A Level History Component 1
The Origins of the
US Civil War, 1846-1861
Examination
• Candidates will complete one document question.
• There will be two parts to each question.
– Part (a) Candidates will be expected to consider two
sources on one aspect of the material.
– Part (b) Candidates will be expected to use all the
sources and their knowledge of the period to address
how far the sources support a given statement.
• Candidates must answer both parts of the question.
• Sources will contain a maximum of 600 words and there
will be at least three sources on a specific issue. Evidence
will contain material from a range of documentary
sources.
Key Questions
• How and why did the outcomes of the war with Mexico
1846–48 add to sectional difficulties?
– The Missouri Compromise, 1820
– The Wilmot Proviso, 1846
– The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848
– The Compromise of 1850
The Missouri Compromise
• Missouri’s application for statehood in 1819 caused a
regional political conflict presented as a moral issue.
• If Missouri were admitted to the Union as a slave state,
the South would gain two Senate seats and congressional
appointments to the House based on the state’s white
population and 3/5ths of its black population.
• Representative James Tallmadge (Democrat-Republican,
NY) introduced a resolution to eliminate slavery in
Missouri, which would strengthen the North.
The Missouri Compromise
• Missouri would be admitted as a slave state; Maine
would be admitted as a free state; slavery would be
prohibited north of the 36°30’ parallel.
• “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the
ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only
extinguish.”—Representative Thomas W. Cobb
(Democrat-Republican, Georgia
• “A fire bell in the night awakened and filled me with
terror.”—Thomas Jefferson (former US President)
The Missouri Compromise
The Wilmot Proviso
• The ideology of Manifest Destiny rationalized US
expansion in North America from the Atlantic Ocean to
the Pacific Ocean. The ideology of Puritanism
demanded that Americans strive to be free from sin. The
ideology of racism demanded that US culture be white.
And regionalism depended on a balance of political
power between North and South.
The Wilmot Proviso
• Abolitionists opposed slavery on moral and economic
grounds: abolitionists believed slavery was sinful;
abolitionists feared economic competition from cheap
black labor, not wanting free whites to compete with
black slaves. Many abolitionists were racist and
supported sending blacks back to Africa. A deep-seated
prejudice against black people was fundamentally
American.
The Wilmot Proviso
• Many proponents of Manifest Destiny simply opposed
the presence of nonwhite people in the pure garden of
America: several northern states prohibited the entry of
free blacks in the 1850s. By excluding blacks from the
West, white America could fulfill its Manifest Destiny to
cover the continent with free institutions.
• “It is certainly the wish of every patriot…our union
should be homogenous in race and of our blood”—
Francis Preston Blair (Republican journalist).
The Wilmot Proviso
• In the 1830s, Southern churches redefined their attitude
toward slavery, shifting from support of a necessary evil
to a self-righteous vindication of a moral good, causing a
sectarian split in American churches.
• Slavery (as a regional institution and as a possibly sinful
institution) caused deep and unhealing wounds for
Americans convinced of the uniqueness of democratic
political institutions and of their special virtue.
The Wilmot Proviso
• The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) raised divisive
issues. Could the non-white Mexicans be incorporated
into the USA? Was the territory of Mexico to be
incorporated into the USA free or slave? Was slavery
sinful? How could the balance of power be maintained?
• “To incorporate Mexico would be the very first
instance…of incorporating an Indian race; for more than
half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is
composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such
a union as that! Ours, sir, is the government of a white
race”—Senator John C. Calhoun (Democrat, SC).
The Wilmot Proviso
• In 1846, Representative David Wilmot (Democrat, PA)
introduced a measure to prohibit slavery in any lands
obtained from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso was defeated
twice in the Senate, but it unleashed a bitter debate about
the status of slavery in the territories.
• Congressional leaders split angrily along sectarian lines
debating the Wilmot Proviso, creating a constitutional
deadlock that threatened the USA.
The Wilmot Proviso
• Slaveholders feared that Northerners were abolitionists;
Northerners feared that slaveholders conspired to
subvert republican principles and to extend aggressively
their slaveocracy into new territories. Radicals did
promote these policies, but most simply projected their
own worst intentions onto their enemies.
• Northerners saw the annexation of Texas, the war with
Mexico, and the designs on Cuba as Southern
expansionism; Southerners felt the North was attempting
to deny their constitutional rights of property and to
reduce the South to colonial status.
The Wilmot Proviso
• Southerners insisted on the full rights of citizenship: any
attack on the right to own slaves consigned Southerners
to inferior political status.
• Political compromise was tenuous and logically
unsatisfying, while moral compromise was impossible.
• “The prohibition [of slavery] carries with it a reproach to
the slaveholding states, and…submission to it would
degrade them”—President Martin Van Buren (Free Soil).
