The Outbreak of the American Civil War

One hundred and fifty years ago, at 4.30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, artillery batteries under the control of the newly formed Confederate States of America opened fire on federal troops in Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Decades of growing tension had culminated in the secession of seven Southern slave states and the Confederacy was moving quickly to seize control of federal government facilities in its section. Fort Sumter was a great prize but had been holding out and now the guns were called upon to resolve the issue. Huge crowds had joyously welcomed secession and now they clambered onto rooftops and other vantage points to watch the bombardment, which continued for thirty-six hours until the federal forces surrendered to the jubilant Southerners.

On April 15, the new president of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, issued a call for 75,000 militiamen to enlist for ninety days to suppress the secessionist rebellion. This further incited the South and within two months, four more Southern states had seceded and joined the Confederacy. Both sides were overwhelmed with volunteers and over the next four years some 3.2 million soldiers fought in some 10,000 military engagements, leaving 620,000 dead and 410,000 wounded or maimed—more casualties than America has suffered in all her other wars combined. It also left vast swathes of the South devastated and its social system destroyed, while in the North its industrial economy was mobilised on an unprecedented scale; the state assumed extraordinary powers; and modern America was born.

This gigantic conflict signalled the start of the era of total war, a point well recognised by a delegation of Soviet historians when they visited the United States in 1976 for the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Asked where they would like to visit first, the Soviets bypassed Lexington, Concord, Yorktown and other major sites of the Revolution and asked to be taken to the site of the murderous Civil War battle of Gettysburg. “Why Gettysburg?” their bemused host asked. Because, the visitors replied with inclusive solemnity, Gettysburg was “the American Stalingrad—the battlefield in America’s Great Patriotic War where so many gave the last full measure of devotion that the United States might not perish from the earth” (James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword, 1996).

The Civil War was indeed the defining event for the world’s first great democracy. As Paul Johnson has observed in A History of the American People (1999), “The Civil War, in which are included the causes and consequences, constitutes the central event in American history. It is also America’s most characteristic event which brings out all that the United States is, and is not. It made America a nation”, where before it had been “an artificial state or series of states, bound together by negotiated agreements and compacts, charters and covenants”. It was a great tragedy for the Union but especially for the Southern states that the latter took this situation for granted; declaimed endlessly about states rights and sovereignty; fiercely embraced and zealously implemented extreme theories of racial domination and subservience; never adequately confronted the massive economic, demographic, cultural and political forces that were transforming the nation; indulged in bluster and bravado that could never be backed up; fundamentally underestimated the ability of the new president; and lurched recklessly into a war that destroyed everything they held dear.

Ironically, it was the political ascendancy enjoyed by the South that blinded it to its ultimate vulnerability. This dominance arose from its long-term grip on the Democratic Party and its ability to dictate terms in elections and in Congress, where it enjoyed inherent advantages arising from the fact that 60 per cent of the slave population could be counted towards determining the number of congressional seats allocated to the section, while numbers in the Senate were held for decades in balance under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. While this prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30ʹ parallel (except within the boundaries of the new state of Missouri) it also ensured that the admission of every new free state required the simultaneous admission of a new slave state.

Consequently, slaveholders occupied the presidency for fifty of the sixty-two years up until 1850, the Speaker’s chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee for forty-two years. On the Supreme Court, eighteen out of the thirty-one justices in that period were slaveholders. The South also enjoyed an ascendancy over many Presidents (such as Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, who immediately preceded Lincoln) and other Northern politicians, who were derisively called “doughfaces” for their pliability. For decades the South had also benefited greatly from the judicial activism of a very sympathetic Supreme Court, until a momentous decision by the Court finally destroyed the precarious equilibrium that had kept the Union intact, as we will see. 

The titanic transformative forces that threatened this Southern ascendancy must be briefly reviewed. Geographically, the westward march of the American people across the continent was becoming one of the greatest frontier expansions in human history, moving to occupy some five million square kilometres recently acquired from France and Mexico, and the crucial question was: would these be free-soil and free-labour lands, or part of a new slave empire? Demographically, the population had grown from 5.3 million in 1800 to 32 million in 1860, at a rate of growth six times the world average. Within the Union the population of the Northern free states was some 19 million, while the South had 8 million, with another 4 million black slaves (there were about 500,000 free blacks evenly spread between the two sections). The Northern populace was also growing much quicker, fed by natural increases, migration from the South, and overseas migrants, with the North claiming 80 per cent of these, many of whom looked longingly to the new western lands as their main chance in life. Economically, this growth produced an increasingly large and self-sustaining internal market for Northern manufacturing industries and farms, while politically it indicated that the North would shortly dominate Congress, driving the South to promote desperate schemes to open up new lands for slavery, across continental North and Central America and in the Caribbean.

