In 2017, I taught a course called Why the Civil War Happened (and What We Can Learn From It) for the Christopher Wren Association (now the Osher Institute). I have taught it in two other semesters since then. Two factors motivated me to put together this course:
The Republican Party was strengthening its appeal across the south by insisting that the Civil War was about states’ rights or tariffs or something like that, not about slavery. The confederate-flag-toting Trumpists cawed that the flag was about “heritage, not hate” and thus any negative responses to it from “libruls” was just ignorant and ahistorical.
Even at the beginning of the Trump Administration, America was beginning to experience the kind of systematic failure of the institutions of government – the presidency, the Congress, the political parties, and the courts – that led up to the Civil War. The institutions that existed to resolve conflict weren’t doing their job. In the years since I first taught this course, we have continued to see the failure of these institutions fail.
The short answer to “Why the Civil War Happened” is slavery. I came across a set of interesting statements recently, and I think that they’re true:
People who don’t know anything about the Civil War think slavery was the cause of it.
People who know a little about the Civil War think that economics and states rights were the cause of it.
People who know a lot about the Civil War KNOW slavery was the cause of it.
A full answer is, of course, more complex than this. Reality is almost always more complicated than a bumper sticker. So I started thinking about this topic. What follows in this piece is a brief summary of my course.
I started with George Washington’s Farewell Address which appeared in newspapers about 10 weeks before the 1796 Presidential Election. In it, Washington addressed a number of issues. I focused on two of these – the importance of unity among the states and the dangers of sectionalism. In a new country with little to hold it together in its early years, the fact that everyone revered George Washington created some gravitational force; if Washington said that the Union was of paramount importance and that sectionalism was bad, then the new nation must be focused on maintaining the Union above all. That led the country’s leaders to focus on the preservation of the Union and the resultant failure to solve serious problems.
I then examined each of the three elements of the Triangle of Conflict (see above). First, I presented some charts documenting economic development during the first half of the 19th century:
After exploring the impact of these technological developments, we looked more specifically at the expansion of the railroads, and talked about how this changed the way the country operated.
Further evidence of the relationship between the economy and slavery can be seen in this chart, comparing the number of slaves, the number of slave states, and national cotton production.
The next factor in this Triangle of Conflict is Westward Expansion: this map illustrates how rapidly the country grew between 1803 and 1860.
By the time the country reached the 1850s, the stresses associated with these three factors had been papered over a number of times (from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, through the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the 1832 Nullification Crisis, to the Compromise of 1850), only to re-emerge with the next election cycle or acquisition of new land. During the decade of the 1850s, we saw the serial failure of the institutions that had kept things together.
The Presidency: This decade featured the weakest presidents the nation ever had. Any hope for bold and decisive action from the Executive Branch was belied by the individuals who held the office.
Zachary Taylor – inaugurated in 1849, he served a little more than a year before he died in 1850
Millard Fillmore – 1850-1853. Generally incompetent. Always near the bottom of any list that ranks the Presidents
Franklin Pierce – 1853-1857. Too weak to deal with the emerging violence in Kansas, he was not renominated by his party in 1856
James Buchanan – 1857-1861. His hesitant and shifting approach to dealing with slavery pissed off everyone. He and Millard Fillmore often compete for last place in rankings of presidents.
The Congress:
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850 inflamed anti-slavery opinion in the North.
The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act lit the match that ignited “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855 – a preliminary to the violence of the Civil War that would erupt six years later
In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner was nearly beaten to death on the floor of the Senate after he gave a speech critical of people who owned slaves.
The Political Party System:
The Whig Party fell apart after the 1852 presidential election; the party that would replace it in the two-party system, the Republican Party, didn’t run candidates for office until 1856. Prior to that, it was busily organizing the various anti-slavery factions in society but not contributing substantially to policy debate with the Democratic party.
The fledgling Republican Party unsuccessfully ran candidates for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency in 1856 (John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton).
This election was complicated by the Whig/No-Nothing Party slate of Millard Fillmore and Andrew J. Donelson, who pulled 21% of the vote away from the other two candidates.
The Courts:
The 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, sent the issue of slavery off the rails. In what some people have labeled “the court’s greatest self-inflicted wound,” Justice Taney’s opinion declared that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, that the Congress had no right to regulate slavery anywhere, and that blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He denied that even a free black person had citizenship rights in the country. He based his opinion on what he perceived to be the “original intent” of the men who wrote the Constitution.
What Can We Learn from this?
It is not very hard to answer this question (although I did get a complaint the first time I taught this class – one of the members of the class wanted me to spend more time spelling out and explaining the correlations). I thought it was pretty obvious, but I guess not. I’ll spell it out here. It’s not complicated.
The Trump administration debased the Presidency, broke the Congress, replaced the Republican Party with a bunch of sniveling sycophants, and loaded the Supreme Court with people who think Taney got it just about right. Am I being too kind?
That’s it. That’s what we can learn from the years leading to the Civil War. If we break our institutions, they won’t be around when we need them. The batshit crazy elements of the far right in America today are calling for a 2nd Civil War. I suggest that they study the first one before they decide that’s where they want to go.
Karen,
Are any of your Osher classes available by Zoom to people not in Virginia? I would really like to take a couple of the courses you teach. Thanks! Gayla Larson