From, "The 1840's and the Democratic Process:'by Avery Craven, Journal of Southern History, May 1950. Copyright @ 1950 by The Southern Historical Association..

 

THE 1840's AND THE

DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

 

The most significant thing about the American Civil War is that it represents a complete breakdown of the democratic process. After years of strain, men ceased to discuss their problems, dropped the effort to compromise their differences, refused to abide by the results of a national election, and resorted to the use of force. After four years of bloody civil strife, one side was beaten into submission and the other had its way in national affairs. The emergence of modern America was largely the product of that outcome.

 

If the breakdown of the democratic process is the significant thing about the coming of the Civil War, then the important question is not what the North and South were quarreling about half so much as it is how their differences got into such shape that they could not be handled by the process of rational discussion, compromise, or the tolerant acceptance of majority decision. The question is not "What caused the Civil War?" but rather "How did it come about?" The two questions are quite different, yet hopelessly tangled. The effort to distinguish between them, however, is important and needs to be stressed.

 

If one were to discuss the causes of the Civil War, he might begin with geography, move onto historical developments in time and place, trace the growth of economic and social rivalries, outline differences in moral values, and then show the way in which personalities and psychological factors operated. The part which slavery played would loom large. It might even become the symbol of all differences and of all conflicts. State rights, territorial expansion, tariffs, lands, internal improvements, and a host of other things, real and imagined, would enter the picture. There would be economic causes, constitutional causes, social causes, moral causes, political causes involving the breaking of old parties and the rise of sectional ones, and psychological causes which ultimately permitted emotion to take the place of reason. There would be remote or background causes, and immediate causes, and causes resting on other causes, until the most eager pedagogue would be thoroughly satisfied.

 

The matter of how issues got beyond the abilities of the democratic process is, on the other hand, a bit less complex and extended. It has to do with the way in which concrete issues were reduced to abstract principles and the conflicts between interests simplified to basic levels where men Teel more than they reason, and where compromise or yielding is impossible because issues appear in the form of right and wrong and involve the fundamental structure of society. This is not saying, as some have charged, that great moral issues were not involved. They certainly were, and it is a matter of choice with historians as to whether or not they take sides, praise or condemn, become partisans in this departed quarrel, or use past events for present‑day purposes.

 

As an approach to this second more modest problem, a correspondence which took place between Abraham Lincoln and Alexander H. Stephens between November 30 and December 22, 1860, is highly revealing' On November 14, Stephens had delivered one of the great speeches of his life before the legislature of Georgia. It was a Union speech. He had begged his fellow Southerners not to give up the ship, to wait for some violation of the Constitution before they attempted secession. Equality might yet be possible inside the Union. At least, the will of the whole people should be obtained before any action was taken?

 

Abraham Lincoln, still unconvinced that there was a real danger, wrote Stephens, as an old friend, for a revised copy of his speech. Stephens complied, and he ended his letter with a warning about the great peril which threatened the country and a reminder of the heavy responsibility now resting on the president‑elect's shoulders. Lincoln answered with assurance that he would not "directly, or indirectly, interfere with the slaves" or with the southern peo­ple about their slaves, and then closed with this significant statement: "I suppose,

however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be ex­tended,, while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us. "

 

The reduction of "the only substantial difference" between North and South to a simple question of right and wrong is the important thing about Lincoln's statement. It revealed the extent to which the sectional controversy had, by 1860, been simplified and reduced to a conflict of principles in the minds of the northern people.

 

Stephens' answer to Lincoln's letter is equally revealing. He expressed "an ear­nest desire to preserve and maintain the Union of the States, if it can be done upon the principles and in furtherance of the ob­jects for which it was formed . " He insist­ed, however, that private opinion on the question of "African Slavery" was not a

matter over which "the Government un­der the Constitution" had any control. "But now," he said, "this subject, which is confessedly on all sides outside of the Constitutional action of the Government so far as the States are concerned, is made the 'central idea' in the Platform of prind­ pies announced by the triumphant Party!

It was this total disregard of the Constitu­tion and the rights guaranteed under it that lay back of southern fears. It was the in­troduction into party politics of issues  which projected action by Congress out­side its constitutional powers that had made all the trouble. Stephens used the word "Constitution" seven times in his letter.'