The Wilmot Proviso
• Senators blocked the Wilmot Proviso, seeking to
maintain the balance of power by keeping the Senate
divided equally into free and slave constituencies. If
slavery could not expand, the South would be forced into
permanent minority status.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
• After the American victory in the war with Mexico, there
were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico.
• The conquest of Mexico was an example of America’s
Manifest Destiny, but it also revealed a desire to keep the
United States racially white.
• The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February
1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the
Rio Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded.
• Non-white Mexicans in California, New Mexico, and
Texas were expected to make way for white settlers.
Many Mexicans became unwanted aliens in the land of
their birth.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
• The United States paid Mexico $15 million.
• The Whig Intelligencer concluded, “We take nothing by
conquest…. Thank God.”
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Compromise of 1850
• Moderate politicians, Senator Henry Clay (Whig, KY)
and Senator Stephen Douglas (Democrat, IL),
introduced a series of resolutions to allow California to
enter the Union as a free state, to maintain the
unresolved status of New Mexico and Utah, to abolish
the slave trade (but not slavery) in Washington, DC, and
to protect the rights of southern slave owners by
strengthening the fugitive slave law.
• In the Compromise of 1850, principled men agreed to
remain silent on abolitionism and slavery, reducing the
regional power conflict to a trading of interests on policy
matters.
The Compromise of 1850
Key Questions
• Why did the Compromise of 1850 break down so
quickly?
– Implementing the Fugitive Slave Act
– Implementing the Kansas-Nebraska Act
– Uncle Tom’s Cabin
– The formation of the Republican party
The Fugitive Slave Act
• The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was a concession
to the southern states in return for the admission of the
Mexican war territories (California, especially) into the
Union as nonslave states. The Act made it easy for
slaveowners to recapture ex-slaves or simply to pick up
blacks they claimed had run away. Northern blacks
organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act,
denouncing President Millard Fillmore (Whig), who
signed it, and Senator Daniel Webster (Whig, MA), who
signed it.
The Fugitive Slave Act
• J. W. Loguen, the son of a slave mother and her white
owner, escaped to freedom on his master’s horse, went to
college, and became a minister in Syracuse, New York (a
major station on the Underground Railroad). In 1850,
Loguen said, “The time has come to change the tones of
submission into tones of defiance—and to tell Mr.
Fillmore and Mr. Webster, if they propose to execute this
measure upon us, to send on their blood-hounds…. I
received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the
command to defend my title to it…. I don’t respect this
law—I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I
outlaw it….
The Fugitive Slave Act
• “I will not live as a slave, and if force is employed to reenslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis
as becomes a man…. Your decision tonight in favor of
resistance will give vent to the spirit of liberty, and it will
break the bands of party, and shout for joy all over the
North…. Heaven knows that this act of noble daring will
break out somewhere—and may God grant that Syracuse
be the honored spot, whence it shall send an earthquake
voice through the land!”
The Fugitive Slave Act
• In 1851, a runaway slave named Jerry was captured and
put on trial in Syracuse. A crowd used crowbars and a
battering ram to break into the courthouse, defying
marshals with drawn guns, and set Jerry free.
• Loguen helped 1,500 runaway slaves on their way to
Canada. His memoir of slavery came to the attention of
his former mistress, and she wrote to him, asking him
either to return of to send her $1,000 in compensation.
Loguen’s reply to her was printed in the abolitionist
newspaper, The Liberator:
The Fugitive Slave Act
• “Mrs. Sarah Logue…. You say you have offers to buy me,
and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and
in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you
say, “You know we raised you as we did our own
children.” Woman, did you raise your own children for
the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post?
Did you raise them to be drive off, bound to a coffle in
chains?... Shame on you! But you say I am a thief,
because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got
to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you
call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater
sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob
my mother’s cradle, and steal me?...
The Fugitive Slave Act
• “Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and
reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit
your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is
there a law for one man which is not a law for every other
man? If you or any other speculator on my body and
rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need
but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave
me…. Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen.”
• The national government, while weakly enforcing the law
ending the slave trade, sternly enforced the laws
providing for the return of fugitive slaves.
The Fugitive Slave Act
• Abraham Lincoln refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave
Law publicly. He wrote to a friend: “I confess I hate to
see the poor creatures hunted down…but I bite my lips
and keep quiet.” And when he did propose, in 1849, as a
Congressman, a resolution to abolish slavery in the
District of Columbia, he accompanied this with a section
requiring local authorities to arrest and return fugitive
slaves coming into Washington. (This led Wendell
Phillips, the Boston abolitionist, to refer to him years
later as “that slavehound from Illinois.”) He opposed
slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant
theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send
them back to Africa.
The Fugitive Slave Act
• Northern legislatures fanned the fires of regional discord
by enacting personal-liberty laws designed to impede the
fugitive slave provisions of the Compromise of 1850.
