Nationalism’, p. 65.

30. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1851), III, p. 97.

31. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), pp. 20, 35–6.

32. Wiltse, The New Nation, pp. 55–9; see the conversation quoted by Mrs Trollope, in her The Domestic Manners of the Americans (London, 1832: Folio Society, 1974), p. 89: ‘How should freemen spend their time, but looking after their government, and watching that them fellers as we give offices to, doos their duty, and gives themselves no airs?’

33. Parish, ‘American Nationalism’, p. 122; Stampp, Imperiled Union, pp. 3–4.

34. E.g. Wiltse, New Nation, p. 122. There must have been good political reason why the states’ rights question flourished for forty years ‘before a comparable case for a perpetual Union had been devised’. See Stampp, Imperiled Union, p. 35. He is referring to Andrew Jackson’s Nullification Proclamation of 1833; see below, pp. 58–9.

35. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1954) I, pp. 102, 104–5, 106–7.

36. On the ‘legality’ of secession, see the various Confederate viewpoints discussed in Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret their Civil War (Princeton UP, 1954), pp. 62, 71, 81–2, 84–5, 88.

37. Peter J. Parish, ‘A Talent for Survival: Federalism in the Era of the Civil War’, Historical Research 62 (June 1989), pp. 178–9, 181–2.

38. Ibid., p. 185.

39. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, p. 401. See below, pp. 298–9.

40. Kammen, People of Paradox, p. 290.

41. Quoted in Hugh Brogan, Tocqueville (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 38.

42. Charles Dickens, American Notes (London, 1842: Granville, 1985), pp. 104, 122, 125, 210–16; Mrs Trollope comments on the ‘unconquerable dislike’ of the Americans for the English (Domestic Manners of the Americans, p. 123), but one suspects that her imperious and condescending presence did not diminish it. On Dickens and America, see Malcolm Bradbury, ‘A Rogue among the Detectives: Transcendentalism, Irony and American Culture’, in Brian Holden Reid and John White (eds) American Studies: Essays in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 158–71.

43. This is particularly true of older books, such as Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1955). Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, favoured gradual emancipation; but he adopted a robust anti-slavery stance (mainly directed against the Portuguese and Brazil) which was politically popular in Britain. Palmerston made an anti-slavery treaty a condition for recognizing Texas. See Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (London: Allen Lane, 1982), pp. 622, 623–4.

44. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (London: Athlone, 1980), pp. xvi-xix.

45. Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago UP, 1986), p. 19.

46. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), is a good more recent example.

47. See Edward Royle, Radical Politics, 1790–1900: Religion and Unbelief (London: Longman, 1971).

48. Quoted in Wills, Inventing America, p. xxi.

49. Jefferson’s precise attitude to slavery has been the subject of controversy. In 1787 he wrote: ‘This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it’. Yet he was a slaveholder. But the paradox can be resolved by observing that Jefferson expected slavery to die out slowly but surely. This is consistent with his language and actions. Such a view was not unusual in the South before 1840. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 220.

50. Wiltse, New Nation, p. 69.

51. For legislation prior to 1819, and a discussion of the economic factor, see above, pp. 25–8, 32–4.

52. This account is based on William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 134–43. For the ‘three-fifths’ clause, see above, pp. 25–6.

53. Lacy K. Ford, Jr. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), pp. 125, 134.

54. The ban on the slave trade was due to a glut of slave labour, its withdrawal due to a shortage, and was justified on the grounds of large-scale slave smuggling. Congress was forbidden to end the trade before 1808. See above, pp. 26–7. Wiltse, The New Nation, p. 4; Jordan, White Over Black, pp. 318–19.

55. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Oxford UP, 1965, 1992), pp. 23–4.

56. Jerry M. Cooper, ‘Federal Military Intervention in Domestic Disorders’, in Kohn (ed.) United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, pp. 121–3.

57. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 121–4; Freehling, Prelude, pp. 32–7, 42–3, 47–8. Annually South Carolina aristocrats spent, on average, $500,000 while on holiday outside the state.

58. John White and Ralph Willett, Slavery in the American South (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 31, 60, 146 (doc. 47); Freehling, Prelude, pp. 49–51, 60, 63, 85–6; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 123.

59. Freehling, Prelude, pp. 94, 112–14.

60. Ibid., pp. 114–15.

61. Ibid., pp. 132–3, 138–9, 142–3; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 129–30; Wiltse, New Nation, p. 104.

62. See Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton UP, 1992), p. 175: ‘Because it guarantees the state’s existence, power in relation to other states is the ultimate standard by which the internal affairs of the state must be measured’.

63. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948), pp. 70–1; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay and Calhoun (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), pp. 189–94; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 123–8; George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 284–7.

64. Freehling, Prelude, pp. 160–6, 169–70, 173–2; Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester UP, 1978), pp. 102, 212–13.

65. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 130–41; Freehling, Prelude, pp. 196–204, 206, 224–30, 231–6, 241–4, 256–9; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–32 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 232–4, and pp. 277–8 for the reasons for his acquiescence in Georgia’s defiance of the Supreme Court.

66. Freehling, Prelude, pp. 262–6. The next six paragraphs are indebted to ch. 8 of this book.

67. Richard B. Latner, ‘The Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion’, Journal of Southern History 43 (1977), pp. 22–31; Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, pp. 380–1, 388–9.

68. When Jackson received an honorary LLD at Harvard in 1833, the Latin translation of this sentence, and the question whether it was uttered at the degree ceremony, occasioned some controversy designed to ridicule Jackson’s lack of education. This effort rebounded on its authors. See John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford UP, 1962), pp. 83–6.

69. Latner, ‘Nullification Crisis’, pp. 32–3; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 140–1.

70. Cooper, ‘Federal Military Intervention in Domestic Disorders’, pp. 133–4.

71. Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 245–8: (p. 246) ‘With respect to possible military action, the President’s message was relatively tame’. Latner, ‘Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion’, pp. 35–6; for Lincoln’s dilemma, see below, pp. 121, 255.

72. Michael P. Johnson, Towards a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977), pp. 91–2.

73. Freehling, Prelude, p. 291.

74. Remini, Life of Andrew Jackson, pp. 247–51: Freehling, Prelude, p. 297.

75. Latner, ‘Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion’, p. 20.

76. Wiltse, The New Nation, pp. 122–3; Freehling, Prelude, p. 297.

77. Archie V. Huff, Jr, Langdon Cheves of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977; Tricentennial Studies no. 111), pp. 219–20.

78. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, pp. 141–4; Latner, ‘Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion’, pp. 23–8.

79. David Thomson, The Aims of History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969). p. 64.

80. Parish, American Civil War, pp. 24–5.

81. As E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 97–8, has pointed out.