 

The significant thing here is Stephens' reduction of sectional differences to the simple matter of southern rights under the Constitution. He too showed how completely the sectional controversy had been simplified into a conflict of principles. And he with Lincoln, speaking for North and South, emphasized the fact that after years of strife the complex issues between the sections had assumed the form of a conflict between right and rights.

 

To the scholar it might be perfectly clear that this drastic simplification of sectional differences did not mean that either Lincoln or Stephens thought that all the bitter economic, social, and political questions could be ignored. It simply meant that right and rights had become the symbols or carriers of all those interests and values. Yet it is equally clear that as symbols they carried an emotional force and moral power in themselves that was far greater than the sum total of all the material issues involved. They suggested things which cannot be compromised‑things for which men willingly fight and die. Their use, in 1860, showed that an irrepressible conflict existed.

 

The question as to whether the Civil War was "a needless war" has therefore, little to do with the bungling statesmanship of 1860‑1861. It has much to do with the matter of how problems got beyond the ability of the democratic process. And as to that, we do know that the author of the Declaration of Independence, on which the Lincoln position rested, was a slaveholder. So was Madison and many other important leaders of the first great democratic drive in national life. The three men whom Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., names as the ones who carried the democratic torch on down to the age of Jackson ‑John Randolph, Nathaniel Macon, and John Taylor of Carolina‑were also slaveholders, as were Jackson himself and Thomas Hart Benton and Francis Preston Blair, his chief lieutenants. Even the father of Martin Van Buren held slaves .6 Evidently, in these years only a generation away from Civil War, the belief that slavery was morally wrong did not constitute "the only substantial difference" between those who sought to forward government "of the people, by the people, for the people" and their reactionary opponents.

 

Nor, by the same token, was everyone in the early South agreed on the value of slavery or its constitutional right to immunity from public criticism and political action. In the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829‑1830 and in the legislature of 1832, men questioned the economic benefits of slavery, pointed out its social dangers, and shamed its violation both of Christian and democratic values. Bills were introduced and voted upon. True, it was a case of a state discussing and acting upon its own domestic affairs, but these men were talking about slavery as an institution, not as just a Virginia practice, and they were thoroughly conscious of the larger national implications of what was going on. Robert Stanard spoke of the impulse begun in Virginia passing "with the rapidity of lightning across the whole extent of this Union." James Monroe frankly admitted that he looked "to the Union to aid in effecting" emancipation; and James M'Dowell, Jr., bitterly denounced slavery because it created "a political interest in this Union" and produced conflicts in Congress and dissension in the nation. He saw the day when a national crusade against slavery would unite all rival interests against the South.'

 

Slavery took its blows in other states as well, and there was anything but general agreement on how to protect constitutional rights when South Carolina took a try at nullification. However much they might dislike the tariff, the other southern states had not as yet returned to the old anticonsolidation state‑rights position of their elder statesmen. The issue outside of South Carolina was generally one of the merits of the tariff rather than the constitutional rights of a state. The younger Southwest, moreover, had its own attitudes towards lands and internal improvements which kept these issues on the level of interest rather than on that of constitutionality.'

 

The next few years, however, brought important changes. The growing realization of failure to share equally in national expansion, the new demand for slaves with the spread of cotton, and the increasing agitation against slavery all contributed to a feeling of resentment and insecurity on the part of the South. Where the coming of the Industrial Revolution to the Northeast upset life to its very roots and forced a reconsideration of every old value and every relationship, Southerners, who had experienced only the extension of old agricultural patterns into new agricultural areas, knew no sharp break with their pasts and found no reason to question the soundness of old social and political institutions and relationships. Conditions under the Constitution, as the fathers had made it, were quite satisfactory.

