Setting the stage for America’s great divide

Jay Sexton’s A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History was our 2018 Book of the Year in the History category because it presents a challenging new perspective in 200 tightly written pages. Instead of telling a conventional story of America’s evolution, Sexton offers the historian’s equivalent of a biologist’s “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of little change punctuated by dramatic disasters that create surprising benefits.

Washington politics now is divisive, but the divide early in 1861 was worse. Sexton describes how in slave states “candidates for office raced to establish themselves as the most ardent defender of Southern institutions and honor. There was little political incentive for Southern statesmen to pursue compromise with … Northern Democrats.”

Sexton’s also shows how denominational divides among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians set the stage for civil war. “How little is to be expected from any other Union, if the union of Christians fail,” one reporter noted in 1845. Henry Clay said, “If the Churches divide on the subject of slavery, there will be nothing left to bind our people together but trade and commerce.”

Given our current tussle about immigration, it’s worth noting that worries about increased labor competition contributed to the demise of the Whig Party. Some young men of modest means “joined the nativist American Party, popularly known as the Know-Nothing Party … whose name came from the response members were to give when asked about their political association.” Know-Nothing concerns brought new people into the political process, much as Donald Trump has, and one result was the formation of a new party, the Republicans.

Immigration also made the difference in the Civil War. Some 543,000 Union army soldiers—about one-fourth of the total—were foreign-born. About 84,000 foreign-born seamen made up 40 percent of the whole Union navy. The Union’s 144,000 Irish soldiers outnumbered Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Union (Republican) Party platform in 1864 supported “foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed.”

Sexton has interesting comments on other crises as well, but the Civil War was America’s great divide, so the section that follows—courtesy of Basic Books—looks at its causes. Read on, please. —Marvin Olasky

Chapter 2: The Wrecking Ball

Slavery lay behind the greatest crisis in American history. Of that there is no serious debate. It was clear to Americans at the time that the future of slavery in the federal territories of the West—and by extension the future of slavery itself—was “somehow the cause of the war,” as Lincoln put it. It was also clear that the slavery question was more than a conventional political controversy or wedge issue. It was a wrecking ball that demolished the social, economic, and political institutions that held the Union together.

What made the slavery question so destructive was the remarkable growth of the South’s peculiar institution. In the late eighteenth century, many Americans had predicted that slavery was on the road to extinction. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the astonishing expansion of slavery, along with the political power amassed by the Southern master class, led many to conclude that, in the future, forced labor might well extend beyond the South. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free;” Lincoln warned in his 1858 “House Divided” speech, “and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.” The ambitions of some Southern slaveholders extended beyond the horizons of the United States. “I want Cuba,” thundered Mississippi senator Albert Gallatin Brown, “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.”

The political crisis that culminated in civil war in 1861 is most commonly understood as a domestic one. But its roots extended beyond America’s borders. The crisis of the Union played out within a moment of world history characterized by the development of global capitalism, ideologically charged political conflict, and revolutionary advances in communications and transportation. “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, “we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.” The growth of American slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century that caused the sectional crisis was fueled by a British-led international economic order that developed an almost insatiable appetite for cotton, “white gold,” as it was called at the time. As slavery became ever more entrenched into Southern life and ever more central to the international economic order, it disrupted the fragile political balance within the Union. A growing number of people within and beyond the United States passionately devoted themselves to either advancing or destroying slavery as the institution grew in size. Policies and ideas that once had unified Americans on either side of the Mason-Dixon line, ranging from the tariff to evangelical Christianity, now tore them apart along sectional lines. Slaves became increasingly shrewd political actors whose daily struggles to improve the terms of their bondage, if not free themselves from it altogether, ensured that the slavery question could never be swept under the rug of national politics.

As slavery became ever more entrenched into Southern life and ever more central to the international economic order, it disrupted the fragile political balance within the Union.