• Some Northerners openly defied the law by protecting
runaway slaves. These “traitors” who “waged war”
against the USA were prosecuted, but the open defiance
deepened the regional divide, moving the regions toward
separation.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• By 1850, northern industrialists desired to build a
transcontinental railroad from New York to California via
Chicago so that trade with China could be expanded.
• Before the transcontinental railroad could pass through
the unorganized territory of Nebraska, it would have to
be organized. But the South opposed the organization of
Nebraska because the Missouri Compromise of 1820
had prohibited slavery in the territory.
• Thus, the South blocked the building of the
transcontinental railroad.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat, Illinois)
proposed a compromise to gain Southern support for the
transcontinental railroad: the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
• Douglas proposed to repeal the Missouri Compromise,
opening the territory above the 36°30’ parallel to slavery
on the basis of popular sovereignty.
• Southerners, by settling in the newly organized territory,
could increase the number of slave states in the Union.
• Northern opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was
intense, but ultimately the bill passed in May 1854.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• Many in the North were outraged by the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise.
• The Whig Party collapsed, split on regional lines.
Southern Whigs joined the Democratic Party; Northern
Whigs formed the new Republican Party. Many
Northern Democrats joined the Republican Party.
• The Republican Party was a party of the North only. The
Democratic Party remained a national party until the
election of 1860, when, it too, split on regional lines into
the National (Northern) Democratic Party and the
Constitutional (Southern) Democratic Party.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• To pragmatists like Douglas, the principle of popular
sovereignty seemed eminently reasonable and thoroughly
democratic. But it ignored the moral imperatives of the
issue and so aroused passionate protests throughout the
North. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
declared Abraham Lincoln, in a typical northern
reaction, was doubly wrong—“wrong in its direct effect,
letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska—and wrong in
its prospective principles, allowing it to spread to every
other part of the world, where men can be found inclined
to take it.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet
Beecher Stowe in 1852 emphasized the emotional
distance between the regions.
• Stowe encouraged readers to morally confront politics.
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin opens on the Shelby plantation in
Kentucky as two enslaved people, Tom and 4-year old
Harry, are sold to pay Shelby family debts. Developing
two plot lines, the story focuses on Tom, a strong,
religious man living with his wife and 3 young children,
and Eliza, Harry’s mother.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• When the novel begins, Eliza’s husband George Harris,
unaware of Harry’s danger, has already escaped,
planning to later purchase his family’s freedom. To
protect her son, Eliza runs away, making a dramatic
escape over the frozen Ohio River with Harry in her
arms. Eventually the Harris family is reunited and
journeys north to Canada.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Tom protects his family by choosing not to run away so
the others may stay together. Sold south, he meets Topsy,
a young, black girl whose mischievous behavior hides her
pain; Eva, the angelic, young, white girl whose death
moved Victorians to tears; charming, elegant but passive
St. Clare; and finally, cruel, violent Simon Legree. Tom’s
deep faith gives him an inner strength that frustrates his
enemies as he moves toward his fate in Louisiana.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• The novel ends when both Tom and Eliza escape slavery:
Eliza and her family reach Canada; but Tom’s freedom
comes with death. Simon Legree, Tom’s third and final
master, has Tom whipped to death for refusing to deny
his faith or betray the hiding place of two fugitive
women.
The Republican Party
• Northern opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to
the formation of the Republican Party, founded by
former Whigs and joined by former Democrats.
• The Republican Party was the first regional political
organization.
• The central thrust of the Republican Party was
opposition to the spread of slavery, not the abolition of
slavery.
• Convinced that slaveowning interests were attempting to
pervert free institutions and destroy the national mission,
the Republicans determined to thwart the regional
conspiracy.
The Republican Party
• To the South and to loyal Democrats, however, the
Republicans seemed equally subversive.
• Identifying with the agrarian tradition, the South saw its
opponents as mad abolitionists, and agents of Yankee
materialism, urban corruption, and capitalist
exploitation.
• Once persuaded, once committed, neither side could
transcend the self-generating logic of conspiracy.
• After Senator Charles Sumner (Republican, MA) gave an
inflammatory speech on “the Crime against Kansas,”
Representative Preston Brooks (Democrat, SC) attacked
Sumner with his cane, leaving him an invalid.
Key Questions
• Why did the Republicans win the 1860 presidential
election?
– The Dred Scott judgment
– The Lincoln-Douglas debates
– John Brown and Harpers Ferry
– The election campaign of 1860
The Dred Scott Judgment
• Dred Scott, a slave, sued his master for his freedom,
claiming that he was not property but a person. In the
Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Supreme Court held
that blacks were property, not citizens of the United
States, and that Congress—and by implication the
territorial legislatures—lacked the constitutional
authority to exclude slavery from the territories. Not only
was popular sovereignty invalid, but so too had been the
Missouri Compromise. Northerners bristled; Southerners
exulted. In light of the Court’s ruling, a vote in Kansas
on the issue of slavery was unnecessary, yet a rigged vote
was held that favored slavery. President James Buchanan
(Democrat), however, blocked statehood for Kansas.
