America on the Eve of the Civil War

Edward L. Ayers, Carolyn R. Martin, Edward L. Ayers, Carolyn R. Martin

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780813930886
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

"This remarkable publication provides a captivating and brilliantly executed series of conversations among seventeen most impressive historians. These participants in a daylong conference focusing on the extraordinary years leading to the Civil War provide an incredible range of historical information that is both educational and exciting. Here is an opportunity to draw on a lively exchange between a substantial number of knowledgeable and entertaining scholars."—James Oliver Horton, author of Landmarks of African American History

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1 TAKING STOCK OF THE NATION IN 1859

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Presenters were Christy Coleman, Gary Gallagher, Walter Johnson, and Joan Waugh, with Edward L. Ayers moderating.

ED AYERS We’re talking about the era right before the Civil War. Later sessions will look at slavery in Virginia and Richmond, at John Brown’s raid, and at the upcoming election of 1860. This session’s presenters are going to paint a broad panorama of what the United States is like in the years coming up to the Civil War. It strikes me that these 1850s have been pretty interesting times. What do you think is going to leap out from the census that is being taken for the country? It will later be known as the 1860 census, but it was actually taken in 1859.

GARY GALLAGHER I think growth is going to be one remarkable thing, growth in many, many ways: Growth in the expansion of a transportation and information network with the railroad and the telegraph. Expansion in population. The country is growing unbelievably quickly in terms of how many people live here. And immigration. I think the dominant theme is growth and energy.

JOAN WAUGH Immigration has been remarkable. The two largest immigrant groups coming into the United States, mostly into the Northern states, are the Germans and Irish. In thinking about how to answer this question, I looked at just one city, St. Louis, Missouri. Is Missouri a western state? Is it a Southern state? Is it a Northern state? The answer is all three. If we look at St. Louis, we see that it has a population of 167,000 in 1859, with 60,000 immigrants from Germany and 39,000 from Ireland, making it an incredibly diverse city, and perhaps explaining why, in the late 1850s, an antislavery mayor was elected in that growing and prosperous port city.

ED AYERS Do any enslaved people live there?

JOAN WAUGH Very few. Ten percent of the general population in Missouri is enslaved, down 2 percent from the previous census, but the enslaved population living in St. Louis is very small.

CHRISTY COLEMAN The influx of Germans and Irish, in particular, is not only shaping the growth of these communities but also having an impact on the social environment. They are picking up their possessions, which are very limited, and coming into these Northern cities looking for work. They’re often being placed in work environments that are just deplorable. There’s no other way to say it. Women and children and men are working in deplorable factory conditions.

The other thing that is striking is that they’re also beginning to be pitted against African Americans, whether enslaved or free. The newspapers and all of those wonderful little illustrated booklets are developing caricatures that put African Americans and Irish literally on the same scale, showing that they are somehow equal socially. You see the two biting at each other. And they do. There are a lot of conflicts between these two groups as they are trying to find their place in society. As we think about these numbers, there’s also a social dynamic. The Germans, Brits, Scots, and others are coming here with some means and are able to acquire land, solidify themselves in a community, and make themselves a part of the political fabric, something that the Irish are not able to do at the same level.

ED AYERS Do the Irish and Germans live in the same places? Where do they tend to migrate to?

CHRISTY COLEMAN Again, the Irish are pretty much going into the Northern cities, the larger Northern cities. We’re seeing them in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The Germans tend to head farther west.

JOAN WAUGH Cincinnati is another place that they go. Chicago.

ED AYERS And Richmond.

GARY GALLAGHER There’s a thriving German community in central Texas, in the hill country of Texas. There are pockets of immigrants in many places, predominantly north of the Ohio and the Potomac. But there are immigrants everywhere. New Orleans has a flourishing immigrant community, as does Charleston.

WALTER JOHNSON What you’ve seen over the 1850s that will also show up in the census is a massive relocation of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South, about a quarter of a million people in the 1850s. The slave market is booming in the late 1850s, and that has a devastating impact on enslaved families in the Upper South. Forty percent of those relocations involve the separation of a family. The boom in the slave market also has implications for social relations among white people. By the 1850s slave prices are getting so high that it’s becoming very, very difficult for non-slaveholding white people to buy slaves. By 1857, and quite critically by 1859, that is beginning to set up tension within the slaveholding South over the question of support by non-slaveholding white people for the institution of slavery. This massive relocation of slaves is setting up an intraregional dynamic between the Upper and Lower South, between places like Virginia and Mississippi and Louisiana. There’s a fear that the booming cotton South in the late 1850s is going to drain so many enslaved people out of the Upper South that support for slavery in a state like Virginia will be attenuated.

