An Outline of United States History (1789-1861)
The following is a set of big-picture, highly simplified narratives, meant to give an overview for later review, and for you yourself to revise as you learn from future reading. The stories overlap in time, as do the periodizations I have given.
1. Establishment of Constitutional System and Elections (1787-1820s)
The Constitution proposed by the Federalist convention of 1787 undergoes ratification at often raucous conventions in each of ‘the several States’ in 1788. This becomes the year of the first federal election, and the compact for the new Union comes into force in 1789. President Washington, Vice-President Adams, and the first Congress are inaugurated in New York City starting in April 1789. New York serves as the capital of the United States for two years. Hamilton (Treasury), Jefferson (Secretary of State) and Franklin (Postmaster General) serve in the first cabinet.
Henceforth, the results of the United States Census (taken every ten years ever since) determine representation in the House of Representatives, based on the populations of the states. (Back then it took several years to finish the Census and for State legislatures to determine the new Congressional districts. It took weeks to count votes in elections. Since travel generally was so slow, presidents were inaugurated four months after their election and Congress usually didn’t convene until the December a year after the election.)
Meanwhile the Senate expands through the addition of states, one state with two senators at a time. This also affects each state’s representation in the Electoral College, which is equal to the number of representatives, plus two for the senators. (The smallest states have just one representative, due to their low populations, but they still have two senators and thus 3 Electoral College votes. This means the Electoral College is not strictly by population and favors smaller states.)
The first Census is taken in 1790. It finds a population of almost 4 million people. That does not include independent Indian tribes within (or beyond) the claimed territory of the United States, who are called ‘unincorporated’ and treated as independent and generally hostile nations. The Census does include enslaved persons and “incorporated” Indians, those who live within the areas settled by Americans. (The “incorporated” are largely integrated into American economic activity, if not necessarily the society. Many are in mixed families, while the majority live in settled Indian communities and towns.)
For the specific purpose of determining a state’s representation in the House, the enslaved and the incorporated Indians are counted as 3/5 of a person until the Civil War. Indians, slaves, and black people generally do not have a vote, as women also do not (except in New Jersey for a few years).
States determine how their elections are conducted. States are free to limit the franchise. They may, for example, impose property qualifications for voting, or even religious requirements. Some states have much smaller electorates as a proportion of their overall population than others. The largest free electorates, counted as a proportion of a state’s whole population, are found in New England; the smallest in the South.
(Delegates to the Constitutional Convention from New England did not want slaves to count toward determining representation in the House at all; those representing slave states wanted to count slaves as full persons for that purpose, even though the slaves otherwise had no vote and no rights.)
Some states have universal white-male suffrage. This will become the norm (if not absolutely so) in all states by the time of what historians call “the democratic revolution” of the 1820s. In the decades to come, more and more voters from the middle and lower economic classes will enter the electoral process. This will contribute to more active and contentious politics and the creation of larger, more organized political parties and political machines. We will pick up that tought below.
2. Land, Indian Country, Frontiers, Wars, Settlements (1783-1820s)
The new United States claims the territory along the East Coast from Maine to Georgia, from the coast westward to the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Great Lakes in the north (see maps).
American independence and territorial claims are recognized by Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ends the independence war. However, more than half of this territory is still “unincorporated” and recognized as “Indian Country.” The same treaty forces Britain to surrender Florida and the Philippines (which it had won in the Seven Years’ War) and cede these back to the Spanish empire. While under Spanish rule, Florida is inhabited mostly by the Seminole and other tribes, some converted to Christianity, some not. It is a refuge for escaped slaves, whom the Spanish authorities recruit as soldiers for a potential fight against the U.S.
To the north of the United States is British Canada, where many of the Loyalists fled after the War of Independence. From Canada, the British endeavor to exercise influence over what the Americans call the Northwest Territory: the territory south of the Great Lakes, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi. The British ally with some of the tribes in this vast region, and provide them with arms.
The American governments before 1787, those under the Articles of Confederation, carefully planned for the Northwest Territory to become the next great frontier for settlement, dividing its territories into possible future states and rectangular plots of land that will be sold to prospectors and settlers. An expansion of slavery into the Northwest Territory is never planned, however. The land is supposed to be settled by free persons, and then be admitted as several new states.
In past decades, starting long before the Revolution when they were British subjects, states/colonies such as Virginia and Pennsylvania laid claim to these lands. Many men of property speculated on the future settlement by whites and exploitation of this land (including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, the Morrises and others). The Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, two acts passed by the Continental Congress in Confederation times, divided the Northwest Territories into rows and columns of neat rectangles for future development and sale. But in 1791, for the most part, the Ohio Territory is American only on U.S. maps.
On the ground in the real Ohio and Great Lakes regions, the unincorporated natives of these territories see that the shattering of the old European empires and the loss of a balance of power between them has left them with little chance of a lasting alliance or peace with the new American government. Fight they must, many of them believe, although others still hope for some form of peaceful incorporation into the new republic. Those who prefer peace include even several tribes of the Iroquois nations, whose centuries of fighting spirit have finally subsided after their divisions and defeats during the Independence War.
A newly federal army, mostly raised from among the state militias, is dispatched to Ohio to subdue a confederation of tribes who want to keep the Americans out of the Northwest Territory. One thousand American troops, organized by state militias, suffer a near-total defeat at the Wabash River in 1791. They are killed nearly to the last man by a combined force of the Miami and Shawnee led by the war chiefs known as Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, respectively. Their general, St. Clair, is also killed. This is the first war fought by the new state, and it starts disastrously, with the greatest defeat the Americans would ever suffer in wars with the Indians. Washington responds by raising a new and more effective federally organized army under a general known as “Mad Dog” Wayne. He builds a series of forts, taking land and avoiding battles, until the Indians feel forced to go on the attack. They are defeated in a 1794 battle at site called Fallen Timbers and subusequently sign a peace treaty at Greenville, ceding most of the future state of Ohio to the Americans.
The Treaty of Greenville is soon abrogated after the American government claims Indians had violated it. Over the next 20 years, the Indians of the “Middle Ground” suffer further military defeats, land cessions in treaties imposed on them, breaches of these treaties, and expulsions from nearly all of their lands. Federal armies inflict the final military blows in 1811-13 and during the War of 1812-1815. They defeat a coalition under the command of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, who had attempted a revival of Middle Ground spirit and lifeways. During the same war, independent Indian tribes are also defeated in the southern U.S. territories by settler and state militias, above all by Andrew Jackson’s militia of Tennessee, which operates well outside that state’s borders. In the following 20-30 years, most of the remaining Indians east of the Mississippi will be deported, with thousands often force-marched in “trails of tears” to the desolate areas designated as “Indian Country” in Oklahoma. This is also the fate of the “incorporated” groups, those who had chosen a settled, peaceful life as farmers, had legal title to their lands, and never engaged in hostilities against the Americans.
Thus are almost all of the lands from the East Coast to the Mississippi River made available to settlers from existing U.S. states, and to immigrant settlers from Europe. The war’s end in 1815 is followed by a near-frenzy of land speculation on easy credit, urban real estate speculation, and settlement of new lands. New grain farms are loaded with debt but take advantage of high international grain prices in the wake of the disruption to European markets caused by the Napoleonic wars. The boom ends after European farming recovers and grain prices collapse. As a result financial markets crash in 1819, and a period of depression follows. The economic crisis affects regions and groups most dependent on markets, and has less impact on subsistence farmers and the yeomanry. (More below.)