Nationally the urban population grew three times faster than the rural population, going from 6 per cent to 20 per cent of the total between 1810 and 1860, with most of this concentrated in the North (Chicago alone grew 375 per cent between 1850 and 1860), while the South remained barely urbanised (and proudly so), cultivating instead an increasingly ramshackle rural society, which appalled Northern visitors and undermined Southern claims that they possessed an advanced civilisation. In terms of infrastructure, only a small fraction of canal and rail transport ran through the South, and this was designed principally to transport agricultural produce to the ports without significantly facilitating internal travel within the South, a debilitating situation once it became necessary to mobilise resources for war. Almost all the shipping servicing the South was owned by Northern and overseas companies, and once the war started the Northern blockade rapidly became very effective.

Even the much vaunted contribution of “King Cotton” to the wealth of the South was discounted by the fact that 95 per cent of cotton was exported raw to overseas and Northern markets where it was processed into manufactured goods that equalled the value of the raw cotton and found a ready market back in the South. In addition, some 20 per cent of the proceeds of the sale of the raw cotton were expended on middlemen, credit, insurance, warehousing, and shipping services. Efforts to diversify in such an economy were made difficult because capital was comparatively scarce, and what was available was disproportionately invested in the purchase of slaves and land. Investment in slaves was still increasing between 1850 and 1860, as the political crisis mounted, while investment in industry floundered. As the economic historian James M. McPherson concluded, in Battle Cry of Freedom, the slave-based plantation economy of the South was preserved by whites for cultural rather than economic reasons (Unless otherwise stated, all contemporary citations are from this source.)

This lack of industrial development became critical as the Civil War evolved into total war. Even while the clamour for secession was becoming irresistible, the South’s proportion of national manufacturing establishments was declining to only 18 per cent in 1850. Attempts to redress this imbalance foundered on a basic Southern antipathy towards manufacturing. Ominously, for all the exalted martial aspirations of the South, almost no armaments were manufactured there, and the lethality of the weapons produced in abundance by Northern factories over the four years of war would take a huge toll of young Southern lives.

Philosophically, as Russell Kirk noted in The Conservative Mind (1953) and Patrick Allitt emphasises in The Conservatives (2009), the Civil War was “a conflict between two types of conservatism”. One was represented by John C. Calhoun, and was characterised by a romantic but ultimately wilful and reactionary impulse, as the Southern leadership convinced themselves that they had the right and duty to secede from the Union in order to preserve states’ rights and what they saw as their uniquely valuable agricultural civilisation based on their “peculiar institution” of slavery, which they wanted to preserve and expand on a continental scale. The other was represented by Abraham Lincoln, and was characterised by a commitment to the preservation of the Union, the containment and eventual abolition of slavery, and the building of a great nation, guided by constitutionalism and the rule of law. 

The purely reactionary nature of Southern conservatism was well illustrated by its relentless opposition to any federal involvement in economic and social development, key policies of the dominant Northern political parties, the Whigs and subsequently the Republicans. One set of initiatives went before Congress in the 1850s and involved land grants for new settlers in the West, a Pacific railroad, and the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges. The Southern reaction was intractable: “Better for us that these [new] territories should remain a waste, a howling wilderness … than be so settled”. Consequently, the package was killed by President Buchanan, who “paid his debts to Southern Democrats by vetoing it”. As the leading clergyman, social reformer and militant abolitionist Theodore Parker declared, the South was “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce … She is the foe of our institutions—to our democratic politics in the state, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community, [and] our democratic equality in the family” (Drawn with the Sword).