The Dred Scott Judgment
• Stephen Douglas (Democrat, Illinois) broke with the
Supreme Court and with the President. Douglas
defended popular sovereignty.
• Even though Douglas supported state rights on the issue
of slavery, his rejection of the Dred Scott Judgment (and
his rejection of the rigged Kansas election) cost him the
presidency in 1860.
• The Dred Scott Judgment split the Democratic Party into
a Northern wing that supported popular sovereignty and
a Southern wing that accepted the Court’s ruling,
allowing the Republican Party to carry the presidential
election of 1860.
The Dred Scott Judgment
• Dred Scott was the law of the Union until the Fourteenth
Amendment was adopted in 1868, declaring “all persons
born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens
and that “no state shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of
the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.”
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Abraham Lincoln combined perfectly the needs of
business, the political ambition of the new Republican
party, and the rhetoric of humanitarianism.
• Lincoln would never accept an end to slavery by
rebellion; Lincoln would end slavery only under
conditions controlled by whites, and only when required
by the political and economic needs of the business elite
of the North.
• Lincoln kept the abolition of slavery not at the top of his
list of priorities, but close enough to the top so it could
be pushed there temporarily by abolitionist pressures and
by practical political advantage.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Lincoln could skillfully blend the interests of the very
rich and the interests of the black at a moment in history
when these interests met. And Lincoln could link these
two with a growing section of Americans, the white, upand-coming, economically ambitious, politically active
middle class.
• Historian Richard Hofstadter: “Thoroughly middle class
in his ideas, he spoke for those millions of Americans
who had begun their lives as hired workers—as farm
hands, clerks, teachers, mechanics, flatboat men, and
rail-splitters—and had passed into the ranks of landed
farmers, prosperous grocers, lawyers, merchants,
physicians and politicians.”
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Lincoln could argue with lucidity and passion against
slavery on moral grounds, while acting cautiously in
practical politics.
• Lincoln believed “that the institution of slavery is
founded on injustice and bad policy, but that the
promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase
rather than abate its evils.”
• Lincoln read the Constitution strictly, to mean that
Congress, because of the Tenth Amendment (reserving
to the states powers not specifically given to the national
government), could not constitutionally bar slavery in the
states.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• In Lincoln’s 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate
against Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently
depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps
depending on how close it was to the election).
• Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago),
Lincoln said: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this
man and the other man, this race and that race and the
other race being inferior, and therefore they must be
placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these
things, and unite as one people throughout this land,
until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men
are created equal.”
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois,
Lincoln told his audience: “I will say, then, that I am not,
nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way
the social and political equality of the white and black
races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of
making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying
them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white
people…. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while
they do remain together there must be the position of
superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am
in favor of having the superior position assigned to the
white race.”
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• In the debates, Douglas defended popular sovereignty.
• Therefore, Douglas opposed the Dred Scott Judgment
(his position became known as the Freeport Doctrine).
• Douglas also opposed the proslavery Lecompton
Constitution of Kansas that was approved in a rigged
election.
• Standing on principle, Douglas appeared no better than a
Republican to Southerners.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• After the debates, Lincoln won 50.6% of the popular vote,
but the Illinois legislature, voting along party lines 54-46,
returned Douglas to the Senate.
• Even though Lincoln lost the 1858 Illinois Senate race,
his debates with Douglas increased his national
reputation, allowing him to run successfully for the
presidency of the Union in 1860.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• John Brown, an outsider, a white man of ferocious
courage and determination, concocted a wild scheme to
seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and
then set off a revolt of slaves through the South, igniting
a revolution.
• Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass met with John
Brown to plan the raid. Sickness prevented Tubman from
participating. Douglass argued against the raid from the
standpoint of its chances of success, but he admired the
ailing man of sixty, tall, gaunt, white-haired.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• Douglass was right; the plan would not work. The local
militia, joined by a hundred marines under the command
of Robert E. Lee, surrounded the insurgents. Although
his men were dead or captured, John Brown refused to
surrender: he barricaded himself in a small brick
building near the gate of the armory. The troops
battered down a door; a marine lieutenant moved in and
struck Brown with his sword. Wounded, sick, he was
interrogated.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• Historian W. E. B. DuBois: “Picture the situation: An old
and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds
inflicted but a few hours before; a man lying in the cold
and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking
hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead
bodies of his two sons almost before his eyes, the piled
corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife
and a bereaved family listening in vain, and a Lost
Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his
heart….”
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• Brown told the governor of Virginia: “You had better—
all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a
settlement of this question…. You may dispose of me
very easily—I am nearly disposed now, but this question
is still to be settled,—this Negro question, I mean; the
end of that is not yet.”