 

Yet, the matchless material growth that had come to the nation in these years, the deep ferment of ideas, and the rapid increase in the means of communication denied the South the chance to live alone. The nation was, in fact, in a state of transition, politically, economically, and socially. The attempt to apply old forms to constantly changing conditions put heavy strain on institutions and agencies created in more simple times and tended to thrust forward for decision the questions of just what kind of a government we had set up in the United States, what provisions it made for the protection of minorities, and just what the relations were

between government and business. Nor could southern institutions escape the scrutiny that was being given to all institutions and relationships in this age of transition. The whole Northeast, under the pressure of forces that would ultimately produce modem America, was rapidly becoming the center of social unrest and of efforts at reform. The new age was revealing too many contradictions between profession and practice. Where before in a simple rural order the true and the good were not beyond the comprehension of every man through a direct moral approach, and a good society was simply one composed of good men, they now found environment a force of major importance. The living of the many was passing into the hands of the few. Everywhere men were losing their independence, and forces quite beyond individual control were shaping the lives of the masses. Neither Christianity nor democracy seemed to be working. Something was wrong and it should be righted. The Declaration of Independence with its emphasis on freedom and equality ought again to become a force in American life.

 

Out of the welter of reform movements that resulted from such convictions came the antislavery impulse and the resulting struggle over antislavery petitions in Congress. Joining hands with the great religious revivals that were burning their way through the lives of men and women in a region spreading east and west from upper New York, a group of earnest souls had lighted the fires of moral indignation against the sin of slavery and were pouring a flood of petitions into Congress demanding various steps against the evil. The South thus found itself faced by danger on a new front. It was thrown on the defensive. The Constitution and its clear statements of rights also needed to be brought back into American consciousness.

 

     Already, in the tariff controversy, Robert J. Turnbull had argued that under chang­ing conditions it was the interest of the North and West to make the government "more national," while the interest of the South was to continue it "Federal." In op­posing Jackson's Force Bill, John C. Cal­houn had insisted that the real issue was

whether this was a federal union of states or a union of the American people in the aggregate. He made it perfectly clear that he thought it was the former, and that "To maintain the ascendancy of the constitu­tion over the law‑making majority" was the great and essential thing for the preserva­tion of the Union!' When the petition

struggle developed, he quickly picked up the charge that slavery was "sinful and odious, in the sight of God and man" and pronounced it "a general crusade against us and our institutions. " "The most un­questionable right may be rendered doubt­ful," he insisted, if slavery were "once ad­mitted to be a subject of controversy." The

subject was beyond the jurisdiction of Congress‑'they have no right to touch it in any shape or form," he said, "or to make it the subject of deliberation or discussion' " And then, ignoring his own words, he bluntly pronounced "the relation now ex­isting in the slave‑holding States" between the two races to be "a positive good ' " Even though opposition to the very popular right of petition might weaken friends in Congress and strengthen the abolitionists, the enemy must be met "on the frontier"; this was the southern "Thermopylae.""

 

Later, on December 27, 1837, he introduced a series of resolutions which carefully defined the character, purposes, and powers of the government under the Constitution. It had been adopted by the "free, independent and sovereign States" as security against all dangers, "domestic as well as foreign." The states retained the sole right over their domestic institutions, and any intermeddling with those institutions by other states or combinations of their citizens was unwarranted and "subversive of the objects for which the constitution was formed." And it was the duty of the government to resist all such meddling.

 

     Negro slavery, he declared, was an im­portant domestic institution in southern and western states and was such when the Constitution was formed. "No change of opinion or feeling, on the part of other

States of the Union in relation to it, can justify them or their citizens in open and systematic attacks thereon." To do so was a "breach of faith, and a violation of the most solemn obligations, moral and reli­

gious. " Furthermore, to attempt to abol­ish slavery in the District of Columbia, or in any of the territories, on grounds that it was immoral or sinful "would be a direct and dangerous attack on the institutions

of all the slaveholding States" ; and to re­fuse to increase the limits or population of these states by the annexation of new territory or states on the pretext that slav­ery was "immoral or sinful, or otherwise

obnoxious" would destroy the equal 44 rights and advantages which the Consti­tution was intended to secure.""...