The hubris and aggressive self-assertion of the South, as expressed by its ruling elite, were quite extraordinary: “The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores command the world … No power on earth … dares to make war on cotton. Cotton is king”, one Southern leader declared. As a London Times correspondent reported, there was towards the North “a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind … which exceeds belief”. For the Southerners, the Northerners were an ignoble people, whose pursuit of trade, commerce, profit, manufacturing, and “the base mechanical arts”, had “degraded the whole race”. In contrast, “we are an agricultural people, pursuing our own system, and working out our own destiny, breeding up women and men with some other purpose than to make them vulgar, fanatical, cheating Yankees”; “We are a peculiar people, sir! … We are an agricultural people … We have no cities—we don’t want them … We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes … As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want” (Drawn with the Sword). “Ours is an agricultural people … the most powerful condition on earth.”

For the South, the North’s commitment to democracy was a mistake that flew in the face of history and the reality of human nature. As several Southern journals and newspapers explained: “The great evil of Northern ‘free’ society is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens”. “Free society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists … hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant”. As James McPherson observes, “no doubt some of the soldiers who marched through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman a few years later had read these descriptions of themselves”, and recalled the slur as they enthusiastically implemented the North’s scorched-earth strategy, laying waste to confederate cities, towns, plantations, farms, and infrastructure, while freeing the “body servants” and other slaves of the erstwhile Southern aristocracy.

The notion of Northern inferiority and its implications were explored by a Southern intellectual in 1861, drawing upon the racial theories that abounded in the nineteenth century: “In this country have arisen two races [that is, Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government” (Drawn with the Sword). An ancient genealogy was devised to explain this divergence, with the northern Yankees portrayed as the descendants of servile Anglo-Saxons and the noble Southerners as descendants of their Norman conquerors. Centuries later, these contrasting bloodlines “coursed through the veins of the Puritans who settled New England and the Cavaliers who colonized Virginia”; with the latter being “directly descended from the Norman barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its earliest history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness, and intellect”; all of which meant that “one Norman Southerner could doubtless lick ten of those menial Saxon Yankees”, while it was thought that Southern women and children “armed with popguns … could deal with every Yankee likely to appear in Georgia”, if civil war should erupt upon secession. So ingrained did this set of beliefs about the manliness, gallantry and military prowess of the South become that Lincoln initially had great trouble getting his generals to engage with the Southern armies.

In January 1860 an article in a leading Southern journal further developed this racial explanation for the North’s opposition to slavery. It argued that the uncouth Yankees would be forever hostile to the noble civilisation of the South because there existed “a deep cultural and racial opposition that had originated over two hundred years before in England in the antagonism between Puritan and Cavalier”; “the Southern States had been settled almost entirely from the better and more enlightened classes of Great Britain and France”, while the North had attracted only the dregs of England, who were possessed by “misanthropy, hypocrisy, diseased philanthropy, envy, hatred, fanaticism, and all the worst passions of the human heart”. Ultimately, the writer declared, the North hated the South “because their fathers hated ours; they envy us because we are happy in our society, and have slaves, denied to them by the coldness of their climate and the sterility of their soil; and they are seeking to deprive us of our social system … The same fanaticism that impelled their ancestors is urging them” forward in their attack on slavery (Ritchie Watson, Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (2008)).

The Yankees were literally beneath contempt as far as the Southern elite was concerned, and this was vividly demonstrated when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina took exception to an address denouncing the South delivered by the fervent abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate in 1856. Incensed that Sumner had insulted a relative of his, Brooks consulted with friends and decided that Sumner should not be challenged to a duel because he was a social inferior and deserved instead a brutal beating. Consequently, Brooks marched into the Senate and attacked Sumner with a heavy cane as the older man sat writing, trapped by his desk, which he ultimately tore from its bolts in the floor as he desperately tried to escape. Shielded by a cordon of Southern sympathisers who prevented any intervention, Brooks followed Sumner into the aisle and beat him so severely as he lay semi-conscious on the floor that Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for some two years.

Instead of any real censure, Brooks attracted admiration and approval from the South, with the Richmond Enquirer applauding the thrashing as a fitting admonition to “the vulgar abolitionists in the Senate who are getting above themselves … They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen … The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.”

(Brooks was subsequently triumphantly re-elected by his delighted constituency but was denounced as a coward by Sumner’s fellow New Englander, Congressman Anson Burlingame, who Brooks then challenged to a duel. As the challenged party, Burlingame specified rifles as the weapons, and named a site on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, in order to avoid American anti-duelling laws in the event of a death. Apparently alarmed at Burlingame’s enthusiasm and reputation as a skilled marksman, Brooks didn’t appear for the occasion. He died in 1857 from diphtheria.) 

