The American Civil War and Reconstruction

People, Politics, and Power

Britannica Educational Publishing, Jeff Wallenfeldt

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781615300457
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The American Civil War hit close to home as it pitted brother against brother, Americans fighting one another to defend their differing beliefs. Years of war were followed by a subsequent period of Reconstruction, wherein the nation tried to piece itself back together in an uneasy political climate—a trying time in American history. This book focuses on the underlying causes, important battles, remembered personages, and lasting outcomes of the Civil War through detailed information and supporting photos.

CHAPTER 1
PRELUDE TO WAR

Before the Civil War, the United States experienced a whole generation of nearly unremitting political crisis. Underlying the problem was the fact that America in the early 19th century had been a country, not a nation. The major functions of government—those relating to education, transportation, health, and public order—were performed on the state or local level, and little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, D.C., a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way.

Gradually, however, changes in technology and in the economy were bringing all the elements of the country into steady and close contact. Improvements in transportation—first canals, then toll roads, and especially railroads—broke down isolation and encouraged the boy from the country to wander to the city, the farmer from New Hampshire to migrate to Iowa. Improvements in the printing press, which permitted the publication of penny newspapers, and the development of the telegraph system broke through the barriers of intellectual provincialism and made everybody almost instantaneously aware of what was going on throughout the country. As the railroad network proliferated, it had to have central direction and control; and national railroad corporations—the first true “big businesses” in the United States—emerged to provide order and stability.

For many Americans the wrench from a largely rural, slow-moving, fragmented society in the early 1800s to a bustling, integrated, national social order in the mid-century was an abrupt and painful one, and they often resisted it. Sometimes resentment against change manifested itself in harsh attacks on those who appeared to be the agents of change—especially immigrants, who seemed to personify the forces that were altering the older America. Vigorous nativist movements appeared in most cities during the 1840s; but not until the 1850s, when the huge numbers of Irish and German immigrants of the previous decade became eligible to vote, did the antiforeign fever reach its peak. Directed both against immigrants and against the Roman Catholic church, to which so many of them belonged, the so-called Know-Nothings emerged as a powerful political force in 1854, increasing the resistance to change.

IN FOCUS: KNOW-NOTHING PARTY

Formally known as the American Party, the Know-Nothing party flourished in the 1850s as an outgrowth of the strong anti-immigrant and especially anti–Roman Catholic sentiment that started to manifest itself during the 1840s. A rising tide of immigrants, primarily Germans in the Midwest and Irish in the East, seemed to pose a threat to the economic and political security of native-born Protestant Americans. In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city.

Members, when asked about their nativist organizations, were supposed to reply that they knew nothing, hence the name. As its membership and importance grew in the 1850s, the group slowly shed its clandestine character and embraced its official name. As a national political entity, the American Party called for restrictions on immigration, the exclusion of the foreign-born from voting or holding public office in the United States, and a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship.

By 1852 the Know-Nothing party was achieving phenomenal growth. It did very well that year in state and local elections, and with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 it won additional adherents from the ranks of conservatives who could support neither the pro-slavery Democrats nor antislavery Republicans. When Congress assembled on Dec. 3, 1855, 43 representatives were avowed members of the Know-Nothing party.

That, however, was the peak of Know-Nothing power. At the American Party convention in Philadelphia the following year, the party split along sectional lines over the pro-slavery platform pushed through by Southern delegates. Party presidential candidate Millard Fillmore carried just one state (Maryland) in the 1856 election, and congressional strength dropped to 12 representatives.

Caught in the sectional strife disrupting all national institutions, the American Party fell apart after 1856. Antislavery Know-Nothings joined the Republican Party, while Southern members flocked to the pro-slavery banner still held aloft by the Democratic Party. By 1859 the American Party’s strength was largely confined to the border states. In 1860 remnants of the Know-Nothings joined old-line Whigs to form the Constitutional Union Party, nominating John Bell of Tennessee for president. Bell finished fourth in popular votes in the four-man contest of that year, won by the Republican Abraham Lincoln.

Two other groups that took the name American Party appeared in the 1870s and ’80s. One of these, organized in California in 1886, proposed a briefly popular platform calling mainly for the exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from industrial employment.