3. Britain, France, and the First American Party System (1790-1824)
A two-party system forms in the 1790s. The American party system will be transformed several times, but it tends always to allow only two major parties, thanks to the ‘winner take all’ principle of the Constitution. There can only be one president and only one representative per territorial House district.
In the ‘First Party System’ of the 1790s, the Federalists (represented by Adams and Hamilton, though they are personal antagonists) are Anglophile, meaning that they favor Britain. They seek to shape the new republic into an economic empire, commercial and increasingly urban. Hamilton’s vision of the ideal republic is that a strong federal government should manage a robust physical, legal, and financial infrastructure to support private agricultural and industrial development. His policies favor the growth of manufacturing, the establishment of standards and measures and patents, and underwriting for canals and turnpikes. (Much later, ideas such as these will be called “The American System” and upheld by the son of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and by the Whigs of the ‘Second Party System.’)
The first year of the American Republic, 1789, is also the first year of the French Revolution. Its ideas are partly inspired by the American example. In fact, influences have been crossing the Atlantic in both directions for some decades, during the period of intellectual ferment internationally known as the Enlightenment (Les Lumieres or “The Illuminations”) of philosophy, the sciences, arts, anthropology, and political ideas. Thomas Jefferson is the U.S. ambassador to France until September 1789, when he leaves to join the first U.S. government. He thus sees the beginning of the French Revolution (which starts in July 1789) and actually participates, helping to draft the French Declaration of the Rights of Man with his old friend, the Marquis de Lafayette.
The American party opposing the Federalists come to be known as the Jeffersonians or ‘Republicans’ (no relation to the later Republican Party; the Jeffersonians are later also known as Republican-Democrats, and eventually just Democrats). During this period, the Republicans at least sound Francophile (pro-French) during this period. Jefferson famously wrote that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed” once every generation or so “by the blood of patriots.” In contrast to the Federalists of Hamilton and Adams, the Jeffersonian Republicans envision a mostly agrarian republic of small-holding, independent citizen-farmers (men leading households of wives, children, relatives, servants, workers, and often slaves). The Republicans strongly favor U.S. territorial expansion and hope a republic of the ‘yeomanry’ will grow ever further into new lands, upholding principles of liberty and local control, and remain uncontaminated by the corruption that they blame on cities and commerce. The Hamiltonians or Federalists never oppose territorial expansion, but put more emphasis on economic growth, development of markets, and growth of cities.
Meanwhile, in the same decade of the 1790s, the French Revolution threatens the entire European royalist order. As a consequence, France on one side, and Britain and other “great powers” on the other, once again lead large coalitions against each other in a long, rapid-fire sequence of enormous, costly, destructive wars of unprecedented scale, mobilization, and technology. These will turn even harsher after a general named Napoleon takes power in France as a semi-revolutionary dictator in 1799. Napoleon declares himself Emperor of France in 1803.
In the years that follow, Napoleon’s armies defeat several major powers and occupy most of Europe from Spain all the way to Poland, ruling these territories directly or via client states and kingdoms. The French attempt to modernize European legal and economic systems. They impose a new secular legal code, known as the ‘Code Napoleon,’ with mixed results. After Napoleon reaches a truce with the Russian emperor in 1808, Britain is the only power still at war with the new French empire on the European continent.
France, the land power, and Britain, the sea power, attempt to set up total trade and travel blockades against each other. That is how the Americans come to be involved in the European wars.
Americans are seen generally to prefer commerce to the foreign entanglements, which Washington decried in his 1796 retirement speech. He seems to have genuinely believed that in regard to entanglements with the European great powers. During the European wars of the 1790s and early 1800s, U.S. traders seek to sell supplies to any belligerent in the European conflicts who can pay for it. But back in the United States, their parties adopt colors over which side to favor.
Running aground of the opposite French and British blockades, the U.S. undertakes hostilities on the high seas against France in the late 1790s, during the single term of Adams, the only-ever officially Federalist president. Adams backs the passage of Alien and Sedition Acts that limit free speech and practically equate opposition to this war with treason.
More than a decade later, there are more incidents at sea with the British Royal Navy, which kidnaps many American sailors for British duty. Above all, the British support for the Northwest Indians causes the United States to wage a second, declared war against Britain in 1812-1815 under President Madison (who serves as a Republican). An American attempt to invade Canada fails. A British-Canadian attack puts the torch to Washington (which is still a small city) before the Americans gain the better terms in the 1815 peace.
The Federalists went into decline after Jefferson’s election in 1800. By the 1810s they have dwindled as a party outside of New England, as a result of their opposition (for the most part) to the war. One convention of New England Federalists even devises a plan for their states to secede from the Union. After the war, the Federalist Party collapses. By 1820, during the Monroe presidency, only one major party remains. The very antagonistic candidates in the 1824 election, J.Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson, both officially run as Republican-Democrats. Out of the many contradictions these two figures represent, there will grow the second system of two big parties seeking to piece together different groups into coalitions of voting majorities: the Democrats and the Whigs (1830s-1850s).
4. Revolutions, Nationalism, Nation-States (1792-1830s)
In 1792, revolution against French rule comes to the sugar-slave colony of Saint-Domingue. The island becomes the site of the modern world’s first successful slave revolt. The rebel leaders invoke the ideals of the French Revolution and its declaration of rights, and the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ French government of the time responds by abolishing slavery in Saint-Domingue and in the French overseas empire.
The later French government of Napoleon, however, comes under the influence of the dispossessed slave-owners, some of whom are helping to finance Napoleon’s armies. At their behest, Napoleon sends an invasion force to restablish the system of slave plantations on Saint-Domingue. Plagued by yellow fever, in 1803 these French forces are defeated and completely expelled from the island. The independent country of Haiti is established over the formerly French parts of the island, sending a shock to slave-based societies around the Atlantic. (The eastern part of the island, which is also known by its Spanish name of Hispaniola, remains a Spanish colony and eventually becomes the Dominican Republic.)
These events are noted with great alarm by the plantation owners (“planters”) of South Carolina and Virginia, where major slave revolts are infrequent but always feared.
At the time of its defeat in Haiti, the Napoleonic empire already had its hands full with finance, recruitment and logistics for the European conflicts. Defeat on Saint-Domingue encourages French willingness to sell Louisiana to the United State. The French ‘sell’ a vast territory, that goes well beyond the actual (former or current) French settlements in New Orleans, Louisiana, and northward along the Mississsippi valley. The “Louisiana Territory” is defined as extending from the Mississippi delta at the Gulf of Mexico northwards and westwards over the entire region of the western Mississippi watershed. In other words, it is supposed to include all of the land drained by the tributaries on the western side of the Mississippi River. This extends over the Great Plains all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and represents one-third of the area of the modern continental United States (see map below). Claimed by the French since the 1600s, although colonized only in a few locations, the territory was transferred to the Spanish empire in 1763 after the Seven Years’ War. It was returned to a French claim only a couple of years before the Louisiana Purchase, while Spain was under French-controlled government.