At the centre of this mythologised world, where self-styled “gentlemen” felt free to run amuck in the nation’s senate, was the South’s fundamental dependence on its “peculiar institution”. Only the old Iberian colonies of Cuba and Brazil accompanied the South in still practising African slavery, while even Russia abolished serfdom in February 1861. This didn’t deter the South, which believed slavery elevated it above the ignoble North: “Slavery demonstrated the superiority of Southern civilization”, the Senate was told in 1858: “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life … It constitutes the very mudsill of society … Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement”, as demonstrated by the South.

To ascend this hierarchy and to acquire a large plantation and negro slaves was every Southerner’s dream: “For this the lawyer pores over his dusty tomes, the merchant measures his tape … the editor drives his quill, and the mechanic his plane—all, all who dare to aspire at all, look to this as the goal of their ambition.” Even dirt poor white folk were elevated onto the lower echelon of this caste system by the mere fact of their skin colour and consequently their sense of solidarity was directed upwards towards their aristocratic betters, and not laterally towards the black slaves whose menial lives otherwise resembled their own.

Ideological support for this “mudsill model” of society was provided by Southern intellectuals such as Georg Fitzhugh, whose books included Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). Civilisation is based on exploitation and the ascendancy of a master race over subservient peoples, he declared. Therefore, “slavery is the natural and normal condition of society, the natural and normal condition of the laboring men”. Wage labour under capitalism is a dangerous experiment, little more than “social cannibalism”, and a war-of-all-against-all without masters to dictate behaviour, and therefore “the situation in the North is abnormal and anomalous … We slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism.”

This argument about the superiority of slave over wage labour reflects the critique of industrial capitalism by the American socialist Orestes Brownson, in The Laboring Classes (1840). According to Brownson, the miseries of work are balanced for the chattel slave by the care received from the master (who has an interest in looking after his property), while the wage slave must endure not only those miseries but fend entirely for himself in every aspect of life. This argument became highly influential as Southern politicians and intellectuals moved from defending slavery to advocating it as a positive good, not only for agriculture, but for manufacturing industry as well.

Consequently, the slave system was to be expanded outwards from the South, into the newly won territories to the North and the West, and into the Caribbean and Central America, there to establish a vast slave empire, bounded to the north by the Mason–Dixon Line, to the south by Mexico, and including Cuba and all other lands in the region. As a commercial convention discussed in 1856, the massive labour force required for this new empire would be guaranteed by the re-opening of the African slave trade: “With cheap negroes we could set the hostile legislation of Congress at defiance. The slave population after supplying the states would overflow into the territories and nothing could control its natural expansion.” Cuba was especially coveted in this grand imperial vision, not only for the land it would provide for the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of new slaves, but also for its political weight, providing some fifteen extra Southern representatives in Congress.

Consequently, in 1848, Senator Jefferson Davis, the future President of the Confederacy, declared that the Gulf of Mexico was “a basin of water belonging to the United States” in which could be founded many “slaveholding constituencies”. “Instead of an evil”, declared John C. Calhoun, the master politician and intellectual champion of both state rights and slavery, the “peculiar institution” was “a positive good … the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world”; it was “a great moral, social, and political blessing”, and no legitimate limits could be placed upon its expansion.

Such pretensions were offensive nonsense as far as the industrial North was concerned. As William H. Seward, the Republican leader and later Lincoln’s Secretary of State explained, slavery undermined the intelligence, energy and vigour of all workers, both black and white, and produced “an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads … an absence of enterprise and improvement”; and was “incompatible with all the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations”. Echoing Lincoln’s famous “house divided” speech delivered a few months earlier in 1858, Seward declared that there existed “an irrepressible conflict between two opposing and enduring forces” within the Union, that the United States had become two nations, and that this tension had to be resolved, with the country becoming “either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation”. The onrushing crisis, an Ohio congressman concluded, was a struggle “between systems, between civilizations” (Drawn with the Sword) where there could be only one survivor.

The Southern aristocracy’s aspirations to rule over a vast slave empire were delusional, but it remained deaf to all pleas for moderation and reform. When Hinton Rowan Helper of North Carolina sought to draw attention to the inevitability of change in The Impending Crisis of the South in 1857 he despaired of finding a publisher below the Mason–Dixon Line and instead went to New York, where the book attracted considerable attention, especially for its denunciation of slavery as the root cause of “all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South”. Predictably, Southern states moved quickly to ban distribution of the book, while Northern abolitionists and Republicans widely circulated abridged versions.