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• W. E. B. DuBois: “If his [Brown’s] foray was the work of
a handful of lunatics, led by a lunatic and repudiated by
the slaves to a man, then the proper procedure would
have been to ignore the incident, quietly punish the
worst offenders and either pardon the misguided leader
or send him to an asylum…. While insisting that the raid
was too hopelessly and ridiculously small to accomplish
anything…the state nevertheless spent $250,000 to
punish the invaders, stationed from one to three
thousand soldiers in the vicinity and threw the nation
into turmoil.”
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• In John Brown’s last written statement, in prison, before
he was hanged, he said: “I, John Brown, am quite certain
that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged
away but with blood.”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of
the execution of John Brown: “He will make the gallows
holy as the cross.”
• Of the twenty-two men in John Brown’s striking force,
five were black. Two of these were killed on the spot, one
escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities,
including John Copeland.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• Before his execution, Copeland wrote to his parents:
“Remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a
few of my poor and oppressed people from my condition
of servitude which God in his Holy Writ has hurled his
most bitter denunciations against…. I am not terrified by
the gallows…. I imagine that I hear you, and all of you,
mother, father, sisters, and brothers, say—‘No, there is
not a cause for which we, with less sorrow, could see you
die.’ Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in
prison and under sentence of death, I have spent more
happy hours here, and…I would almost as lief die now
as at any time, for I feel that I am prepared to meet my
Maker….”
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
• John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 sent
chilling fears across the South, raising terrible visions of
northern plots and domestic slave revolt.
• In December 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal
complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence
what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence several
years later—end slavery.
• Planter Henry William Ravenel (31 December 1859):
“Should the North fail to give some substantial
guarantees of security for Southern institutions and
constitutional rights a revolution is inevitable.”
The Election Campaign of 1860
• Amid extreme tension and fear, the Democrats convened
in Charlestown, South Carolina—the hub of southern
radicalism—and could not agree on a presidential
candidate.
• Northern Democrats clung tenaciously to popular
sovereignty; Southern delegates bolted the meeting,
allowing a rump group to reconvene in Baltimore to
nominate Stephen A. Douglas and popular sovereignty.
• The Southern Democrats proposed John C. Breckinridge
of Kentucky and drafted a platform based on
congressional protection of slavery in the territories.
The Election Campaign of 1860
• A small fragment of Southern Whigs, still uneasy about a
regional alliance, supported the candidacy of John Bell
and urged a return to national unity.
• The Republicans, hoping to draw support from the
Midwest, nominated the little-known Abraham Lincoln
from Illinois.
Key Questions
• Why did the Civil War begin in April 1861?
– The results of the 1860 presidential election
– The secession of the southern states
– The leadership of Abraham Lincoln
– The leadership of Jefferson Davis
The Election Results of 1860
• In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln captured the
presidency on a strictly regional vote.
• Stephen A. Douglas carried only Missouri and part of the
New Jersey ballot.
• John Bell won three border states.
• John C. Breckinridge swept the remainder of the South.
• Lincoln’s election as a regional president symbolized the
South’s alienation from the national government and its
impotence before the will of the northern majority.
• Lincoln’s meancing election alarmed and united the
South.
The Election Results of 1860
• The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 resulted in the
dissolution of the Union, but the dispute was not over
slavery as a moral institution.
• Most Northerners did not care enough about slavery to
make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war.
• The dispute was not a clash of peoples: most Northern
whites were not economically favored, not politically
powerful; most Southern whites were poor farmers, not
decision-makers.
• The dispute was a clash of elites.
The Election Results of 1860
• The Northern elite wanted economic expansion—free
land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for
manufacturers, a bank of the United States.
• The Southern elite opposed economic expansion.
• The slave interests of the South saw Lincoln and the
Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant
and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.
• Southern secession from the Union became necessary.
Secession of the Southern States
• More than the abolitionists, more than Lincoln himself,
slaveholders feared the South’s slaves and nonslaveholding whites. Control of neither group had ever
been easy. By the late 1850s, it was getting harder. A
Lincoln presidency would make control even more
difficult, even if Lincoln himself was no direct threat. If
the slave states remained in the Union, most slaveholders
feared that their “peculiar institution” might collapse as
much from internal as external pressures. Outside the
Union, controlling the lower classes might be easier and
slavery might be safer.
Secession of the Southern States
• Other factors certainly helped fuel the crisis. Overestimation of abolitionist strength in the North, the issue
of slavery’s expansion, and personal political ambitions
all played their part. But slaveholders’ fear of their fellow
southerners was a primary, though publicly
unacknowledged, force driving secession.
• Even so, slaveholders were not entirely united behind the
movement. Secession found its most enthusiastic support
among the more numerous “new money” planters and
lesser slaveholders. Their spokesmen tended to be young
up-and-coming lawyer-politicians trying to carve out a
niche for themselves at the expense of the older
establishment.