Napoleonic France, at the height of its power, had fatefully installed a client government in Spain and brutally suppressed rebellions against it. Starting in 1808, this prompted new independence struggles of the New World peoples of the Spanish Empire. In large part, the Latin American rebellions were inspired by the example of the United States. The fight for independence from the 300-year-old Spanish empire involves fractious coalitions: colonized mestizos and Hispanic Indians, enslaved Afro-Latinos, and the creole of Spanish descent, who generally provide the leadeship. The latter include most of the administrative and land-owning classes in Spanish America, but they are considered subordinate to Spaniards born in Spain.
After many wars and further revolutions, the independence of a variety of new national republics, some more democratic and republican than others, is established throughout Latin America by 1823. They will remain independent nations. Spanish rule remains only in a few Caribbean colonies, the largest of which is Cuba.
In the meantime, Napoleonic France suffers its final defeat, in 1815. Monarchy is restored to France and throughout the European continent. Would-be founders of new European republican nation-states are pushed back, for a generation and more. The next wave of European nationalist revolutions will rise in the late 1840s.
The story told in the last two sections has outlined, in a very bare and incomplete way, the world’s first great wave of revolutionary republicanism, nationalism, and creation of modern nation-states, in the United States, France (and its large but short-lived Napoleonic Empire), Haiti, and throughout Latin America. Many historians view the United States as the original case of a modern nation-state. That is contestable, but the US represents the first creation by revolution of a new form of state in a sequence that began in the 1770s and continued far into the nineteenth century, and is often called “The Age of Revolutions.”
5. Virtue, Liberty, Patriotism, and Republican Womanhood
In these first decades, many projects are devised by artists, patriots and political thinkers who want to encourage national feeling: artworks and anthems and flags and “Columbian” clubs and handbooks and standards of weights and measures and a new dictionary of American English, by Noah Webster. This reaches a new, emotional peak by the War of 1812 and in the years that follow. Such projects are also undertaken in revolutionary France on an even grander scale, and in the nineteenth century become the standard accoutrements for would-be nation-builders around the world. Every nation is seen to need national poets, songs, popular myths of long-ago origins and lands, and a written common language. (Countless languages at that time still had never been in print, and most places were home to a multiplicity of mutually unintelligible tongues.)
In this vein, American women (especially white women of the middle and upper orders) are acknowledged as the most virtuous, essential servants to the nation, whose job it is as mothers to be fertile and bring up as many children as they can, and to educate young men and women to understand liberty, patriotism, virtue and citizenship — as well as to train them in their differing gender roles. This is a flipping of an older European script, in which men are rational actors and women are emotional and subject to passions. Now it is often thought men are rational but savage, subject to base drives, intensely competitive and dangerous to one another. Boys must be tamed into virtuous citizens. Women, frail and delicate and emotional though they are thought to be, carry the burden to civilize the growing populace.
It is also understood that liberty and virtue can be in tension, requiring self-control and vigilant policing of the moral order by communities as wholes, as has already largely been the case since colonial times. To take on their mission, women, or at least women of the middle and upper orders, need to be literate. They are acknowledged as the better teachers of children, and many find work in related caring professions. At the same time, this concords with early thinking that the rights being declared by the world’s new republics rightly extend to women as equals. But the ideal of patriotic womanhood holds that they should not be voting, or owning property except as widows (until they remarry or their sons inherit). Property rights begin to be acquired depending on jurisdiction and in fits and starts during the period of our course, while the vote and eventual legal equality will take a lot longer. By the 1840s, however, the first openly feminist wave has begun, with its thought-leaders meeting to demand suffrage and rights for women at the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference.
6. Several Species of Frontier (1790s-1840s)
The new United States can be described as a republic with relatively democratic institutions, a nation, and an empire. Its constitution is republican. Most of its people come to see themselves as a new nation, bound by common ideals and lineages. The U.S. is also an empire in fact, through the holding and acquisition of territories not incorporated into the republic, and through its treatment of unincorporated Indian tribes as other independent nations. Territorial expansionism is well represented in its reigning belief systems, laws, and governmental policy.
There are multiple frontiers of expansion that build upon the old colonial settlement models.
In the beginning, to generalize, different patterns of settlement are followed in the South, the North, and in the development of urban areas.
Although it is rarely seen as such, the building of New York City up the spine of Manhattan and out into other counties is a species of frontier. Ever-higher populations crowd into ever-denser neighborhoods. Money, commerce and waves of construction and new industries create greater extremes of wealth and poverty and a strange, tumultuous, exciting city life. This will become true of many northern cities. During our period, the immigrants to these cities tend to arrive from the German lands and from Ireland.
Another kind of frontier is the more common model in the Northern regions, as settlement extends ever westward. The usual pattern of the “Northern frontier” first sees federal troops or state militias defeating and expelling Indian tribes from given territories. This is followed by sales of pre-surveyed, large rectangular parcels of land, generally to speculators or prospectors. They then sell smaller parcels to homesteaders, who will largely become farmers who grow grain and sell it on markets. Canal diggers and turnpike builders go to work to connect the new territories to the East. As territories are settled, they are incorporated as states and accepted into the United States.
Infrastructure construction projects are run by some of the country’s earliest shareholder corporations, backed by the government’s enforcement of land grants (including use of eminent domain to remove property holders in the way of projects). Financing is ultimately assured by the First and Second Banks of the United States (these central banks exist until 1837).
Before the railway, the most consequential single project will be the Erie Canal in western New York, opened in 1824 to bypass Niagara Falls and connect the Great Lakes through Lake Erie via a long canal to the Hudson River at Albany, and from there downriver to the port of New York City. This makes the Great Lakes regions of Northwest Territory lands accessible to shipping, all the way out to present-day Chicago and Minnesota. Grain and meat travels to the East and crosses the Atlantic. Upstate and western New York see rapid growth in towns, population, and new industries. They become centers of cultural, social, and religious ferment. With commodities from as far away as Minnesota being shipped through its harbor, New York City becomes by far the most important port and commercial center in the country, finally surpassing Boston and Philadelphia.
Many of the settlers in the new Northern territories arrive as already established families and even whole groups or villages, moving in caravans from New England, or arriving in groups from Europe (mostly from the German lands and Scandinavia). The latter quickly build their own communities. Increasingly immigrants go directly to existing immigrant communities. Many are even recruited actively by agencies arranging travel across the Atlantic. Many of these homesteading settlers arrive in land they have already purchased, hoping one day to pay off the debt incurred.
These are free-labor communities (no slavery). Very generally speaking, politics is organized in townships and closely intertwined with religion and sect. As we have seen, much of this manner of expansion bespeaks the Federalist vision, and policies to support it come to be called “The American System.”
A third kind of frontier is not unknown in the North, especially once it moves beyond the Mississippi River valley, but is more typical of settlement in the Southern regions as these expand westward. In this model, settlers claim and secure land before federal incorporation or even territorial jurisdiction is achieved. Groups of settlers might move into lands ahead of any other claims or surveys, and fight to defend their claims against Indian counter-attacks or competing claims. Animal colonists, meaning the livestock that the settlers bring, still precipitate fights, and will continue to do so into the later Western expansion (below, Section 13). Larger numbers of settlers (and business ventures) arrive to stake their claims. European immigration on the Southern frontiers is lower than in the Northern model, and tends to skew Scotch-Irish (Protestant).