In Congress, tempers reached boiling point as Republicans promoted a candidate for speaker of the house who had endorsed Helper’s book. Ballot after ballot was held over two months and eventually congressmen and spectators in the gallery routinely arrived armed, with some from the South increasingly anxious to have the matter out once and for all in a gun fight. Responding helpfully, the Governor of South Carolina advised one of his state’s congressmen that if he felt the deadlock needed to be resolved by force “write or telegraph me, and I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time”, to provide the necessary firepower. 

The commitment of the South to slavery and secession only hardened as the threat to its “peculiar institution” intensified, while the free-soil and free-labour logic of America’s continental expansion became apparent with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848. Eighty thousand migrants ventured thousands of kilometres to the previously sparsely populated Western territory in 1849 alone, leaving thousands lying dead along the way. Effective government was quickly needed to prevent anarchy, and moves were made to establish territorial administrations for California and New Mexico, but these were blocked, with the South incensed that they involved the prohibition of slavery and threatened the balance of power in the Senate. Calhoun was commissioned to prepare an address stating the section’s grievances and demands, threatening secession if these weren’t met. President Zachary Taylor had been expected to sympathise with the South but instead he moved directly to admit California and New Mexico as states, driving the Southern leadership to denounce “the dictation of Northern hordes of Goths and Vandals”, and calling for the South to make “the necessary preparations of men and money, arms and munitions, etc, to meet the emergency”.

If slavery was to be excluded from the new states, then “I am for disunion”, declared one Southern leader, while another demanded “our rights”, promising that, “if you refuse, I am for taking them by armed occupation”. Southerners felt it was despotic and tyrannical, and an outrageous affront to their honour and liberty, for the federal government to assume that it had “the power to dictate what sort of property [a citizen] may own—whether oxen, horses, or Negroes”. A new breed of intransigent politician became prominent in the South—“fire-eaters”, passionately committed to Southern nationalism and the ascendancy of slavery. Senators were now drawing guns on each other in the chamber, and when the Southern leadership went to confront Taylor, the war veteran lost his temper and declared that he would personally lead an army to enforce federal laws and hang any traitors who tried to interfere, including those standing before him.

So the scene was set for the great “Compromise of 1850” involving debates that “became the most famous in the history of Congress”, with major contributions from great antebellum politicians like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Calhoun. The latter’s indictment of the North and celebration of a slave-based social order was read by a colleague as the shrivelled and mortally ill Carolinian sat wrapped in blankets; his “prophecies of doom” about the end of the Union and the onset of civil war “reflected in the piercing eyes that stared from deep sockets within the shroud”.

Younger men who played pivotal roles in the onrushing tragedy also spoke, including Stephen A. Douglas, Seward and Davis. Seward declared himself in polar opposition to Calhoun—slavery was condemned by the “Higher Law” and the choice was between its slow, peaceful, but inevitable disappearance, or a civil war that would guarantee “violent but complete and immediate emancipation” for all slaves—the choice was the South’s. Clay characteristically sought to contrive a complex compromise between the two extremes, but uncharacteristically failed, leaving Douglas to rescue what he could, fashioning a series of measures that “lanced the boil of tension that had festered in Congress during one of its longest and most contentious sessions in history. Most of the country gave a sigh of relief”.

It proved to be a false hope, because amongst the measures adopted under the Compromise was a more rigorous Fugitive Slave Law, the enforcement of which in the North involved rampaging gangs of slave hunters, now assisted by federal marshals and even the military. Many outrages occurred, with one case involving a Southerner who claimed ownership over a Philadelphia woman who had allegedly run away twenty-two years before, and for good measure he also claimed ownership of her six children. That woman was eventually saved but not so another fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, who was hunted down in Boston, arrested by federal marshals, and held under heavy guard in the federal courthouse, to which a fierce group of abolitionists quickly laid siege. After a deputy marshal was shot dead in the riot, President Pierce, politically beholden to the South, ordered marines, cavalry and artillery to join state militia and police in escorting Burns to the harbour where a federal ship was provided to transport Burns back to enslavement, all at phenomenal cost to the taxpayer.