Secession of the Southern States
• On the other side, wealthier and more conservative “old
money” planters tended to view secession as much more
risky than remaining in the Union. Some viewed
themselves as having a greater stake in preserving the
status quo. Others felt that even if slavery within the
Union was in danger, they had enough capital and
investments—much of it with the North—to ride out
slavery’s demise. Whatever their situation, more wealthy
planters were generally more cautious than lesser
slaveholders.
Secession of the Southern States
• Should withdrawal from the Union lead to civil war,
business dealings with the North would certainly be
disrupted. Furthermore, success for a southern
confederacy would depend on widespread support from
non-slaveholding whites. Many planters wondered how
long that support could last. Secession might actually
hasten the end of slavery rather than preserve it.
• That danger seemed clear enough to Texas governor
Sam Houston. “The first gun fired in the war,” he
warned, “will be the knell of slavery.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Georgians Alexander Stephens and Benjamin Hill, future
Confederate vice president and Confederate senator,
respectively, agreed with Houston. Stephens stressed
that as dependent as a southern government would be on
plain folk, slaveholders could lose their grip on the
course of events: “The movement will before it ends I
fear be beyond the control of those who started it.” Hill
was certain that a South divided by class could not
survive a civil war. The southern government would fall
and slavery with it.
Secession of the Southern States
• Many of Hill’s colleagues had similar fears. Shortly after
Lincoln’s election, in what one contemporary called “a
large meeting of the Members of the General Assembly”
at the Georgia capitol, legislators called for thoughtful
restraint. They appointed a committee of twenty-two,
including Hill, to draft a resolution urging Georgia voters
not to support secessionists in the upcoming election for
convention delegates. Immediate secession would, they
insisted, lead to “nothing but divisions among our
people, confusion among the slaveholding States, strife
around our firesides, and ultimate defeat to every
movement for the effective redress of our grievances.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Such divisions set the stage for intense controversy at
state secession conventions, at least in those states where
secessionists had a strong voice. Though most slave state
governments held elections for delegates to secession
conventions, southern popular opinion ran so strongly
against breaking up the Union that the upper South and
border states, constituting over half the slave states,
dismissed it out of hand. Only in the Deep South was
secession an immediate threat. Even there voters were
deeply divided.
Secession of the Southern States
• So worried were secessionist leaders over the possibility
of secession being voted down that they used
intimidation and violence in their efforts to control the
ballot box wherever they could. Samuel Beaty, a farmer
in Mississippi’s Tippah County who was physically
threatened because of his Union sentiments, dared not
go to the polls. “It would,” he said, “have been too
dangerous.” Secessionists threatened to hang James
Cloud, a crippled farmer in Jackson County, Alabama,
after he spoke up for the Union.
Secession of the Southern States
• There were many who resisted such anti-democratic
pressure despite the dangers. In some cases, there was a
resistance of only one. In south Alabama, sixty-fouryear-old Middleton Martin came “pretty near getting into
two or three cutting scrapes” as he pleaded with his
neighbors to support the Union. “I said to the men
‘Don’t for God’s sake vote that secession ticket.’” When
one local secessionist told Martin to shut up or be run
out of town, the old man gave better than he got. “Do
you see this knife?” Martin asked the man who had
threatened him. “If you don’t get away from here right
away I’ll cut your guts out!”
Secession of the Southern States
• Many Union men showed the same kind of grit on
election day. At one Mississippi polling place, a lone
Methodist preacher summoned up the courage to defy
local secessionists. “Approaching the poll s, I asked for a
Union ticket, and was informed that none had been
printed, and that it would be advisable to vote the
secession ticket. I thought otherwise, and going to a
desk, wrote out a Union ticket, and voted it amidst the
frowns and suppressed murmurs of the judges and bystanders, and, as the result proved, I had the honour of
depositing the only vote in favour of the Union which
was polled in that precinct.”
Secession of the Southern States
• The preacher knew of many local men who opposed
secession but were so frightened by threats to their lives
that they stayed away from the polls.
• Due in large part to threat tactics, turnout in the popular
vote for state convention delegates across the Deep South
dropped by more than a third from the previous
November’s presidential election. Still, those opposing
immediate secession gave a strong showing. They ran
almost neck-and-neck with the secessionists in Alabama
and Louisiana. Georgia’s anti-secessionists polled a
likely majority of over a thousand. In Texas, two-thirds
of voters opposed secession.
Secession of the Southern States
• Throughout the Deep South, official returns gave
secession’s opponents about 40 percent of the popular
vote. However, fraud at the ballot box was so widespread
that the returns cannot be trusted as a gauge of popular
opinion. Most likely, anti-secession sentiment was much
stronger than the final vote suggests.
• In any case, the balloting for state convention delegates
makes clear that the South was badly divided. It also
suggests that those divisions were largely class related.
North Carolina’s vote declining even to hold a
convention showed the state’s electorate more clearly
divided along class lines than ever before.