 

In this same period industry entered a new phase in the northeastern corner of the nation, Hard times and bitter competition wrecked weaker concerns and left the field to the large, well‑financed corporations. Work was speeded up and wages remained low. Strikes became frequent. Gradually the native girls gave way before the Irish and French‑Canadians, and the factory and the factory town reached maturity. Industry sent its spokesmen into legislative halls, and the ardent complaint against local ills gave way steadily to the attack on southern slavery. A general acceptance of the new age of interdependent nationalism, already a business reality, marked the section. The questioning and criticism represented in Fruitlands, Brook Farm, and the Fourier associations gradually lost force. A new feeling of being in step with progress took its place. The development of a complex industrial order was a part of the nation's manifest destiny. Men, therefore, fell into line on domestic issues, but they did not yield their tough Puritan estimates of the ways of other Americans. Meanwhile the growth of internal commerce, now far more important than foreign trade, fostered the growing cities along the Atlantic coast, and the canal and the railroad, as the great new agents of transportation, more and more linked the interests of the Northwest to those of the commercialindustrial Northeast.

 

     By these quick and drastic develop­ments, the problems of lands, internal im­provements, tariffs, and expansion were thrust forward in aggravated forms. They took on the character of sectional strug­gles. They became part of the right and the effort to achieve a manifest destiny.

 

     Sooner or later every one of them became tangled with slavery and from it took new strength with which to wage their battles. Both Calhoun and the abolitionists con­nected slavery with the annexation of Texas. Benjamin Lundy declared the Texas revolution a scheme to wrest that territo­ry from Mexico in order to establish a slave market, and John Quincy Adams and twelve associates denounced annexation as a proslavery scheme. Calhoun gave substance to their charge by insisting on annexation as necessary for the protection

of southern slaveholders'  Others connect­ed it with the tariff and internal improve­ments. Joshua Giddings of Ohio in May, 1844, called attention to the balance and rivalry between North and South which produced a deadlock in legislation. "So equally balanced has been the political power," he said, "that for five years past

our lake commerce has been utterly aban­doned; and such are the defects of the tariff, that for years our revenues are un­ equal to the support of government" The annexation of Texas, secured "obviously to enhance the price of human flesh in our slave‑breeding states' " would now place "the policy and the destiny" of this nation in southern hands.

 

     "Are the liberty‑loving democrats of Pennsylvania ready to give up our tariff?" he asked. "Are the farmers of the West, of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, prepared to give up the sale of their beef, pork, and flour, in order to increase the profits of those who raise children for sale, and deal in the bodies of women? Are the free states

prepared to suspend their harbor and river improvements for the purpose of establish­ing their slave‑trade with Texas, and to per­petuate slavery therein?" "Our tariff ' " he added at a later time, "is as much an anti­ slavery measure as the rejection of Texas. So is the subject of internal improvements and the distribution of the proceeds of the public lands. The advocates of perpetual slavery oppose all of them, they regard

them as opposed to slavery.""

 

Giddings represented an extreme position, but the proposed tax on tea and coffee brought from more moderate western men the charge that it was "a sectional tax." It was "wrong, unequal, and unjust," because while all free western laborers used these articles, the three million slave laborers scarcely touched them at all. President James K. Polk was asking for a war tax on tea and coffee "to make southern conquests, while northern

territory [meaning Oregon] is given away by empires. ""

 

     Slavery was also blamed for Polks veto of a river and harbor bill intended largely to benefit shipping on the Great Lakes. "Is it not strange that enlightened men of the South cannot be persuaded that our lakes are something more than goose ponds?" asked the Chicago Democrat. "If we were blessed with the glorious institution of slav­ery this comprehension would not be so difficult. The Chicago Daily Journal was more blunt. It charged Southerners' op­position to western internal improvements to the fact that they were "slaveholders:'

but "not Americans." "If no measures for the protection and improvement of any­ thing North or West are to be suffered by our Southern masters," it said, "if we are to be downtrodden, and all our cherished interests crushed by them, a signal revo­lution will eventually ensue.""