SECTIONALISM AND SLAVERY

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A more enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong feelings of sectional loyalty. New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which drained off the ablest and most vigorous members of the labour force. Further, once the railroad network was complete, western states produced wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. The West, too, developed a strong sectional feeling, blending a sense of its uniqueness, a feeling of being looked down on as raw and uncultured, and an awareness that it was being exploited by the businessmen of the East.

The most conspicuous and distinctive section, however, was the South—an area set apart by climate, by a plantation system designed for the production of such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, especially, by the persistence of slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. It should not be thought that all or even most white Southerners were directly involved in the section’s “peculiar institution.” Indeed, in 1850 there were only 347,525 slaveholders in a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states. Half of these Southerners owned four slaves or fewer and could not be considered planters. In the entire South there were fewer than 1,800 persons who owned more than 100 slaves.

Nevertheless, slavery did give a distinctive tone to the whole pattern of Southern life. If the large planters were few, they were also wealthy, prestigious, and powerful; often they were the political as well as the economic leaders of their section; and their values pervaded every stratum of Southern society. Far from opposing slavery, small farmers thought only of the possibility that they too might, with hard work and good fortune, some day join the ranks of the planter class—to which they were closely connected by ties of blood, marriage, and friendship. Behind this virtually unanimous support of slavery lay the universal belief—shared by many whites in the North and West as well—that blacks were an innately inferior people who had risen only to a state of barbarism in their native Africa and who could live in a civilized society only if disciplined through slavery. Though by 1860 there were in fact about 250,000 free blacks in the South, most Southern whites resolutely refused to believe that the slaves, if freed, could ever coexist peacefully with their former masters. With shuddering horror, they pointed to a number of incidents—an insurrection of blacks that had occurred in Santo Domingo; a brief slave rebellion led by the African American Gabriel in Virginia in 1800; a plot of Charleston, South Carolina, blacks headed by Denmark Vesey in 1822; and, especially, a bloody and determined Virginia insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831—as evidence that African Americans had to be kept under iron control. Facing increasing opposition to slavery outside their section, Southerners developed an elaborate pro-slavery argument, defending the institution on biblical, economic, and sociological grounds.

A DECADE OF POLITICAL CRISES

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In the early years of the republic, sectional differences existed, but it had been possible to reconcile or ignore them because distances were great, communication was difficult, and the powerless national government had almost nothing to do. The revolution in transportation and communication, however, eliminated much of the isolation, and the victory of the United States in its brief war with Mexico left the national government with problems that required action.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

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The Compromise of 1850 was an uneasy patchwork of concessions to all sides that began to fall apart as soon as it was enacted. In the long run, the principle of popular sovereignty proved to be most unsatisfactory of all, making each territory a battleground where the supporters of the South contended with the defenders of the North and West.

The seriousness of those conflicts became clear in 1854, when Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Kansas bill in Congress, establishing a territorial government for the vast region that lay between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. In the Senate, the bill was amended to create not one but two territories—Kansas and Nebraska—from the part of the Louisiana Purchase from which the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had forever excluded slavery. Douglas, who was unconcerned over the moral issue of slavery and desirous of getting on with the settling of the West and the construction of a transcontinental railroad, knew that the Southern senators would block the organization of Kansas as a free territory. Recognizing that the North and West had outstripped their section in population and hence in the House of Representatives, Southerners clung desperately to an equality of votes in the Senate and were not disposed to welcome any new free territories, which would inevitably become additional free states (as California had done through the Compromise of 1850). Accordingly, Douglas thought that the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which had been applied to the territories gained from Mexico, would avoid a political contest over the Kansas territory: it would permit Southern slaveholders to move into the area, but, as the region was unsuited for plantation slavery, it would inevitably result in the formation of additional free states. His bill therefore allowed the inhabitants of the territory self-government in all matters of domestic importance, including the slavery issue. This provision in effect allowed the territorial legislatures to mandate slavery in their areas and was directly contrary to the Missouri Compromise. With the backing of Pres. Franklin Pierce (served 1853–57), Douglas bullied, wheedled, and bluffed congressmen into passing his bill.