As the slavery debate intensified, shifts in the international position of the United States increased its vulnerability to the deepening sectional divide. Most important was the increased power of the United States, which was made clear by its conquest of northern Mexico in 1848. With the European powers acquiescing to US continental dominion, the old security rational for national union faded away. The greatest threat to the Union now derived from the management of its new continental empire. This danger assumed the form of a simple question. Would America’s vast western territories be open to slavery? As the political system struggled to contain the morally charged debate unleashed by this question, it was simultaneously shaken to its core by a sudden surge of immigration, whose principal driver was a devastating potato blight on the other side of the Atlantic. International forces powered, rather than contained, that wrecking ball as it battered the structures of the Union during the political crisis of the 1850s.

UNTIL RELATIVELY RECENTLY, the Old South was viewed as a social and economic anachronism, a curious throwback destined to be overwhelmed by Yankee capitalism. According to this view, slavery was a quasi-feudalistic institution that stunted the region’s economic development. In the nineteenth century’s race of material development, the backward-looking, slaveholding South ran the wrong direction around the track. Few interpretations of the American past have been as thoroughly revised as this one. Far from a feudalistic holdout, the slaveholding South is now seen as a driver of capitalist development. The growth of American slavery was central to the emergence of new global systems of political power, financial services, transportation, and commodity markets. At each plantation and farm, the master class wielded power over its bonded laborers. But sustaining that power required more than just maintaining discipline on the plantation. It required an imperial power structure, a hospitable international economic order, and a powerful proslavery culture and ideology.

By nearly every measure, the slaveholding South grew at a frenetic pace in the first half of the nineteenth century. The slave population dramatically increased, almost entirely through natural reproduction after the closing of the international slave trade in 1808. This set the South apart from the slave systems of the Caribbean that required continuous importations of new slaves from Africa. The first US census of 1790 found there to be roughly seven hundred thousand slaves in the nation. Twenty years later there were nearly 1.2 million. By the eve of the Civil War, there were some four million enslaved people in the United States. Agricultural production based on slave labor, particularly that of cotton, which flourished in the black belt region of the states of the Deep South, grew at a similar pace. Before Eli Whitney’s 1793 cotton gin expedited the labor-intensive process of separating cotton seeds from fiber, the United States produced three thousand bales of cotton per year. Seventy years later, the slaves in the South produced four million bales of cotton. The cotton boom altered the demography of slavery, shifting its geographic concentration from the old tobacco complex of the Virginia tidewater to the new cotton kingdom in the states of the Deep South and the Mississippi River valley. An estimated one million slaves endured a forced migration in the South at some point in their life. American slavery, in sum, was not a static institution stuck in the past; it was a dynamic social and labor system that rapidly expanded, overcoming seemingly all obstacles in its way. “The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world,” South Carolinian James Henry Hammond triumphantly declared in the 1850s. “No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

Southern slavers shrewdly leveraged their white gold to attract foreign investment.

American slavery rested upon racist assumptions of the inferiority of people of African descent. But another of its foundations was an emerging global economic system that had an insatiable appetite for its staple crops of tobacco, sugar, and—above all—cotton. At its mid-nineteenth-century height, the slaveholding South produced the lion’s share of the cotton consumed by the textile mills of Britain (77 percent), the United States (nearly all), and Europe (90 percent in France, 60 percent in Germany, and 92 percent in Russia). The most important market for Southern cotton was Britain. The textile mills of Lancashire transformed the raw material into finished textile goods, which were then transported to markets around the world, particularly within the British Empire. As the nineteenth century progressed, the cotton South became a key component to Britain’s economy and imperial system. Some in Britain raised concerns about the “alarming fact that Britain is almost entirely dependent on foreign supply for this article,” which The Economist estimated sustained in one way or another nearly one fifth of the British population.