Eventually Congress votes on incorporating a territory and later admits it as a State. In truth, this species of frontier continues the pattern that dates back to the earliest colonial times. It is the real-world form of the Republican-Democratic vision of the yeomanry and their liberty.
Sometimes this ‘third model’ is enacted on a larger scale, however. In place of federal forces, state and other militias, such as those commanded by the warlord Andrew Jackson out of Tennessee in the 1810s, engage in war with unincorporated Indians, generally without waiting for federal sanction. This is what Jackson did in Alabama, Missississippi and Louisiana throughout the War of 1812-15. He became a national hero after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Then he led his own militia on an invasion of Florida in 1819-20 (known as the First Seminole War). A few leaders in Washington call Jackson treasonous for invading Florida without federal authorization. But the U.S. government soon negotiates the annexation of Florida from Spain. At that point Jackson is again hailed, more moderately, as a hero.
Jackson’s exploits and the aftermath effectively accomplish the opening of all disputed lands up to the Mississippi River (and beyond) for the ‘cotton revolution’ — which burgeons along with demand from growing textila industries in Britain and the North, and thanks to technological innovations such as the cotton gin (introduced in 1803). This drives the massive expansion of the Southern slave economy westward, and results in the addition of new slave states.
By the 1830s even the incorporated (assimilated) Indians are expelled from their farmlands and towns in both the North and the South. Georgia passes an Indian Removal Act to expel the ‘incorporated’, assimilated, farming, western-dressing Cherokee. The Supreme Court finds in favor of the Cherokee, but Georgia goes ahead and rounds them up anyway. As president in 1829-1837, Jackson defies the Court and mockingly proclaims it should try to enforce its own ruling. The Cherokee are set on the Trail of Tears, along with many others who had or will have their own passages to tribal reservations: Chickasaw and Creek from the South, Delaware and settled Iroquoia from the North.
Also on a larger scale, the ‘third model’ of frontier (remember, this is your instructor’s terminology) describes the 1820s-1840s actions of the settlers who move into the Mexican territory of Tejas, although these American cattle-ranchers and frontier farmers were initially invited and welcomed. A new Mexican government, however, bans slavery. The Tejanos continue to keep slaves, and declare themselves an independent Texas Republic in 1836. The are able to fight off the Mexican federal forces.
The ‘third model’ also roughly describes the first settlements in the Oregon Territory (disputed with British Canada), which started on a small scale already in the 1820s. By the late 1830s, thousands of settlers are making the journey to the Oregon Territory. They have no official sanction but do have political support. Whole families, with their children and relatives and all their goods in trains of covered wagons, set out from Missouri, following the Oregon Trail through the Indian Country of the Louisiana Territory, hoping to claim lands and establish farms and towns in the Pacific Northwest. Their new lands become private property to defend against possible Indian attack. The first larger town is Astoria, on the Oregon Coast, named after the New York Astors who own massive logging operations and shipping companies in Astoria. (The Queens neighborhood was also named after their ancestor, a rich fur trader named John Jacob Astor.)
Later historians such as Henry Turner and his critics in the late nineteenth century will debate whether the frontiers of this time were the birthing site of a more democratic, vital and egalitarian spirit of America.
7. Populations and Territories, Free and Enslaved
As we have seen, settlement expands territorially westward through the addition of the Louisiana Territory and the displacement of Indian populations in the wars of 1811-15. New lands for settlement are also opened by the Indian Removal Acts. Indian tribes are continually displaced from their territories and generally forced to go to Oklahoma. More states are created and recognized by Congress under the process specified in Article IV of the Constitution. Political leaders in North and South watch carefully to maintain a balance between slave and free states. This also keeps a balance in the Senate, with its power to ratify judicial appointments. One result is the long-lasting “Missouri Compromise” of 1820. After much debate, Missouri is admitted as the first slave state to the West of the Mississippi. The Compromise, however, sets a line of latitude to the south of Missouri as the future dividing line between new slave states and free states. This is not much land compared to the parts of the Louisiana Territory to the north of the line, and pro-slavery interests wanted more.
The U.S. population continues to burgeon. It more than doubles from the 4 million of the 1790 Census, reaching almost 10 million in the 1820 Census. Then it triples again in less than two generations, and hits 31 million in the 1860 Census. Immigration, driven in part by the European hunger and potato blight and the European class conflicts and revolutions of the 1840s, contributes to the growth, but it is not the biggest factor. Birth rates skyrocket. The most powerful force is simply that more human children survive infancy and live longer, a trend which demographers today call the ‘mortality revolution.’ Death rates and especially child mortality begin to plunge (with regional exceptions and reversals) starting at the turn of the nineteenth century. Demographers attribute this to a number of causes, including changes in living conditions and standards of public hygiene, more and better food, medical treatments, inoculations against disease, and, epidemiologists believe, herd immunities acquired after 300 years of pandemics brought by empires and globalization. In the United States the population of the enslaved African Americans increases almost as dramatically as that of the whole population, and reaches 4 million people in 1860, compared by then to the 7 million white people in the South. This, again, is mainly due to natural increase, and not new arrivals through the slave trade. (The slave trade is banned in 1808 but illegal human smuggling continues for decades.)
All of this growth, coupled with the different models of frontier settlement described above, help to drive development and growth of two different but interrelated economic systems. These are very much rooted in differences dating back to the colonial times, but are accelerated by new modern technologies. The westward expansion in the South is largely related to the “Cotton Revolution.” It is highly dependent on a constant increase in slave labor. It should be noted the Southern white majority do not own slaves. They continue settle on new lands (generally away from the best agricultural regions) as a yeomanry, largely impoverished.
Beyond the rapidly growing cities in the East, Northern expansion toward the west mostly consists of new farm communities almost exclusively of small-holding white families (without slavery).
Both of these incipient “sections” of the country, North and South, are linked by interdependent markets, commercial relationships, movements of people, flows of goods, common finance for many ventures, common aspects of national culture, religious affiliations, and the common federal government and system of laws.
8. Life Was Different Then (Public Service Announcement)
All the same, the U.S. remains primarily an agrarian country. It takes two days to travel from New York to Philadelphia, and weeks to get further inland. The material culture is sparse if compared to the relative abundance most of us experience today. We’ve talked about the (massive) impact on history of luxuries and trade-items such as sugar and beaver pelts and treasured art works, but the fact is even most of people we might refer to as “middle class” from the early part of this time — even heads of households who are small landholders, storekeepers, artisans like printers and mechanics, or professionals — might have just a couple of garments for themselves, sleep on beds of straw, live in a room with six other people. Several might sleep in one bed for warmth, or spend hours every day carrying water, collecting wood, or disposing of waste. On the other hand the garments, generally, will be of high quality, sturdy, meant to be washed and worn for many years. And on average, this is probably the country with the highest material standard of living in the world, as foreign visitors remark. As in colonial times, European observers still remark they can’t believe how big and well-fed the Americans seem to be.