IN FOCUS: COMPROMISE OF 1850

On Dec. 3, 1849, the territory of California requested admittance to the Union with a constitution prohibiting slavery. This request brought to a head several outstanding issues related to slavery, creating a crisis that threatened dissolution of the Union. Among the problems was the unresolved question of slavery’s extension into other areas ceded by Mexico the preceding year.

To maintain an even balance between free and slave states, a series of measures was offered by the “great compromiser,” Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky. In an attempt to give satisfaction to both pro-slavery and antislavery forces, the important sections of the omnibus bill that resulted called for the admission of California as a free state, the organization of the territories of New Mexico and Utah with the slavery question left open, settlement of the Texas–New Mexico boundary dispute, a more rigorous provision for the return of runaway slaves, and the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

With the influential support of Sen. Daniel Webster and the concerted unifying efforts of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, the five compromise measures were enacted in September. These measures were accepted by moderates in all sections of the country, and the secession of the South was postponed for a decade. The Compromise, however, contained the seeds of future discord. The precedent of popular sovereignty led to a demand for a similar provision for the Kansas Territory in 1854, causing bitterness and violence there. Furthermore, the application of the new Fugitive Slave Act triggered such a strong reaction throughout the North that many moderate antislavery elements became determined opponents of any further extension of slavery into the territories. While the Compromise of 1850 succeeded as a temporary expedient, it also proved the failure of compromise as a permanent political solution when vital sectional interests were at stake.

POLARIZATION OVER SLAVERY

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SECTIONAL DIFFERENCES

Northern sensibilities were outraged. Although disliking slavery, Northerners had made few efforts to change the South’s “peculiar institution” so long as the republic was loosely articulated. (Indeed, when William Lloyd Garrison began his Liberator in 1831, urging the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves, he had only a tiny following, and a few years later he had actually been mobbed in Boston.) But with the sections, perforce, being drawn closely together, Northerners could no longer profess indifference to the South and its institutions. Sectional differences, centring on the issue of slavery, began to appear in every American institution. During the 1840s the major national religious denominations, such as the Methodists and the Presbyterians, split over the slavery question. The Whig Party, which had once allied the conservative businessmen of the North and West with the planters of the South, divided and virtually disappeared after the election of 1852. When Douglas’s bill opened up slavery to Kansas and Nebraska—land that had long been reserved for the westward expansion of the free states—Northerners began to organize into an antislavery political party, called in some states the Anti-Nebraska Democratic Party, in others the People’s Party, but in most places, the Republican Party.

BLEEDING KANSAS

Events of the mid-1850s further exacerbated relations between the sections, strengthening this new party. Sponsors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (May 30, 1854) expected its provisions for territorial self-government to arrest the “torrent of fanaticism” that had been dividing the nation regarding the slavery issue. Instead, a small civil war erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Free-soil forces from the North formed armed emigrant associations to populate Kansas, while pro-slavery advocates poured over the border from Missouri. Regulating associations and guerrilla bands were formed by each side, and only the intervention of the Governor prevented violence in the Wakarusa War, launched in December 1855 over the murder of an antislavery settler. On May 21, 1856, “Bleeding Kansas” became a fact with the Sack of Lawrence, in which a proslavery mob swarmed into the town of Lawrence and wrecked and burned the hotel and newspaper office in an effort to wipe out this “hotbed of abolitionism.” The next day, the U.S. Capitol became the site of violence when Preston S. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, brutally attacked Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts at his desk in the Senate chamber because he had presumably insulted the Carolinian’s “honour” in a speech he had given in support of Kansas abolitionists. On May 24, back in Kansas, an antislavery band led by John Brown retaliated in the Pottawatomie Massacre. Periodic bloodshed along the border followed as the two factions fought battles, captured towns, and set prisoners free. A political struggle to determine the future state’s position on slavery ensued, centred on the Lecompton Constitution proposed in 1857. The question would not be settled until Kansas was admitted as a free state in January 1861, but, meanwhile, “Bleeding Kansas” had furnished the newly formed Republican Party with...