Masses of black people fled to Canada, as even free blacks were seized, and such episodes brought home to Northerners the reality of slavery and the reach of an apparent “Slave Power”, a sinister coalition of forces committed to pursuing the sectional interests of the South no matter what the cost to the nation. This radicalised innumerable moderates, mobilised outraged state governments, and filled committed abolitionists with a dreadful resolve. 

Amid such an atmosphere appeared the most important novel in American history. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter, sister and wife of Congregational clergymen, and she “had breathed the doctrinal air of sin, guilt, atonement, and salvation since childhood”, while in her book she clothed these themes “in prose that throbbed with pathos as well as bathos”, as she gave expression to what she believed was a divine inspiration, driving home the horrors of slavery in a messianic work that was less a book than a mystical vision, as Henry James noted. Its impact upon the consciousness and conscience of the North is incalculable, and, a decade later, when Stowe was introduced to Lincoln, the President remarked: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war”.

This messianism in turn reflected the colossal impact of the Second Great Awakening, the wave of Protestant revivalism that swept across the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many felt themselves to be sinners in the hands of an angry God, and the elimination of the grave sin of slavery became essential. All were equal in God’s sight; the souls of black folk were as valuable as those of white; and for one to enslave the other was to violate God’s Higher Law. Intense spiritual forces were unleashed and found expression in the apocalyptic opening lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” published by Julia Ward Howe in February 1862: 

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword … 

In the South the fire-eaters seethed at the depths of Northern iniquity: “We cannot stay in the Union any longer, with such dishonor attached to the terms of our remaining.” Rising cotton prices now became a factor, increasing the South’s estimate of its value to the nation, and its emboldened leaders began routinely to threaten and demand secession if the North continued to slander the institution of slavery, failed to rigorously enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, or prevented the admission of new slave states into the Union. Meanwhile, Southern churches resolutely backed slavery, providing their own theological justifications, while in the literary realm their people read apologias like Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston.

Stowe’s brother was the clergyman and militant abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who raised funds for anti-slavery “jayhawkers”, in their guerrilla war with pro-slavery “border ruffians” in the “Bleeding Kansas” conflict, as the latter tried to ensure the election of a pro-slavery government in Kansas through terror and intimidation. “Mark every scoundrel … that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him … Vote at the point of a bowie knife or revolver”, urged a pro-slavery senator: “If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific … We will be compelled to shoot, burn and hang, but the thing will soon be over.” In response, Beecher and his associates shipped large quantities of rifles to the jayhawkers in crates marked “Bibles”, earning the rifles the name “Beecher’s Bibles”, an illuminating comment on how the conflict was progressing from a war of words to a war of guns.

These hostilities arose from the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854—“the most important single event pushing the nation towards civil war”—a piece of legislative opportunism sponsored by Douglas to create commercial opportunities for railway interests and himself. This effectively nullified both the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, repealing the ban on slavery north of 36˚30ʹ, creating the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening up other new land, and providing that the adoption or prohibition of slavery in any new state would be determined by popular sovereignty amongst the new settlers, thereby inviting the wave of violence that made Kansas bleed.

Typical of this were the actions of a fanatical abolitionist, John Brown. After the free-soil stronghold of Lawrence was sacked by 800 ruffians deputised as a posse by a pro-slavery judge, and Sumner was bashed in the Senate, Brown and his sons abducted and murdered five pro-slavery farmers in the Pottawatomie Massacre, cleaving their heads in twain with a broadsword, in a deliberate “eye-for-an-eye” act of terrorism. This was duly reciprocated by the burning of Brown’s homesteads and the killing of his son amongst the 200 people who died in the Kansas conflict. Brown would shortly return to the fray, with calamitous results.

Meanwhile, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, made his move. For decades the South had been able to rely on the judicial activism of the Court to construct decisions that furthered its sectional interests. Nothing illustrated this better than the Dred Scott case, which destroyed the remaining foundations of the uneasy political compromises that had accumulated over the decades to keep the Union intact. In its ruling in Dred Scott v Sanford (1857), written by Taney, the Court determined that no people of African descent imported in the past into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants (whether or not they were slaves) were entitled to any protection under the Constitution; could never be US citizens; and that, because they were not citizens, had no standing to sue in court (for example, to seek their freedom, as in this case).