Southern slavers shrewdly leveraged their white gold to attract foreign investment. Without credit, there would have been no slave empire. American slaveholders were blessed with ample land—once the Native peoples of the Deep South had been dispossessed of their territories in the era of the War of 1812—and, owing to high birthrates among the slave population, labor. But, like the new American republic as a whole, the South needed capital, particularly in the decades following 1815 in which the cotton kingdom rapidly expanded. It required funds to underwrite all the activities necessary to create millions of bales of cotton and then deliver them to distant markets: slave purchases, land sales, the clearing of woodlands in cotton producing regions, annual acquisitions of seeds and machinery, transportation of commodities from plantations to port cities. Southern planters engineered new commercial associations and financial instruments that opened to them the capital markets of the North, Britain, and continental Europe. Planters pooled their resources together into state-chartered associations that raised money in distant capital markets by selling securitized bonds backed by the collateral of land, or even slaves themselves. Louisiana was a particularly popular destination for foreign investors. The London firm of Baring Brothers loaned more capital to it than to any other state in the Union in the years between 1815 and 1860; indeed, 52 percent of the capital invested in the state’s sixteen new banks was foreign, primarily British. The South’s integration into the wider Atlantic financial system was far from an orderly and stable process, as the great financial panics of 1819 and 1837 attested, but it did provide the capital the booming cotton kingdom required.

In other realms, however, the slaveholding class of the South pursued its interests not through integration but through appropriation and domination. Nowhere was this more the case than in politics. Southern slavers and theorists appropriated the symbols and history of the young nation in order to buttress the peculiar institution. Nationalism flourished in the antebellum South, but it was a peculiarly Southern variant that interpreted the nation’s founding documents and ideals as endorsements of racial slavery. By the mid-nineteenth century, Northern critics were talking about the “slave power.” They pointed to how Southern slavers exerted power disproportionate to their numbers, owing in large part to the three-fifths compromise. Slaveholders assumed leadership roles in key congressional committees, the military, the foreign service, and the judiciary. Today we tend to equate the Old South with states’ rights. To be sure, the idea of states’ rights existed in the antebellum South, particularly in regard to the compact theory of the Constitution that prioritized the state powers over those of the federal government. But states’ rights were not the South’s only political tradition. Southern statesmen were not uniformly opposed to central power. One of the secrets to their success was how they commandeered the power of the federal government to advance their interests. They created a proslavery foreign policy; they used the federal judiciary to their advantage; they sought to build up national military and naval power to insulate the South from foreign threats and abolitionism; they demanded a draconian federal fugitive slave bill that trampled upon the states’ rights of the North; and they went so far as to make their allegiance to the Union conditional on a series of radical proslavery federal measures, not least governmental protection for them to carry their slaves into all federal territories of the West. …

What made the slavery question so dangerous to the Union was how it fractured institutions and social networks that tied the sections together.

The emergence of powerful political groupings and ideologies for and against slavery made the future of the peculiar institution an unavoidable issue in American public life. No gag order could make the slavery question disappear. What made the slavery question so dangerous to the Union was how it fractured institutions and social networks that tied the sections together. Indeed, some of the most significant battlegrounds and turning points on the road to disunion occurred in realms apart from that of formal politics.

None were more important than evangelical Christianity. As politicians grappled with the question of the expansion of slavery, a comparable struggle concerning the morality and theology of slavery took place within the powerful evangelical churches, particularly the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. These churches were the backbone of the early American nation, both as propagators of a shared belief system and in the more concrete terms of institutional reach and coordination. Churches unified people from all sections of the Union. “If the Churches divide on the subject of slavery,” nationalist Henry Clay feared, “there will be nothing left to bind our people together but trade and commerce.” It thus was an ominous portent of the storm to come when the Baptists and the Methodists fractured along sectional lines in the 1840s. “How little is to be expected from any other Union, if the union of Christians fail,” wrote a reporter from the Southern Baptist Convention of 1845. The very beliefs and institutions that had been one of the primary engines of nationalism did an abrupt about-face, redirecting their power on behalf of sectionalism.

The fissure within the evangelical churches was part of a broader pattern in which national institutions and networks fractured along sectional lines. Sometimes even families, particularly those in border states, such as Kentucky, found themselves divided on the morality of slavery. The question confronting the United States in the mid-nineteenth century was if any of its national institutions could withstand the onslaught of the slavery issue, absorbing the blows until that wrecking ball somehow lost its momentum.

Adapted excerpt from A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History by Jay Sexton. Copyright © 2018. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group.