9. Markets
Institutions like the first two Banks of the United States (1792-1811, 1815-1835) and the U.S. Patent Office were meant to foster commerce. By the 1820s, the first industrial revolution, underway in Britain, begins to take hold in the United States. As we have seen, the northern states especially is linked by networks of canals and turnpikes. These are built on government contracts by shareholder corporations issuing bonds for finance. Such projects employ many thousands of men, immigrant and native-born. Some of these ditch-diggers are landless, some are local farm-workers.
New England and New York and Pennsylvania become the cradle of the first industrial revolution in the United States, which is powered by water mills. The major industry is in textiles. Farmers’ daughters are often among the first waves of workers. Women are supposed to do wage-work only until they marry.
The first American railways are built in the 1830s. There is an explosion of railway building, following the same corporate model as the canals and turnpikes. Almost every middle class household buys a mass-manufactured mechanical clock. This is a revolution in how time is treated, how people divide up their day. Wage labor is timed to the minute. Work-days at the new factories extend over 14 hours with bells announcing short breaks every couple of hours and, finally, the end of the day.
Market relations and dependence on the market become ever denser, reaching farther out into the country and deeper into how the majority makes a living. This accentuates tensions between the bases of the anti-tax (and very mildly anti-commercial) Democrats and the pro-commerce Whigs. It also subjects larger parts of the population to economic cycles of boom and bust. Busts are often followed by periods of depression that persist for years, depending on the area. Each of the successive economic crises of the period is therefore larger and affects more people. A big economic recession started in 1819, as we saw. A bigger one still arrived in 1837 (after a crash in both the cotton and railway industries). The biggest yet will come in 1857 (mostly northern, a railways and banking crash). These are also international events.
Despite the crises of capitalism, faith in the virtues of hard work for a wage becomes a kind of creed known as Free Labor. This is represented much more among the Whigs but is usually respected by the Democrats. Free Labor is adopted as a downright anti-slavery creed by third parties like Free Soil in 1848. In the 1850s, it becomes the ideology of the new Republicans of Fremont, Seward, Stanton, and Lincoln.
The free laborer, so the story goes, has dignity and virtue. He frowns upon any form of bondage. He makes his own life by selling his work-hours for a wage, a fair day’s wage for a day’s work. Sorry about the pronouns, which fit the custom of the time. She is, of course, sometimes a woman. Beyond market relations, women are still doing the majority of the labor of household and child-rearing. Increasingly, when they do so, they make use of purchased consumer goods.
10. The Antebellum Slave Republic (1815-1860)
Starting with Vermont in 1777, all of the Northern states abolished slavery, with New Jersey as the last in 1804 (abolishing women’s suffrage and African American votes as part of the deal). Britain banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, and the United States followed in 1808. (This was the first year in which Congress was allowed to consider the question of the slave trade, as specified in the Constitution.) In the United States, early anti-slavery efforts are largely a province of intellectuals and funders who favor initiatives for manumission and colonization (the sponsored ‘return’ of the manumitted freedmen and Free Blacks to Africa). Meanwhile, the British Empire will ban chattel slavery in 1833, followed by the French in 1834.
The system of enslavement in the Southern American states simultaneously undergoes massive expansion throughout the nineteenth century and will continue to expand ever-more rapidly right up until the start of the Civil War in 1861. Even as the Atlantic slave trade becomes the business of ever-fewer illegal smugglers, the South becomes the site of a ‘Second Middle Passage’ by natural increase. Owners intentionally seek to ‘breed’ large numbers of people, so as to sell them. As part of this practice, rape is not uncommon. The internal slave trade becomes the biggest industry in South Carolina, where many of the best soils have been depleted after 120 years of rice and cotton farming. It is also a key industry in Virginia, which also suffers soil depletion due especially to tobacco. With its large port at Charleston and civic elite, South Carolina remains the most radical of the pro-slavery states, producing as its long-term spokesperson and senator the “theorist” of slave society, John Calhoun (who is vice-president for four years in Jackson’s first term).
Virginia is the most populous slave state, but also home to more ambiguity about it, as the old examples of Madison and Jefferson suggest. During the four-plus decades of the antebellum period (1815-60), slave-owners in the states of the “Upper South” or “Upper Tier” (the more northerly slave states) sell nearly one million people to new owners in the southerly “Lower South” or “Lower Tier.” There, an ideal climate and geography for cotton growing and the use of the cotton gin foster the Cotton Revolution.
Depending on the area, slaveholders number no more than about 6 percent or at most 10 percent of the white population. By 1860, this proportion will be tending toward zero in many parts of the Upper South. In some cotton-belt counties in the fertile Mississippi valley, however, it appears to be as high as 90 percent of households (see the “1860” map in the Maps section, below). But these are areas where there may be only a handful of households in a given county, and these “households” are actually huge plantation enterprises driving hundreds of slaves. A rich ‘planter,’ one of the men who truly constitute a Southern ruling class and are derogatorily termed the ‘Slave Power’, may own hundreds of enslaved persons. That is one ‘household.’ But the majority of whites are small landholders or landless workers, and may or may not aspire one day to own one or two humans as their ‘property’ and servants.
Nevertheless, majorities of the poorer white people of the South usually supported the system, believing that their interests were served by having the enslaved people below them — or simply believing in the overall racist ideology justifying slavery.
The extreme expansion of cotton production results in ever greater intensification and cruelty in the labor regime imposed on the African-American field workers. Massive plantations spring up around the Mississippi overnight. These are often corporate ventures with hundreds of laborers force-marched or shipped to the plantation out of South Carolina or Virginia. The system of surveillance and control becomes increasingly thorough. The enslaved clear the fields and go to work planting cotton. The financing often comes from Northern banks or merchants. The crop is sold to Britain and the growing textile mills of the North. (There, the United States’ first industrial proletariat, and the first to organize industrial strikes, consists mostly of young unmarried daughters of farming households at textile mills in towns like Lynn, Massachusetts.)
The planters develop a ‘paternalist’ ideology to justify their order as natural, as traditional, as one that provides a needed father-master and a stable, comfortable life to the Africans, who are characterized as child-like. By 1860, “scientific racism” has reared its head, and Social Darwinism is on its way. Supporters of slavery are measuring skull shapes to demonstrate the superiority of the white race.
Many forms of coping and passive resistance develop among the enslaved, above all centering on the black church and the family. Slaves may not enter legal marriages, but it is tolerated and encouraged to keep the peace, as long as they conform to the slave order. Spouses and children can still be sold away from their families. Slaves may seek spiritual refuge in music or Christianity. They may engage in labor slow-downs and subtle insubordination, such as pretending to be incompetent so as to get breaks from work. Or they may attempt to escape, to move to the North and try to pass as Free Black.
Only on a few occasions do gestures of defiance break out into open, bloody rebellions. As many as 500 field hands in the Germantown region of Louisiana revolted, captured arms, and marched on New Orleans in 1811 before they were defeated. Dozens were subjected to mass public executions, while most of the rest were sold off. A group led by the Free Black pastor and teacher Denmark Vesey were arrested for plotting a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822. The slave pastor Nat Turner led a revolt that kills more than 30 white people in Virginia in 1831. Although revolts are rare and subject to quick suppression, the Slave Power never forgets and always fears such manifestations. All revolts are seen as potential wildfires that could rapidly grow to engulf a whole region. Haiti is never quite forgotten. Fearing rebellion, large parts of the white South become an armed camp, a militia of the free white men, conducting slave patrols and always preparing to fight uprisings.
