John Brown takes an oath to destroy slavery, 1847.
Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.
This chapter recounts the events of the 1850s that drew the nation into a civil war. Such narratives suggest that war was inevitable, as many believed at the time. John Brown, the abolitionist fanatic who was sentenced to death, declared on the scaffold that the "crimes of this guilty land"would only be purged "'with Blood"—with war. Historians Charles and Mary Beard used the term irrepressible conflict as a chapter title in their 1927 history text, arguing that antithetical economic systems could not coexist, if only because paid workers could not compete with slaves. In The Repressible Conflict (1939), however,
Avery Craven argued that the war could have been avoided. He blamed northern "'fanatics"such as Brown for whipping up sentiment against the South, causing southern politicians to respond with equal vituperation. The "molders of public opin-ion"divided the nation by creating "the fiction of two distinct peoples."Northerners and Southerners retained their allegiance as Americans. James G. Randall (1942) similarly saw no differences between the North and South of sufficient magnitude to rip the nation apart. The leaders of both sides—he called them a "bungling generation"—should not have
Allowed overheated passions to ignite a civil war. In the 1970s and 1980s historians who embraced the "new political history,"which focused on statistical analyses of voting behavior rather than the rhetoric of politicians, argued that war might have been avoided if the Whig party had not disintegrated. William Gienapp (1987) and Michael Holt (1999) credited the two-party system of the Whigs and Democrats with holding the nation together during difficult times. Local coalitions on issues such as temperance and immigration had forestalled the divisive reckoning over slavery. It was the collapse of the Democrats and the emergence of the Republican party in these contexts, not the economic tension between the sections, that made war "irrepressible."In 2007 John Ashworth revived the Beard's class-based argument:The slaveholders were pursuing their class-based interests, as were the Northerners who opposed them. But Ashworth framed the issues in a more nuanced way. Most scholars accept that the path to war lurched into unfathomable thickets of complex human motivations and actions.
Source: Charlesand Mary Beard, TheRiseofAmerican Civilization (1927); Avery Craven, The Repressible Conflict (1939); James G. Randall, The Coming ofthe Civil War (1942); William Gienapp, The Origins ofthe Republican Party (1987); Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999); John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (2007).
Major outbreaks
Parochial schools, lay control of church policies, the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and increasing the time before an immigrant could apply for citizenship (the Know-Nothings favored twenty-one years) were matters of major importance to them. Since these were divisive issues, the established political parties tried to avoid them—hence the development of the new party.
The American party was important in the South as well as in the North, and while most Know-Nothings disliked blacks and considered them inherently inferior beings, they tended to adopt the dominant view of slavery in whichever section they were located. In the North most opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Operating often in tacit alliance with the antislavery forces (dislike of slavery did not prevent many abolitionists from being prejudiced against Catholics and immigrants), the northern Know-Nothings won a string of local victories in 1854 and elected more than forty congressmen.
Far more significant in the long run was the formation of the Republican party, which was made up of former Free Soilers, Conscience Whigs, and “Anti-Nebraska” Democrats. The American party was a national organization, but the Republican party was purely sectional. It sprang up spontaneously throughout the Old Northwest and caught on with a rush in New England.
Republicans presented themselves as the party of freedom. They were not abolitionists (though most abolitionists were soon voting Republican), but they insisted that slavery be kept out of the territories. They believed that if America was to remain a land of opportunity, free white labor must have exclusive access to the West. Thus the party appealed not only to voters who disapproved of slavery, but also to those who wished to keep blacks—free or slave—out of their states. In 1854 the Republicans won more than a hundred seats in the House of Representatives and control of many state governments.
The Whig party had almost disappeared in the northern states and the Democratic party had been gravely weakened, but it was unclear how these two new parties would fare. The Know-Nothing party had the superficial advantage of being a nationwide organization, but where slavery was concerned, this was anything but advantageous. And many Northerners who disliked slavery were troubled by the harsh Know-Nothing policies toward immigrants and Catholics. If the Know-Nothings were in control, said former Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln in 1855, the Declaration of Independence would read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.”
World History
