Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (2 page)

There, Lincoln and his party had drawn the line: they would not crush slavery where it was, but they would not allow it to spread, either. The Southern states were outraged at this denial, fearful that if slavery could not grow and extend itself, it was doomed to a slow death. “The government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it,” but that was more than sufficient to make the slaveholding South begin thinking of cancelling its membership in the Union. “Both parties deprecated war,” Lincoln said, “but one of them would
make
war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would
accept
war rather than let it perish.” Lincoln paused for a long moment, looking out over the upturned faces crowding the Capitol steps. “And the war came.”

Since Lincoln uttered those words—and they amount to no more than two paragraphs in an inaugural address only four paragraphs long—something close to 50,000 books and articles on the American Civil War have been published. Still, we would be hard-pressed to find a more concise statement of just what it was that caused the American Civil War. If we want to understand what plunged the American republic into its greatest crisis, and map out the paths and highways that led Americans to four years of unplanned-for and unlooked-for carnage, we can hardly do better than to take our bearings from the three signposts that Abraham Lincoln left us.

Underlying everything else that pushed or pulled nineteenth-century Americans toward the abyss of civil war was one very plain fact about the United States of America: its political structure—that of a union of states—was a standing invitation to chaos.

The origins of this situation extend far into the American past, all the way to the founding of the first English-speaking colonies in North America. Beginning in 1607 with Jamestown, Virginia, these settlements had been individually laid out, funded, settled, and organized, with next to nothing in the way of supervision from the English government. Right down to the outbreak of the American Revolution, the British North American colonies operated on different currencies, commissioned separate defense forces, and maintained separate agencies in London to represent their interests to the English Parliament. A dozen years of spectacular political bungling by Parliament provoked thirteen of those colonies to declare themselves independent of British rule in 1776. But even in the face of British armies sent to suppress their revolt, the American colonies were unwilling to cooperate with each other on more than a hit-or-miss basis. The Continental army that the colonies raised as a joint defense force to fight the British was continually starved for men and supplies, while the local colonial militias played politics at home. The Continental Congress that they formed to act as their parliament looked more like a steering committee than a government, and even then its deliberations were racked with dissension and bickering. Frequently on the run from the British, the Continental Congress had no power to levy taxes and only the slimmest public credibility. Even the Congress’s Declaration of Independence, which was supposed to be the joint announcement that the colonies were now “Free and Independent States,” had been co-opted by several over-eager colonial legislatures that bolted ahead to declare their own separate independence from British rule.
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It took five years after the Declaration of Independence for the Continental Congress to persuade the new states to adopt some form of unified national government, and the states agreed only because they could not obtain an alliance with France (which they needed for survival) without forming themselves into something that the French could recognize as a government. What they finally created in 1781 was based on a flimsy document known as the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, each of the thirteen new states would receive equal representation in a new Confederation Congress, regardless of each state’s size or population—a formula that amounted to allowing the states to come to the Confederation Congress as separate but equal powers, rather than participants in a national assembly.
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There could have been only one end to this. Soon enough, individual states would find themselves quarreling with each other while the Confederation Congress stood on the sidelines, wringing its hands. Then the quarrels would explode into civil war, and the war would so weaken the United States that some powerful European monarchy (perhaps the British again) would intervene and force the Americans under European control all over again. In the 1780s almost all the rest of the world was still governed by kings who looked upon the kingless American republic as a bad example to their own restless subjects. Those kings had armies and navies that were too close to the American borders for comfort. Britain still occupied Canada to the north, and Spain still ruled the western half of North America and all of Central and South America, and neither of them liked what they saw in the new republic. If the American states divided, the European powers might take the opportunity to conquer.

So it was fear more than unity of purpose that finally drove the Americans to scrap the Articles of Confederation and write a new constitution in 1787. The Constitution equipped the national government with the power to raise its own income by imposing taxes on the states, and created an executive president who had the authority and the means to enforce the decisions of Congress. Even so, there were ambiguities and compromises in the Constitution that allowed the individual states to retain a large measure of their jealously guarded autonomy. The most obvious example of compromise concerned the Congress. The Constitution divided the old Confederation Congress into two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Members of the House were elected directly by the voters of each state, with the population of each state determining how many representatives each state could elect. By contrast, the members of the Senate were elected by the state legislatures, and each state had two senators regardless of size, giving each state equal voice in the Senate, just like in the Confederation Congress. What this meant, in effect, was that in the House, the representatives would speak for the people of the United States as a whole, but in the Senate, the senators were clearly understood to be representing the interests of the states.