The ‘yeoman’ ideal of small, supposedly self-sufficient, landholding households, multi-generational and each headed by independent-minded pragmatic men with a strong hand on the reins of their families — and their servants, including slaves — helped animate the movements that swept Thomas Jefferson and then Andrew Jackson to power. At the same time, increasing town and city populations in the North and immigrant arrivals began to organize new communities and popular political machines as a means of defense against the nativists (“nativist” did not mean “native American” but referred to anti-immigrant sentiment within established, Anglo-Protestant communities). Generally, the immigrants and town populations voted for the Democrats and were organized by the political machines of the northern states. Although northern Democratic voters were largely dependent on “free labor” (wage labor), they were thus allied with the southern Democratic establishment, the largest pro-slavery faction within politics. This combination was the paradox at the heart of the coalition maintained by the Democrats of Andrew Jackson and his successors.
11. Religion, Culture, Movements and Politics
Second PSA: Another aspect that always should be kept in mind is the near-constant presence of religious affiliation, belief, sect, and practice as strong social factors compared to what many (though not all) people nowadays experience, especially on the surface of a city like today’s New York.
From the early nineteenth forward, there are many social revolutions related to the economic and political ones, but with their own independent force thanks to religion, passion, and new ideas. The society develops in surprising ways and new forms of religious fervor arise, with revival meetings and popular lay speakers challenging the organized church establishments. Social movements call for, win, and self-organize institutions like public and private elementary schooling, temperance drives, penitentiaries (considered progressive compared to the cruelty of former punishments like the stockade or tarring and feathering), poor houses (workhouses for the relatively new phenomenon of the unemployed), asylums and hospitals, new colleges. It is an era both of church-building and fervent religious sermons delivered well away from the churches, which feel sorely challenged by the evangelicals. Many utopian movements seek to found their own communities, including those who will become the Mormon community in Utah today. The overall variety is too great to describe here in detail: Christian proto-socialists, communities practicing ‘free love’ (actually serial monogamy) and independent economies, experimental collectives, first socialist communities.
The two movements that may not at first attract the largest followings but will generate the most contentious struggle for social change are those for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights. Abolitionism gets a new direction and new wind in the 1830s through the establishment of many new groups and ‘fire-breathing’ demands for immediate abolition and citizenship for the freed. Women and their allies agitate for rights to property, public political expression, rights within marriage, and suffrage: the vote. A moment for both goals seems to have arrived around the world. The European empires are abolishing slavery, at least in its form of institutionalized, legalized chattel slavery. It was after all abolished in Haiti in the 1790s and in Latin America in the 1820s (with Brazil and Cuba as the big exceptions).
The British abolition of slavery after 1833 spurs the organization of networks of Northerners, who come to be known as the Underground Railroad, to aid the escape of enslaved persons from the South to Canada. This helps build a more radical abolition movement, although it is still a minority. Beyond the (correct) stereotype of the Christian-preaching, ‘fire-breathing’ white abolitionist speakers like William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, newer research finds that Free Blacks in the North are the most active group propelling the abolitionist drive. Their role tends to be organizational and low-key. The great exception, and the greatest of all abolitionist writers and speakers, is the self-freed Frederick Douglass, whose Narrative is published in 1845. After a speaking tour of Britain and Ireland, he settles in Rochester, New York as the publisher of his own abolitionist paper, The North Star.
12. The 1844 Election, “Manifest Destiny” and War with Mexico
American settlers invited into the Mexican territory of Tejas who brought slaves balk at a later Mexican government’s moves to make them free their slaves. They declare an independent Texas Republic, which fights its own “war of independence” and then seeks to join the Union after 1836. If Congress allows that, it seems certain to mean war with Mexico. That is a popular idea in the South, a bit less so in the North, and unpopular in New England. Senator Clay, the perpetual presidential candidate and advocate of the “American System” (more or less the Federalist program, updated), opposes this idea when he runs as the Whig candidate in the 1844 election. The vote and the Electoral College is won narrowly by the Democratic candidate, Polk, who has campaigned on promises to annex both Texas and the Oregon territories. This program soon comes to be known as “Manifest Destiny” — the idea that the United States has a god-given mission to expand to the Pacific and beyond. Even before the victorious Polk has taken office, Congress votes to annex Texas and admit it to the Union as a state.
With the North-South balance in the Senate always a concern (especially to the South which uses the Senate to maintain its political hegemony at the federal level) it is typical that the accession to the Union of slave-state Texas is soon followed by that of free-state Iowa. Iowa is perhaps the most perfected expression of the American colonial model. It began with expulsions of the natives by way of treaty and tricks. This was later covered up with the familiar myth of a natural ‘pristine state’. Soon Iowa is populated by transplants from New England and the German lands. Many of these farmers are at the forefront of the new social movements and institutions, and found colleges and utopian communities, as well as churches. Once the railroad arrives in the late 1850s, Iowa proceeds to revolutionize the world as a producer of seemingly limitles grain at low cost. It will vote overwhelmingly for anti-slavery candidates and provide troops disproportionately to the Union cause in the Civil War.
In 1846 Britain accepts a deal establishing the northern border between Canada and the Oregon Territory. It is less than Polk demanded, but in truth he didn’t expect more. Mexico is willing to let Texas go, but Polk repeatedly sends troops into land still disputed, between the Nasces and Rio Grande rivers. Shots are fired, men die, and the United States declares war. Rep. Abraham Lincoln (D-IL) is among the many voting against the war declaration in Congress. Rep. David Wilmot (W-PA) attempts to amend the war budget bill with a stipulation, the “Wilmot Proviso,” that would ban slavery in any new territories acquired during the war. The Wilmot Proviso is voted down, but the results send a historic signal that split of the sections is becoming more important than party affiliation. Southern representatives vote against Wilmot’s proposal unanimously, regardless of party. Party is almost irrelevant to the Northern representatives’ support for banning slavery from new territories.
The war with Mexico is short and devastating. American forces land at Vera Cruz and march from there straight into Mexico City. Mexico cedes the present-day territory of the southwestern U.S. by treaty in 1848. Polk and Southern politicians had wanted more of it.
13. Western Explosion, Global Consequences
The United States now occupies the entire territory of today’s ‘Lower 48’ states (with only a relatively small later addition of the Gadsen Purchase in southern New Mexico).
In 1849 California sees a gold rush, just one year after the peace treaty and its annexation by the United States. Tens of thousands of Americans arrive from the East and quickly outnumber the former Spanish-Mexican population. Where the older Spanish-Mexican colonists had sought to marry daughters of Indian chiefs and to hold sway over the Indian tribes adjacent to them through Christianity, the new Anglo arrivals want to marry the daughters of Spanish-Mexican plantation owners, and, unfortunately, show a willingness to commit mass murder against Indians.