But that was not all. In an infamous obiter dictum that need not have been delivered but for the elderly Taney’s determination to stamp his mark on history, the court also found that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, and that slaves, as private property, could not be removed from their owners without due process, and could readily be taken around the union, specifically into hitherto free states, raising the spectre of slaves being introduced throughout the North, as a type of enslaved guest workforce. This decision both terrified and outraged the North, gave the South a sense of vindication, contributed significantly to an economic panic of 1857, and opened the final phase of the intensifying political crisis that culminated in the war. 

First to strike was John Brown, who attacked the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 in an attempt to provoke a mass uprising of slaves across the South. After briefly taking possession of the facility, Brown’s small band was routed by a detachment of marines, with many deaths (including two more of Brown’s sons). He himself was wounded, arrested, tried, convicted and promptly hanged on December 2. At one level the exercise was an abject failure: Brown had expected hundreds and even thousands of supporters but they had not materialised; neither had the slaves been willing to join the revolt.

On the other hand, Brown himself became a martyr and a highly potent symbol for the radical abolitionists, giving an impressive display at his trial, and attracting church bells, sermons and moments of silence on his day of execution. Contemporaries noting the extraordinary reaction: “I have seen nothing like it”; “The death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation”; “Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea”; Brown had made the word treason “holy in the American language”; he died “a crucified hero” and the gallows now joined the cross as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption.

In the South, Brown’s insurrection and the enthusiastic approval it received confirmed Southern fears of Northern fanaticism, revealing “that millions of Yankees seemed to approve of a murderer who had tried to set the slaves at [Southern] throats”; and “sanctioned and applauded theft, murder, and treason”. A sense of dread and a desire to have the issues resolved became widespread. Consequently, “the Harper’s Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the formation of the government”, Southern newspapers concluded, while Yankees throughout the South were driven out, tarred and feathered, and even lynched. Ominously, “John Brown’s ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened”.

The 1860 presidential election reflected the complex constellation of forces that had emerged over the past decade, and the political manoeuvring that surrounded it was immense. Nevertheless, Lincoln ultimately emerged as a compromise candidate for the new Republican Party that formed after the Whigs disintegrated in the aftermath of the Kansas–Nebraska debacle, and more prominent Republicans, like Seward, were rejected as unelectable. Their platform was “one of the most effective … in American history”, promoting a firm but moderate stance on anti-slavery, accompanied by nation-building promises, including a homestead act, improvements to waterways and harbours, and a transcontinental railway.

Lincoln had been the darkest of dark horses. A self-trained but successful backwoods lawyer, he had previously served one term in the House of Representatives in 1846–48 as a Whig. He had then achieved some prominence campaigning against the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, and later demonstrated an eloquence and incisiveness that Douglas badly underestimated when he agreed to a series of seven debates with Lincoln during their senatorial contest in 1858, which gained national attention, especially after they were published in 1860. In these and other speeches, Lincoln consistently made clear his opposition to slavery, his view that it was not protected by the Constitution, but also that he felt the correct policy was to allow it to decline in its heart-lands, while preventing its expansion elsewhere. He avoided endorsing any notions of “racial mixing” but called upon Americans to “unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal”, and that “in the right to eat the bread … which his own hand earns, he is my equal … and the equal of every living man”.

“No man has ever before risen so rapidly to political eminence in the United States”, it was observed at the time: “Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility”, and quickly became “the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image”.

The South loathed him, appalled by his unyielding intellectual, legal and political defence of the Union, his consistent anti-slavery, and his free-labour and free-soil positions. His nomination brought forth the visceral fears that dominated the section, conjuring up visions of “buck niggers”, vulnerable young women, and rampant “African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races”; while stories of slave uprisings, rapes, arson and poisonings carried out by treasonous slaves under the direction of mysterious Yankee strangers crowded Southern newspapers—all happening in the apocalyptic shadow of the looming “millennium of Republican rule”, and arousing “the minds of the people … to a pitch of excitement probably unparalleled in the history of our country”.

Unfortunately for the violently aroused South, the opposition to Lincoln had wilted, and dissipated its energy, especially as his great opponent, Stephen Douglas, had alienated the section by adhering to his free sovereignty policy when the South thought that the Dred Scott decision had finally enshrined slavery in the Constitution, irrespective of popular feeling. Consequently, four candidates contested a race that was run effectively as twin head-to-head contests in the two sections, wasting much of the anti-Republican vote. Various strategies were considered to force the election into the House or the Senate where anti-Lincoln forces might have prevailed, but ultimately Lincoln won 180 electoral votes (the minimum required was 152) with only 40 per cent of the national popular vote, and took the presidency.