There were other telltale problems, too. The Constitution created a confusing and cumbersome system for electing the national president. As it was, the Constitution did not specify who was permitted to vote for the president (the eligibility of voters was a question left to the individual states). For those who could vote, the Constitution specified that they would cast their ballots not for a particular presidential candidate but for a handful of state electors, who would then assemble in an electoral college and vote as state delegations for the next president. So it was not the people of the United States who elected a president, but committees of state electors. Ominously, the states made no pledge in the text of the Constitution to treat the arrangement as a perpetual one. Three of the state conventions that eventually ratified the Constitution—those of New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island—agreed to ratification only after adding resolutions that declared that they still retained the right to retrieve the powers they had surrendered “whensoever it
shall become necessary to their happiness.”
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And some of them quickly came close to doing just that. In 1798, the second president, John Adams, attempted to quell political opposition to his administration through the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts. In reply, two of the foremost American political thinkers, Thomas Jefferson (the author of the Declaration of Independence) and James Madison (the architect of the Constitution), drafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which announced to President Adams that the individual states still reserved the privilege of declaring acts of the national Congress unconstitutional and non-operative.

As late as the 1830s, the United States of America looked and behaved more like a league or a compact of states than a single country, and its Constitution was still regarded as something of an experiment, embraced mostly for its practicality. “Asking a State to surrender a part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity,” declared the eccentric Virginia politician John Randolph of Roanoke, who even on the floor of Congress made his loyalties clear by insisting that “when I speak of my country, I mean the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The English travel writer George Featherstonhaugh was confounded to hear a South Carolinian declare: “If you ask
me
if I am an American, my answer is, No, sir, I am a South Carolinian.” The framers of the Constitution, fearing the possibility that state antagonisms, economic competition, and political corruption would easily derail the national system, appealed to the spirit of union or the virtue of political compromise to defuse the threat of divisive issues, but did not appeal to some elusive national authority.
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This is not to say, though, that Americans were not becoming a nation in other ways. No matter how jealously the states regarded and defended their individual political privileges and identities, it would have been hard for a people who spoke the same language, read the same books, heard the same music, and voted in the same elections not to develop some sort of fellow-feeling, irrespective of state boundaries. This was especially true for those Americans who had actually borne the brunt of the fighting in the Revolutionary War, and who carried out of the Revolution a highly different perspective on the unity of the American republic. In the snows of Valley Forge and in the heat of the Carolinas, in victory and in defeat, soldiers from Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and all the other states had undergone so many hardships together that their different backgrounds faded to unimportance.

One of these soldiers, John Marshall, began the Revolution as a Virginia militiaman, then enlisted in the Continental army, and endured the army’s winter at Valley Forge. He remembered later, “I was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my
country and Congress as my government,” not Virginia.
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And Marshall would later rise, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, to shape a system of national jurisprudence that transcended state boundaries and loyalties. A South Carolinian (turned Tennessean) named Andrew Jackson lost two brothers and his mother to the Revolution. Captured by the British, he refused a British officer’s order to clean the officer’s boots and was rewarded with a blow from the officer’s sword. It left a scar Jackson carried with him for the rest of his life, and it also left a burning hatred of all enemies of his country, whether they were British invaders or (as it turned out later) fellow Southerners trying to nullify congressional legislation.
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By the end of the 1830s, the Union, crisscrossed by “mystic chords of memory,” had ascended to the level of a national faith. The belligerent Tennessee parson and newspaper editor William G. Brownlow attacked the notion that the Constitution was merely a temporary political umbrella put up by the individual states to protect their state interests. “The Constitution,” insisted Brownlow, was the political creation of the American people as a single nation, and it “was formed by the
people
to govern the
people
, and no single individual State was called upon as a separate ‘sovereignty’ to sign or ratify that Constitution.” Alexander Stephens, who one day would serve as the vice president of the Confederate States, said that for Abraham Lincoln the Union “rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism,” and even a perfectly straightforward politician such as William H. Bissell of Illinois felt no embarrassment in claiming that whenever anyone in the West carelessly broached the idea of “destroying this Union,” there would not be “a man throughout that vast region who will not raise his hand and swear by the Eternal God, as I do now, that it shall never be done, if our arms can save it.” When, as it turned out, other members of the Union did just that and asked the Lincolns and Bissells to choose between state or local interests and the Union, the answer would more and more be the Union.
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The experience of the Revolution and the development of political maturity were only the first steps away from disunity and suspicion. The new political generation of Americans in the 1830s found two other important cultural paths by which to rise above their divisions. One of these was the embrace of a common religion. Although the Constitution forbade Congress from singling out any particular religion or religious denomination as a national “established” church, it was nevertheless clear that Americans in all parts of the country overwhelmingly favored Protestant, evangelical Christianity. The overall number of Christian congregations rose from 2,500 in 1780 to 52,000 in
1860. Along with the new congregations came new publication agencies, such as the American Bible Society and American Tract Society, which spun off a million Bibles and 6 million religious books and pamphlets each year, and a constellation of inter-locked social reform and missionary agencies. Evangelical Protestant churches claimed approximately 15 percent of the American population as full members, and as much as 40 percent of all Americans as “attenders” or “hearers.”
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There were many differences between various groups of evangelical Protestants, and they organized themselves into more separate and subdivided denominations—Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and so on—than there were states. But one thing they had in common was a commitment to the basic outlines of evangelical piety—a direct appeal to the person of Jesus Christ as God, the experience of conversion from unbelief or half belief to fervent piety, reverence for the authority of the Bible, and an ambition to promote the conversion of others for their own good and the good of the larger society.