By 1850, California has entered the Union as a free state (meaning: free labor or wage labor, not slave labor). California’s first territorial and state governments encourage an outright genocide of the largest remaining unincorporated Indian populations on the continent, who live in valleys beyond the coastal areas of greater Spanish influence. The state offers bounties to militias engaging in raids and massacres. All tribes are dispossessed within a matter of a few years. One of the men involved in this atrocity is John Fremont, an anti-slavery railway lawyer turned adventurer from Georgia. During the war with Mexico, he led his own small army to claim and declare a California Republic (one of several to do so). This briefly raised accusations of treason against him. Instead he became one of the new State’s first senators in Congress. In 1856, he will become the first presidential candidate of the new anti-slavery party, the Republicans.
At this point, after California, most textbooks of U.S. history proceed to the Compromise of 1850, which the Congress reached so as to allow the accession of California as a free-labor state. Free California upsets the Southern leadership. Half of it is south of the 1820 Missouri Compromise line of 36-30 latitude. Whether a new state was north or south of that line was supposed to determine whether it would allow slavery. In exchange for statehood for California (where almost no one supported slavery) the Southerners win the demand henceforth to let settlers within each new territory vote on whether they want to join the Union as a free state or slave state. And in the meantime, as long as the future state is still a territory, settlers can bring their ‘property’ with them, meaning enslaved persons. Thus begins the central American political conflict of the final years leading to the Civil War.
The textbooks, including Watson, usually have less to say about the other epochal consequences of the rapid taking of the American West, from Texas across the deserts and the Rockies to the Pacific Northwest. This territory is far larger than the original United States, which Europeans and Americans had settled through many episodes over the course of 200 years. New communications and transport, and the increased populations, now allow the taking of lands from the remaining independent Indian nations and the settlement and incorporation of the New West in less than 40 years. In 1890, the government will even declare the closing of the country’s internal frontier. While everyone associates the nineteenth-century West with cowboys and ranchers and saloon towns, it will actually have the highest proportion of urban population of the three sections, North, South, and West. Its biggest industries will be mining, building, and industrial-scale ranching and commodity agriculture.
Already in the first years after the Western territorial explosion, the reaching of the Pacific has epic consequences. Compared to our story until now, developments occur at a lightning pace and a global scale. People travel from the East Coast to California mostly by sea. Since ships need several weeks extra to get around South America, themost common option is to sail to Central America, take an arduous land passage across the isthmus, and embark on a second ship headed for California. American companies gain monopoly rights to manage routes across the isthmus. They begin speculating on a future canal. An adventurer or military ‘filibuster,’ William Walker, raises an army to invade Nicaragua with support from Southern interests, captures the capital and declares himself president. Nicaragua had abolished slavery, but Walker re-instituted it. He hoped to become the canal builder. His government is recognized by the U.S. president in 1856, but he is soon driven from power. (He takes a later expedition on an invasion of Honduras and is killed.)
In Belgium, meanwhile, Southern interests meet with European bankers to try to sell them on a plan for a filibuster invasion of Cuba, hoping to capture the island and carve it up into what they envision as several slave states, each with two senators. This is only the beginning of a new level of U.S. military and commercial interventionism in the region, continuing to the present day.
On the federal level, two U.S. naval fleets dispatched by the president to Tokyo Bay in 1853 and 1855, under the command of Commodore Perry (a hero of the 1812 war on the Great Lakes!), use threats of force to fulfill the mission of compelling Japan to allow American ships into all of its ports. Japan opens up to the world for the first time in 300 years, and establishes trade relations with the United States. Realizing their military inferiority, and after a period of civil war, Japanese elites embark on programs of modernization, industrialization, and capitalist development, adopting Western sciences and technologies. By the end of the century, Japan becomes a full participant in the global imperialist land-grabs and wars, a new ‘great power.’
The U.S. begins an overseas empire in the Pacific through the discovery and acquisition (as private properties defended by U.S. navy ships) of dozens of uninhabited guano islands. Every empire at this time is busy trying to find and claim guano islands. To our ears, it may sound like some kind of joke: millions of years of accumulated birdshit from migrating flocks, piled hundreds of feet high on rocks in the middle of the ocean. But guano is an ideal fertilizer. The joke turns sour: it is harvested by the most miserable workers in the world, often impressed or enslaved. This new vital resource provides massive increases in agricultural production. Guano from the Pacific fertilizes the ground in Iowa and Nebraska and France and Britain, and sets off a scramble among empires that threatens to cause wars. Guano means more people and more money. (Guano also brings the potato blight to Europe.)
Beyond, the greatest frontier of all looms: China. A hundred years earlier it was the world’s richest country, and it is still the most populous. The Qing dynasty is crumbling, beset by imperialist incursions, compelled to allow an opium trade by force of British arms, forced to cede areas within many cities to foreign commercial enclaves. The foreigners in the enclaves are governed by the laws of their own countries. The Chinese empire burns with civil war in 1851-1863. Tens of millions die. American irregulars participate in the eventual suppression of a rebel, quasi-Christian peasant-led kingdom. In 1860, the United States is rewarded with the acquisition of its own extraterritorial district in Shanghai, next to the British.
Thousands of Chinese men have by then immigrated to the United States, looking for work in new Western mining towns, on the roads and railroads and irrigation projects of the Pacific and Southwest, and following ever-eastward the leg of the Transpacific Railroad that will be completed when it joins the eastern leg at Provo, Utah in 1867. They meet with discrimination but at first are in demand as laborers. This will change after the Civil War, however.
14. Will the rest of the states of the new West become slave or free?
North-South conflicts intensify, driven by the Slave Power’s relentless pursuit of expansion, political dominance on the federal level, and demands that the North help enforce its system of enslavement, as with the Fugitive Slave Act. This federal law requires northern state authorities and private persons to detain escaped slaves and return them to authorities in the Southern states.
The Southern drive to expand the slave system is an irresistible force. Abolitionism is still a minority belief but it becomes more radical and feeds into a growing general anti-slavery feeling in the North. Anti-slavery will, surprisingly, become an immovable object. Beyond the abolitionists who do not want to compromise on freedom, anti-slavery belief is not incompatible with openly expressed racism, and can even tolerate the idea that slavery will continue in the South. Anti-slavery is the insistence that there will be no new slave territories, and no export of slave labor to the North.
The political, social and cultural divisions into two great ‘sections’ shatter the second party system of Whigs and Democrats. The years after the founding of Free Soil in 1848 see other major third-party efforts capture significant numbers of votes and local offices, notably the ‘Know-Nothing’ nativists of the American Party, an anti-immigrant reaction to the new German and Irish (Catholic) communities in the North. (Recall that immigration increases greatly in the 1840s, with more than a million people arriving from Ireland, primarily younger impoverished Catholics, because of the potato blight and starvation of hundreds of thousands of people starting in 1844. Immigrants from Germany also arrive in larger numbers than before, mostly from Catholic regions, because of political upheavals and failed revolutions followed by brutal crackdowns.
