A Level History Component 1

A Level History Component 1
The Origins of the US Civil War,

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.

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 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 ( ) 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 United States paid Mexico $15 million. The Whig Intelligencer concluded, “We take nothing by conquest…. Thank God.”

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 re-enslave 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 had prohibited slavery in the territory. Thus, the South blocked the building of the transcontinental railroad.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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, up-and-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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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….”

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.”

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.”

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.

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’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 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 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 non-slaveholding 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.

Other factors certainly helped fuel the crisis. Over-estimation 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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-four-year-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!”

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 by-standers, 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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 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.

A Level History Component 1

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