The South declined further into fear and rage: “A party founded on the single sentiment … of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power”, its press declared: “Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies … the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” 

Tragically, secession was seen as the only path, an option that the brilliance of Calhoun had convinced the South was real, when what was really required was some preparedness to compromise if the South was to retain its “peculiar institution”, in at least the existing slave states. But the decision to secede was more than just a political response; it was an emotional release, purgation—“an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people literally to dance in the streets.” And so, within three months of the election the Confederacy had been established, its Constitution drafted, its capital located in Montgomery, Alabama, and its officials were assuming control of federal assets and facilities. Throughout the South there swept a “wild torrent of passion … carrying everything before it”; “a revolution … of the most intense character … a prairie fire”; “People are wild … you may as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them.”

And so the crowds came to find their vantage points around Charleston Harbor. Buchanan, the lame-duck president, had dithered over the previous months, and almost capitulated to Confederate demands to surrender Fort Sumter, but he was also aware of the depth of Northern feeling: “if Sumter is surrendered … Northern sentiment will be unanimous in favor of hanging Buchanan … I am not joking—Never have I known the entire people more unanimous on any question,” reported a Southern agent in New York about the Northern mood. Buchanan backed off; once Lincoln was inaugurated, it became his problem. The garrison would soon be starving, so something had to be done. Lincoln could have the military try to shoot its way through to relieve the garrison, but then he would have started the war; he could withdraw the garrison and yield the fort, but that would have emboldened the Confederacy, gained it international recognition, and destroyed Union morale and his presidency; he could play for time, which would probably have the same effect; or he could manoeuvre the Confederacy into starting the war itself.

Lincoln therefore decided to send in unarmed boats, carrying non-military supplies; he then told the Southern leaders of these intentions, knowing that if the Confederacy opened fire on unarmed men trying to take food to hungry troops, it would bear the moral and political burden for starting the war. Jefferson Davis now faced his own dilemma, knowing that public support for secession was endangered, and aware that the fire-eaters expected resolute action against the detested Northerners: only “the shedding of blood” would suffice to bind the people of the new slave empire together, he was told. Consequently, he decided to open fire before the supply boats arrived, but only ensuring that the act would be seen as military aggression against a garrison that hadn’t fired a shot. Four thousand shells rained down on the fort, destroying much of it, and forcing the garrison’s surrender. On April 14 the stars and stripes came down the flagpole and the stars and bars of the Confederacy flew over Fort Sumter. The South went wild.

The North was galvanised, crowds filled the streets, with a quarter of a million turning out in New York City alone, while state governors begged Lincoln to accept extra divisions of the clamouring young men who were vastly over-subscribing his invitation to join the militia to deal with the rebellion. War meetings were held in every city and village across the North, cheering the flag and vowing vengeance on the Southern traitors: “The heather is on fire”; “the people have gone stark mad”, observers noted. The shift to militancy amongst the previously moderate seemed extreme, indeed “supernatural” in its ferocity. Even the experience of time was transformed: “The time before Sumter” suddenly seemed prosaic, observed one woman; “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now.”

Unbeknown to her or anyone at the time, there lay ahead four years of terrible violence and destruction, passion and despair, victory and defeat, courage and cowardice, hopes fulfilled and betrayed, achievements and sacrifices, out of which emerged the modern United States, bearing a terrible scar that might never fade. In the end, when the war finally came, it was initiated by the South to preserve their “peculiar institution” and to protect a neo-feudal, agricultural, hierarchical and aristocratic vision of civilisation, confronting what it saw as an ignoble urban, industrial and money-grubbing society peopled by social and racial inferiors and manipulated by deranged fanatics driven by absurd beliefs about human equality and freedom. The North, in response, joined battle to preserve the Union and to écraser l’infame—to confront and destroy the infamous régime of systematic oppression that the South had chosen to embrace and desired to establish on a continental scale. Propelled by such beliefs and energised by fearsome passions, the world’s first great democracy plunged into the world’s first total war. 

Dr Mervyn F. Bendle is Senior Lecturer, History and Communication, at James Cook University.

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