In reaction to the new immigration, the nativist vote of the American Party peaks in 1856. Meanwhile, the Congress seeks to apply the 1850 Compromise to actual incorporated territories with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Under this law, Kansas is supposed to hold a vote of white residents on whether it will be slave or free! Pro-slavery forces from Missouri and committed abolitionists from as far afield as Massachussetts flood into the state as settlers, and engage in a very violent armed conflict by 1856: “Bleeding Kansas.” In these skirmishes, John Brown, leading a small battalion of his own sons and followers, takes ‘fire-breathing abolitionism’ to a new, literal, bloody level. Two competing legislatures are formed in Kansas. Two votes are held on the slavery question, one for it, one against. Congress fights over the admission of Kansas as a state.
The 1854 Act sets off an exodus of elected politicians who have had enough of the ever-compromising Whig leadership. At first they call themselves the “Nebraska Party,” and they elect 108 representatives to the House in the fall of 1854. They reorganize as the Republican Party and run Fremont as presidential candidate in 1856. Fremont wins the northernmost tier of northern states.
The Republican program is much like that of the Whigs, but with uncompromising anti-slavery. (Anti-Slavery plus Free Labor plus Lots More Railroads, and a railway lawyer shall lead them.)
The Slave Power is enraged by the rise of anti-slavery. Traditional Democratic leaders like Stephen Douglas (Senator of Illinois, Lincoln’s nemesis in 1858) find it difficult to hold Southern loyalty in the party, no matter how much they bend over backwards.
Then the Supreme Court, dominated by Southern slave-holders, hands down the Dred Scot decision. Its argument denies any rights to black people, free or enslaved, North or South. Its unanimous ruling effectively allows slave-owners to travel with their slaves throughout the North, to establish businesses with slave labor in the North, and to expect the full enforcement of slave law by Northern courts and Northern police. Its logic makes clear that in a single country under modern conditions, Slave cannot be separated from Free: eventually either all the states must become slave states, or slavery will be extinguished.
Then, in 1859, John Brown leads the ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, seeking to spark a general slave uprising. He is defeated, and executed together with his sons. The shockwaves are enormous in the South. To many in the North, he is a hero.
15. The Election of 1860, Secession, and the Start of the Civil War
The stage is set for the sweeping rise of Republican support in the North, on a platform promising no more slave states. The southern Democrats see this as a strategy of bottling their region up, one that is certain to lead to the end of slavery. Many of the Republicans see it in exactly the same way.
Southern Democratic leaders refuse to accept the veteran “compromiser” and Democratic nominee Stephen Douglas as their candidate. The Democratic party splits into North and South parties, just months before the 1860 election. In effect, two separate elections are being held. In the North, the Republicans are opposing the Northern Democrats led by Douglas. In the South, a moderate pro-slavery party faces off against the radicalized Southern Democrats.
In November 1860, the surprise Republican nominee for president — a largely unknown Illinois railway lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who had lost a Senate election in 1858 to Douglas — wins a strong majority of the Northern popular vote and of the Electoral College. (Perhaps he gets a few hundred write-in votes in the South.)
Beginning with South Carolina, the legislatures of the seven Southern states of the “Lower Tier” (see 1860-61 map, below) vote to secede from the United States, the Union. The articles of secession approved by the legislatures make explicit statements upholding slavery as their region’s way of life, to which they have a natural right. they maintain that this way of life must be preserved against the threat posed by the new federal government and its anti-slavery sentiment. They even decry the injustice of Northerners wishing to block Southerners from bringing slaves along on their summer vacations to cooler climes in New England.
In short, the fear that slavery might be extinguished one day — or even imminently — is the cause of secession, and the sole cause for secession. Secession sets off the war. In this sense, slavery is the cause of the war. It is not “culture,” it is not the other economic differences between the sections (which in truth are closely economically interdependent), and it is not states’ rights in regard to anything other than the maintenance and expansion of slavery. The leaders of the rebellion understood this and said it plainly at the time. Only after the Civil War do the ‘Noble Cause’ myths arise, attributing the war to a Southern desire for liberty and freedom quashed by Northern aggression, or to the defense of states’ rights as such, or even to differences in culture and world-view.
Four months pass between the election and the March 1861 inauguration, and it is the nation’s greatest period of crisis until that time. While President Buchanan and the outgoing administration watch sympathetically, the first seceding states seize federal bases and armories in the South, organize themselves politically under the name of an independent Confederate States of America, and fervidly lobby the “Upper Tier” states to join them. Leading officers of the U.S. military like Robert E. Lee defect to become officers in the new Confederate army, while the federal government does nothing to impede the Southern war preparations. When Lincoln is inaugurated in March, his rhetoric continues to say the Union must survive above all. If that means the preservation of slavery in the South, so be it. He insists that he has no plan for emancipation or abolition. He gives an order, however, to resupply a highly strategic federal base still under Union control, Fort Sumter, which controls the entry to Charleston harbor. The South Carolina state militia find this intolerable, fire on the supply ships, and seize the fort. One dies, on the Union side.
In response, Virginia, essential to a would-be Confederate state, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee secede in April and May. The Confederacy grows to eleven states with a capital at Richmond, across the Potomac River and just 50 miles from Washington, DC.
In response, Lincoln decries rebel aggresion and calls on the American people to enlist in the military to defend the Union and fight if necessary to suppress the rebellion. Hundreds of thousands heed this first call, as Northern states and localities and even clubs, including of abolitionists, organize their own military battalions and dispatch them to Washington to join a massing Union “Army of the Potomac.” On the other side of the river, General Lee accepts leadership of the Confederate Army of Virginia. Armies and forces are mustered throughout the land, at the MIssissippi, in Tennessee, in the border regions.
It is a paradoxical moment. The capital of the Union, Washington, District of Columbia, is home to a massive slave prison and market, a few blocks from the still-unfinished Capitol building. It also has the largest population of Free Blacks. There is no declaration of war in Congress, because the Union maintains there is no Confederacy on which to declare war, only a domestic rebellion that must be surrendered. On both sides, hometown crowds cheer as their men march before leaving for the potential fronts of a war that has yet to begin. Slave-state Maryland does not secede, but mobs there attack trains arriving with freshly recruited Union soldiers. The Virginia inland up-country, the poorer people of the Appalachian region, barely have any slaves. They will soon secede from Virginia, remain loyal to the Union, and join the U.S. as the new state of West Virginia. An estimated one-quarter of the whites in the South oppose secession, and as many as one-third of Northern citizens oppose the war.
It takes until July before the two new armies have their first major engagement, at a site in Virginia the Southerners call Manassas and the Unionists call Bull Run. Tourists from Washington go out for a picnic on high ground near the expected battleground. Gentlemen and ladies bring binoculars on sticks, hoping to watch the 20,000 men of the Union Army make short work of the rag-tag rebels, perhaps put the whole nonsense of rebellion to an end with a rout. Battle is engaged but soon the tourists can’t see a thing, because so much dust is rising from the battlefield. Suddenly thousands of Union soldiers emerge from the cloud, right in front of them, running up the hill in a chaotic retreat. They almost run over the tourists. The Union froces flee in a disorderly column back to Washington.
So begins the Civil War of 1861-65, the costliest military conflict in U.S. history, if counted by the number of American lives lost: more than 600,000 from the two militaries. Many hoped for it and many feared it, but at the beginning of the war no one could have known for sure that it would also become a total war for the emancipation of the four million enslaved people in the South.