Secession of the Southern States
• In Louisiana, non-slaveholding voters left little doubt
that they saw the whole secession movement as an effort
simply to maintain “the peculiar rights of a privileged
class.” All seventeen counties in northern Alabama,
where relatively few voters held slaves, sent delegates to
the state convention with instructions to oppose
secession. And in Texas, where 81 percent of
slaveholders voted for secessionist delegates, only 32
percent of non-slaveholders did so. Slaveholders across
the South, who constituted barely a fourth of the
electorate, consistently demonstrated much greater
support for secession than did their non-slaveholding
neighbors.
Secession of the Southern States
• Nevertheless, slaveholders commanded the dominant
voice at all the cotton state conventions. In Georgia, for
example, while just over a third of qualified voters held
slaves, 87 percent of the convention delegates were
slaveholders. Similar statistics at all the conventions
virtually guaranteed secession regardless of the popular
will. Beginning with South Carolina in December 1860,
secessionists took, in order, Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana out of the Union.
Texas finally went on February 1, 1861. Three days later,
representatives from the seceded states met in
Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States
of America with Jefferson Davis its appointed president.
Secession of the Southern States
• While many southerners welcomed the Confederacy’s
birth with wild enthusiastic celebrations, many others
did not. Said one Georgia man of the merrymakers:
“Poor fools! They may ring their bells now, but they will
wring their hands—yes, and their hearts, too—before
they are done with it.” William Brownlow—a Tennessee
preacher, newspaper editor, and leading unionist—called
the secession ordinances “covenants with death and
agreements with hell! They are so many decrees to carry
out the behests of madmen and traitors.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Some southerners continued to question the
Confederacy’s legitimacy and charged outright fraud.
One furious Georgia voter accused Singleton Sisk, a
Missionary Baptist preacher, of cheating Habersham
County out of its anti-secession vote. In an open letter to
the Athens Southern Watchman, he told how this
“[J]anus-faced expounder of the Gospel” had declared
himself a Union man to gain the nomination of
Habersham’s anti-secessionists. With their backing, he
was elected to the state convention. “After the election,
we find that he had privately promised the Secessionists
that he would, in the Convention, support Secession.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Sisk indeed betrayed his constituents and backed
secession at the convention. Similar betrayals occurred
among the representatives of at least twenty-eight other
Georgia counties.
• So it was across the Deep South. John Powell, a
Mississippi slaveholder, ran as the anti-secession
candidate in Jones County. When the state convention
met on January 9, Powell deserted hi s constituents and
voted to make Mississippi the second state to leave the
Union. Such fraud was common in Florida and Alabama
too.
Secession of the Southern States
• As one Florida resident complained: “The election
machinery was all in the hands of the secessionists, who
manipulated the election to suit their end.” Jasper
Harper, a disgusted voter from Marshall County,
Alabama, complained bitterly: “I voted for those
[delegates] who said the guns would have to be placed to
their breast and the trigger pulled before they would vote
for Alabama to go out of the Union, but they did not
stick to what they said.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Officials in Louisiana delayed releasing their
questionable election returns for three months. So did
Governor Joe Brown of Georgia, who did so only at the
insistence of concerned voters. Even then, he lied about
the results. Brown falsely claimed that secessionist
delegates had carried the state by over thirteen thousand
votes. In fact, existing records from the time suggest that
secession was defeated by just over a thousand votes.
Secession of the Southern States
• When Texas governor Sam Houston, in accordance with
his state’s two-thirds vote against secession, refused to
call a convention, an unofficial cabal of secessionists in
Austin organized one for themselves. Houston was able
to get the convention’s secession ordinance submitted to
the voters for ratification in what was a “free election” in
name only. But in the other six seceding states,
ratification was never placed in the hands of voters. One
Louisiana delegate told his colleagues that in “refusing
to submit its action to [the voters] for their sanction...
this Convention violates the great fundamental principle
of American government, that the will of the people is
supreme.”
Secession of the Southern States
• In March, the New Orleans Picayune stated plainly that
secessionist leaders across the South were giving “new
and startling evidence of their distrust of the people, and
thus furnished strong testimony... that the South was
divided, and that the movement in which we are now
engaged has not the sanction of the great body of the
people.”
Secession of the Southern States
• In his seminal study of the secession crisis, David Potter
looked at the popular vote for state secession conventions
throughout the South and concluded: “At no time during
the winter of 1860–1861 was secession desired by a
majority of the people of the slave states.... Furthermore,
secession was not basically desired even by a majority in
the lower South, and the secessionists succeeded less
because of the intrinsic popularity of their program than
because of the extreme skill with which they utilized an
emergency psychology, the promptness with which they
invoked unilateral action by individual states, and the
firmness with which they refused to submit the question
of secession to popular referenda.”
Secession of the Southern States
• Throughout the secession crisis, southerners had
worried about what the results of secession might be.
