With Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, author and former editor of The American Conservative Robert
W. Merry picks up where he left off in his popular biography of James
K. Polk to chronicle the deleterious path of the United States from the
contentious 1849 House speakership race to the firing on Fort Sumter on
April 12, 1861.
In
his acknowledgements, Merry shares that the book’s provenance was a
quote from British popular historian Paul Johnson, who wrote in 1997,
“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
In
nearly 440 pages, Merry expands and clarifies Johnson’s dictum,
presenting Massachusetts and South Carolina, their internal debates, and
their respective radicalisms’ influence on the national stage as a
narrative lens for understanding the growing sectional hatreds of the
1850s and their bloody result.
That
begins with the states’ colonial origins, with Merry wisely giving
credit to David Hackett Fischer’s thesis that much of the regional
diversity of culture in the United States originates with the people who
settled these areas from the contrasting parts of Britain.
“Of
all the New World colonies established in the seventeenth century, no
two were as disparate in outlook, religion, moral precepts, or cultural
sensibility as Massachusetts and South Carolina,” Merry writes.
“Puritanism was fervent, moralistic, universalist, exhortatory; so was
the secular humanitarianism of eighteenth-century Massachusetts.” The
Christianity of South Carolina lacked that ardent piety, instead
promoting a religious pluralism that coincided with a cavalier attitude
towards wealth.
Fast-forward
to the beginning of the 1850s, and slavery had been extinguished in the
north and replaced by growing industry, whereas the practice had become
integral to both the south’s economy and its stratified social order.
The introduction of more than 500,000 square miles acquired from the
Mexican–American War—territory where slavery had been illegal—ruptured
the party system, as both sections hotly contested which would be
allowed to grow and which would be stunted.
This
great debate coincided with a generational changing of the guard. The
three men who for over thirty years had personified their regions, Henry
Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster
of Massachusetts were not long for this world.
These
were leaders who could command—or at least find consensus among—their
constituents. When no singular men could fill any of their respective
shoes, what instead filled the political vacuum in their home states
were disputes and power struggles.
The
Massachusetts breed of “Cotton Whigs,” as they were derisively called,
had opposed slavery but prioritized economic policies like Clay’s
American System and maintained cordial relations with the south. They
would be supplanted by the younger “Conscience Whigs,” who were more
forthright and vocal in their opposition to the south’s slave system and
its appetites. And on the furthest edge were the abolitionists, who
demanded immediate emancipation and equal rights for blacks, and who
often scorned participation in politics.
In
South Carolina, Fire-Eaters were the most hardcore southern
nationalists. Their rancorous demeanor often put the cart before the
horse, advocating immediate secession whether circumstance or public
support could justify it or not. “Let it be that I am a traitor,” Robert
Barnwell Rhett proudly proclaimed before accepting a Senate seat in
December 1850. (He resigned after 17 months when it was clear his
constituency would not follow him into the “dark and dangerous unknown”
just yet.)
On
the other hand, cooperationists, while not precluding the legal right
of secession as a last resort, argued that it was better to fight for
their cause within the union rather than try and go it alone. The
remainder of the 1850s would be a game of musical chairs in South
Carolina with a small coterie exchanging and vying for power and
influence based on whether the secessionist tune was playing.
The
heart of the debate was whether or not slavery would be permitted in
the western territories, but more broadly it was about whether slavery
would be morally countenanced by the north as demanded by the south. It
was not enough that the south wanted its “peculiar institution” legally
protected; it wanted it socially respected. The south would not allow
itself to be shamed for its character by “agitators and intermeddlers,”
to quote Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, the leader of the South Carolina
cooperationists.
“Some
people desperately seized upon the notion that if the North would just
stop its antislavery agitations and the South would cease threatening to
leave the Union, some kind of mutual accommodation might be possible,”
writes Merry.
It
can be overwhelming for a newcomer to understand the nuances of the
Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act and how each shifted the parameters of the debate,
but Merry’s account is straightforward. His work is much more focused on
the goings on of the U.S. Senate than the House. A Senate debate and
the chamber’s machinations may be examined for several pages, while a
House vote is usually summarized in as little as a paragraph.
Outside
of Washington, the reader is always brought back to the “homefront,”
whether that’s Faneuil Hall in Boston or the South Carolina low-country
to understand how folks at home were reacting to national events and
instructing their elected officials. This concentration precludes other
areas like the Midwest, and prominent Republicans like Salmon Chase and
Joshua Giddings are only mentioned in passing.
Merry’s
writing style is wordy but never dense, and a novice on the antebellum
era could enjoy his work without having to chew too hard on the
material. The standouts are his terrific and often hilarious sketches of
the major players, giving life and familiarity to men born two
centuries ago.
I
know of no other book where you can read Senator Stephen Douglas
described as “built like a block of wood, with a smaller block of wood
atop serving as his head. But inside that head was a remarkable mind
directing an iron will.” Decade of Disunion is made richer by this humanization.
If
there is a main character, it is Charles Sumner, who ascended to the
U.S. Senate in 1852, the same seat that had been occupied by Webster two
years prior. Along with his colleague Henry Wilson, they “represented a
dawning new era for their state, a shift in the balance of power toward
a new level of antislavery vigor and aggressive agitations against the
slave power.”
Sumner’s
background, personality, growth in office, and speeches receive
significant space, including his dynamic with Pickens Butler. The two
“who personified the slavery chasm between their states and within the
nation” formed a good-natured and mutually helpful friendship on Capitol
Hill.