GARY GALLAGHER I think the census will also show something else, and that is that Colorado might be next in line to be a state. It’s possible, because there’s been a tremendous amount of mining going on in Colorado, which had a great strike just last year in 1858.

ED AYERS A labor strike?

GARY GALLAGHER No, a strike of gold, a better kind of strike from the point of view of the people going west. They’re going west, and they’re going in very large numbers. The effect of that movement promises to rival what happened in California just ten or eleven years ago in terms of the wealth that’s going to come out of that part of the Rocky Mountains. A great deal of wealth is heading east out of the mountains of Colorado, and it might work tremendously to benefit the nation as a whole.

ED AYERS It sounds like the economy is doing pretty well.

GARY GALLAGHER In some ways it is. Cotton exports are certainly thriving. But the nation has been through a very difficult economic patch just two years ago. More than five thousand businesses failed. Now that the Crimean War is over, Russian wheat is coming back on the market, hurting our wheat farmers. I’d say it’s a mixed picture economically.

JOAN WAUGH Actually, the South is doing better coming out of the depression of 1857 than the other regions of the country.

ED AYERS Why?

JOAN WAUGH Because the cotton economy is still booming.

ED AYERS It’s like the oil of today. Cotton is much like that, isn’t it? It’s the big commodity of the world, and the South has a monopoly on it.

GARY GALLAGHER It gives the United States a favorable balance of trade all by itself. We export more cotton than everything else put together.

ED AYERS You talked before, Gary, about what the next state might be. What does the map of the United States look like right now?

WALTER JOHNSON I think the next state in 1859 might be Cuba. Let’s set aside the notion that comes out of the history of the Civil War and imagine a conflict that’s not defined by “seceding from” but the question of what it is that people think they are seceding to. One of the things that people, particularly in the Mississippi valley, believe that they are seceding to is a global commercial empire, founded on the power of cotton, founded on the fact that cotton is the leading sector in the global economy.

ED AYERS So people really think they might be able to add Cuba as a state?

WALTER JOHNSON It’s the official policy of the United States government with the Ostend Manifesto in 1854, right? Until that becomes public, it’s the secret policy of the United States government. Cuba is viewed as the lynchpin of the joining of the Mississippi valley economy to the Atlantic economy, and then potentially to the Pacific across the isthmus at Nicaragua or Panama. And the fear about Cuba is that Spanish colonial governments in Cuba are so weak that the British will take over Cuba. Actually, throughout the 1850s there’s a very great emphasis, not simply among proslavery expansionists, but also among New York merchant capitalists and shipping interests, to annex Cuba to the United States.

JOAN WAUGH That relationship is also present in some of the more colorful stories of American expansionism during the 1850s, when private individuals led military expeditions to Mexico and to Nicaragua. One of the most famous of the so-called filibusters—“filibuster” in this case means somebody who decides he wants to be king or president of some country—was William Walker. Walker was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and was a doctor. He was a very restless man. He moved to New Orleans, became a lawyer and then a journalist. He then went to the California goldfields in San Francisco and later was working as a newspaper reporter when he just decided, “It’s time for me to be king of Baja, California, and Sonora, Mexico.” The Californians were on board. It was a very different state, very pro-Southern in some parts.

ED AYERS They were looking for a king?

JOAN WAUGH No, they had interests in northern Mexico. Walker went down there with about two hundred men and engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to control Baja, California, and Sonora, Mexico. The Mexican army escorted him out, and at the border the United States military arrested him and put him on trial in California for violating neutrality laws. He was acquitted. Then he went on to Nicaragua—which is another very colorful story—and he recruited five hundred men, mostly from California. The South was very interested and supportive of these filibustering measures, although it caused a little bit of trouble.

ED AYERS How does that work out for him?

JOAN WAUGH It doesn’t work out well. He will be executed.

WALTER JOHNSON But he became the president of Nicaragua.

GARY GALLAGHER And he brought slavery to Nicaragua. He reopened the Atlantic slave trade. To come back to Walter’s point about Cuba, Cuba has a lot to do with cotton, but it also has a lot to do, potentially, with power in our S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1859 Chronology
• Introduction Edward L. Ayers
• Opening Remarks William J. Howell and Timothy M. Kaine
• 1. Taking Stock Of The Nation In 1859
• 2. The Future Of Virginia And The South
• 3. Making Sense Of John Brown’s Raid
• 4. Predictions For The Election Of 1860
• Closing Remarks Edward L. Ayers
• Conclusion: Marking The Civil War Sesquicentennial—Will We Do Better This Time? David W. Blight
• Notes On Conference Participants
• Books By Conference Participants
• Index