 

By the close of the Mexican War, which brought proslavery charges to a climax, some men were frankly saying that the whole business had become a struggle for power. The extension or nonextension of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico was a matter of increasing or decreasing the strength of parties in Congress. Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina was convinced that "Political power, the power of the different sections of the Union, seeking the mastery, is undoubtedly a strong element in the proposed exclusion of slavery from our territory."" George Oscar Rathbun of New York was more explicit. He had figured out that by its three‑fifths representation of slaves the South gained some twenty‑three members in Congress. With this vote the section had "turned the scale upon every important question that had divided this country for the last forty years " The South had by this advantage elected presidents, filled the speakership, ruled the army and navy, and placed southern men in the office of Secretary of State during most of those years. Rathbun was, therefore, opposed to slavery in the territories because it gave "representation and political power." If the South would yield the three‑fifths rule, he was willing for Southerners to go into any territory and freely to take their slaves with them." Southerners made it just as clear that the exclusion of slavery from the territories meant the reduction of their section to the position of a permanent minority and the ultimate destruction of their institutions. They were contending for equality in the nation.

 

The Wilmot Proviso was unquestionably, in part, a move to check southern strength in Congress and to end the restraints placed on northern and western development. It was, however, considerably more than that. It was an assertion of the fact that North and West had now definitely caught step with the modern world and had reached the point where they knew both their minds and their strength. They knew that the future belonged to urban industrial and financial capitalism, to democracy, and to a more social Christianity. They understood that slavery, as an impediment to each of these things, had no place in a nation whose manifest destiny was to round out its boundaries on this continent and, perhaps, to right the social and political balances in the whole western world.

 

     That understanding gave a positiveness to northern opposition to the extension of slavery that knew no yielding. It easily took on the flavor of a moral crusade. Politicians and "sober, deliberate, and substantial

men ' " who had "the good of the country at heart," as Charles Hudson of Massa­chusetts described them, let it be known that slavery could not advance a foot far­

 

 

 

 

 

 

ther." Anyone who has read the debates in Congress on this issue knows that the question of whether slavery had reached its limits in the United States is a thoroughly academic one. And the answer has nothing to do with geography or profits. It could go no farther, for the simple reason that the North had made up its mind and had the strength to enforce its will.

 

And, regardless of how complex were the forces operating to produce this situation, the argument that carried the day was that slavery was a moral wrong and an impediment to progress. In the great debates on compromise which followed, Horace Mann and William H. Seward, not Daniel Webster, made the important northern statements. Mann insisted that to spread slavery was to "cast aside, with scorn, not only the teachings of Christianity, but the clearest principles of natural religion and of natural law." It was to sink back to the Dark Ages. To insist that men and women could rightly be called property was a trick for which any "Juggler or mountebank" would be hissed off the stage in any respectable village. "I deliberately say, better disunion, better a civil or servile war‑better anything that God in his providence shall send, than an extension of the boundaries of slavery!"' Seward declared that we could be neither Christians nor real freemen if we imposed on another the chains we defied all human power to fasten on ourselves. He insisted that the Constitution had created a consolidated political state, in which the states had "submitted themselves to the sway of the numerical majority." The same Constitution had devoted the territories to freedom. And what was just as important, slavery itself in the long run would have to give way "to the salutary instructions of economy, and to the ripening influences of humanity." It was only a question of whether it be done peacefully or by force. And to those who offered the Constitution as an impediment to the forward sweep of material and moral progress, he offered the "higher law.""

 

Some day the historian will understand that there is no break between Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience:' William Lloyd Garrison's burning of the Constitution, and Seward's higher law. He will also understand the obligation which northern men felt to bring profession and practice into harmony in a nation whose manifest destiny was to uphold Christianity and democracy throughout the western world.

 

The South, on its part, met the Wilmot Proviso with an uncompromising insistence on the right to an equal share in the territories won by the common blood of the nation. Calhoun, as usual, brought forward a series of resolutions, declaring the territories to be the property of "the several States composing this Union" and denying the right of Congress to discriminate between the states or to deny to their critizens the full and equal opportunity to migrate to the territories with their property. Others took up the cry of "indefeasible right," and through their statements rang the word "Constitution" like the repeated call of the whippoorwill. "We invoke the spirit of the Constitution, and claim its guarantees," said the resolutions of the Nashville Convention. "I, for one, am for tearing asunder every bond that binds us together:' said Alexander H. Stephens. 'Any people capable of defending themselves, who would continue their allegiance to a Government which should deny to them a clear, unquestionable, constitutional right of the magnitude and importance of this to the people of the South, would deserve to be stigmatized as poltroons."" Jefferson Davis summed up the