Some feared that the federal government might try to
hold the cotton states in the Union by force. The
Vicksburg Whig warned its readers that not only was it
“treason to secede,” but that such a move would bring
“strife, discord, bloodshed, war, if not anarchy.” It was a
“blind and suicidal course.” In an open letter, one
southwest Georgia man was so sure civil war would come
that he referred to secessionists as “the suicides.” Others
were just as certain that they were nothing of the sort.
Secession of the Southern States
• Georgia’s Albany Patriot assured its readers that the
Yankees would never dare make war on the South. “In all
honesty we can say to our readers, be not afraid. We will
insure the life of every southern man from being killed in
war by the abolitionists for a postage stamp.” The editor
of Upson County’s Pilot was not sure what the outcome
of secession might be, but he was glad his county had
voted against it: “If the demon of civil war is to ravage
our fields only to fertilize them with blood—we know our
Upson Delegates will be able, at the last dread account,
to stand up with clean hands and pure hearts and
exclaim through no chattering teeth from coward
consciences:—‘Thou canst not say we did it!’”
The Leadership of Lincoln
• Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, in March
1861, was conciliatory toward the South and the seceded
states: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the States
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so,
and I have no inclination to do so.” He proposed,
moreover, to enforce the fugitive slave law with the same
dedication that he would suppress the foreign slave
trade. But Lincoln remained adamant in opposing the
extension of slavery, and on that single issue, symbolic
as it was, the Union would founder.
The Leadership of Lincoln
• By the time Lincoln presented his inaugural speech,
most of the property belonging to the national
government had been seized by the Confederate states.
Despite his assurances that “there will be no invasion, no
using of force against or among the people anywhere,”
however, the President specifically announced his
intention “to hold, occupy, and possess” federal property.
The Leadership of Lincoln
• One of these enclaves was Fort Sumter, guarding the
harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Told that the
garrison needed supplies and reinforcements, Lincoln
hesitated to act lest he alienate pro-Union support in the
South. But to surrender the fort would be equally
damaging to the authority of the government. The
President chose a middle alternative—he would send
only supplies to the besieged soldiers and he would
announce his decision in public.
The Leadership of Lincoln
• Lincoln initiated hostilities by trying to repossess the
federal base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four
more states seceded. The Confederacy was formed; the
Civil War was on.
• When General John C. Fremont in Missouri declared
martial law and said slaves of owners resisting the
United States were to be free in July 1861, Lincoln
countermanded this order. He was anxious to hold in the
Union the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
and Delaware.
The Leadership of Lincoln
• It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties
mounted, desperation to win heightened, and the
criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the
tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he began to act
against slavery. Historian Richard Hofstadter put it this
way: “Like a delicate barometer, he recorded the trend of
pressures, and as the Radical pressure increased he
moved toward the left.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips said
that if Lincoln was able to grow “it is because we have
watered him.”
The Leadership of Davis
• Besides arguing the constitutionality of secession, the
southern states attempted to create a new confederation
based on what they considered the original principles of
the Founding Fathers. Though some extremists like
William Yancey of Alabama and Robert Barnwell Rhett
of South Carolina asserted the uniqueness of southern
culture and urged their colleagues to repudiate the old
republic, the leadership of secession remained with the
legally elected governors, usually moderate politicians
who sought to restore the original institutions and values
of government.
The Leadership of Davis
• When the seven seceding states met in Montgomery,
Alabama, in February 1861 to form the Confederate
States of America, the delegates represented moderate
interests and carefully chose two moderate politicians,
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Alexander Stephens
of Georgia, as executive officers. The fire-eaters
significantly were frozen out of the government.
The Leadership of Davis
• The Constitution of the southern Confederacy revealed
the conservative principles of its founders. Modeled after
the Constitution of 1789, the document established
similar branches of government, guaranteed the
perpetuation of republican institutions, and protected
the civil rights of its citizens. Noticeably different,
however, was its defense of states’ rights—the “sovereign
and independent character” of each state. In a few
particulars, the Constitution also attempted to alleviate
long-standing grievances. Thus the Confederate
Congress was prohibited from levying tariffs “to promote
or foster any branch of industry.”
The Leadership of Davis
• Similarly, in acknowledging the possibility of future
territorial expansion, the Constitution guaranteed the
preservation of slavery. Yet the delegates to the
Montgomery convention, perhaps with an eye to British
support, indicated their commitment to traditional values
by denying the legality of the international slave trade.
Such moderation placed the Southern Confederacy safely
within the mainstream of American history.
The Leadership of Davis
• The burden to respond to Abraham Lincoln fell on
Jefferson Davis. Outmaneuvered by Lincoln, he chose to
attack Fort Sumter, the vestige of federal authority. On 12
April 1861, the shore batteries opened fire on Fort
Sumter, sounding the first shot of the war. Three days
later, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers
to end the rebellion in South Carolina. Two days
thereafter, the state of Virginia, watching nervously,
voted for secession and renounced the Union. So too did
Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Civil War
had begun.