That
couldn’t and didn’t last. “The tensions roiling the two senators’
relationship went deeper than the slavery issue, as fundamental and
emotional as it was. They stretched back into the divergent cultural
attitudes, mores, and folkways of the two states they represented—the
austere Calvinism of the old Massachusetts Puritans vs. the Cavalier
sensibilities of the early Carolina swashbucklers,” writes Merry.
In
one of his most notable speeches, Sumner cut into Butler, “once his
unlikely friend, then his friendly adversary, then his nettlesome foe,
and now his political enemy.” In retaliation, and to appease southern
“honor,” Butler’s cousin and a member of the U.S. House, Preston Brooks,
entered the Senate floor and with his cane beat an unarmed Sumner until
he was bloodied and debilitated.
The
caning of Sumner, which coincided with an outburst of violence in
Kansas (the subject of Sumner’s speech), forms the fulcrum of Merry’s
narrative and in many ways the pivot point of the decade. What had up to
that point been boisterous arguments and unsatisfactory compromise
turned into bloodshed.
“The
gathering Kansas disruption was becoming a touchstone issue for more
and more Americans. The political passions unleashed in the territory
were seeping increasingly into the American consciousness, and it was
becoming clearer by the day that the issue could not be avoided,” Merry
writes. “Everyone eventually would have to choose sides—and, having
chosen, would have to muster a rationale of justification. Thus was
Kansas pushing increasing numbers of Americans to one side or the other
of a widening national divide.”
When
Stephen Douglas had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he hoped that
not only would it pave the way for a transatlantic railroad along his
preferred route, but that it would permanently end the slavery debate by
removing it from the hands of Congress. In theory, through popular
sovereignty, residents would democratically choose their own future. But
in reality, a free-for-all brawl brought chaos to the frontier.
Bands
of “Border Ruffians” from neighboring Missouri, sometimes financed and
led by prominent political leaders, regularly rode wild into Kansas,
harassing free staters and committing voter fraud. “Of 2,871 votes cast,
only 1,114 were legal. One polling place recorded 604 voters, only
twenty of them legal,” Merry writes of a congressional delegate
election.
“Kansas
has been invaded, conquered, subjugated by an armed force from beyond
her borders,” wrote one of her territorial governors. Aid societies
across the north responded by raising money to send rifles to Kansas
(along with real settlers); but the most well-known and homicidal
retribution came at the hands of John Brown, whom Merry does not handle
with kid gloves.
In
1857, the Supreme Court stepped in with an infamous opinion whose
“bludgeon words… were breathtaking in their sweep, dogmatism, defiance,
and, for many, perversity.” Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott decision
promulgated that blacks could not be recognized as American citizens
and conferred “on southern slaveholders a constitutional right, superior
to congressional prerogative or voter sentiment, to carry slaves into
territorial lands prior to any statehood application. This meant, in
practical terms…that all territories were essentially slave territories
prior to statehood.”
This
judicial capitulation to what was labeled the Slave Power met near
universal opposition above the Mason–Dixon. When it had been founded in
1854, the Republican Party cast a wide net of supporters across the
north, who all congregated around a singular principle: no expansion of
slavery into new territories.
Their
motivation had little to do with racial tenderness. “They didn’t want
slavery because they didn’t want blacks and they didn’t want to compete
with slave labor,” Merry explains.
“So
strong was the coalescence that the party platform, just nine
resolutions that could be read in less than ten minutes, was approved in
a voice vote,” writes Merry about the 1856 Republican National
Convention. Dred Scott was not going to alter that conviction.
More
words have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other president.
But even readers well versed in his biography will still find Merry’s
chapter on Lincoln’s down-and-up political career refreshing, and the
author’s analysis of the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates not at all weighed
down.
If
there is a disappointing chapter, it’s the coverage of the 1860
election following the nominating conventions. Merry gives short shrift
to the fall campaign, and Lincoln’s electoral college victory can come
across as a fait accompli. The Republican strategy to campaign
against the Buchanan administration’s epidemic corruption instead of
spotlighting the slavery issue goes unmentioned.
“The
vote totals in Massachusetts and South Carolina reflected the chasm
separating those two states stretching back to the early decades of the
English colonial experience,” Merry writes. While Massachusetts
Republicans came within range of capturing two-thirds of the popular
vote, the South Carolina legislature, in its aristocratic tradition,
bypassed a vote by the citizenry and instructed its electors to vote for
Vice President John C. Breckinridge, who swept the Deep South.
Despite
the book’s central focus on the influential radicalism of the Palmetto
and Bay States, it’s clear from the text that Merry is more sympathetic
to the “Irrepressible Conflict” School of historiography. This
interpretation, whose name comes from an 1858 address by William Seward,
interprets the Civil War as unavoidable due to the irreconcilable
differences of political economy, culture, and morality between the
north and south.
In
contrast, proponents of the “Blundering Generation” School argue that
shortsighted politicians and inept national leadership allowed
intemperate radicals on both sides to dictate policy and drive an
unnecessary sectional wedge, and that better compromises and cooler
heads could have prevented secession and the war.
Merry
believes that the failure of negotiations like the Crittenden plan
after Lincoln’s election “reflected an underlying reality: the time for
compromise had passed. The South’s demand for a territorial slave code
couldn’t be meshed with the Republicans’ ironclad opposition to slavery
extension.”
Successive
generations have struggled with what even many contemporaries
recognized: how could so many millions be so impassioned and unyielding,
so inescapably willing to kill and die for what amounted, in 1860, to
an abstraction?