The old republic and the sectional crisis

The Civil War was no simple contest between good and evil. It was, to be sure, a moral conflict--a conflict, as Eugene Genovese has long argued, between rival societies organized around rival social systems and dominated by rival social classes, each seeking to vindicate the ways of God to man. (1) The moral quarrels that rent North and South did as much as the political disagreements to unravel what John C. Calhoun identified as the "cords of Union." By 1860 Northerners and Southerners may have "found themselves separated by a common nationalism," but also, conceivably, by a shared political and moral philosophy. (2) Devoted to republican liberty, evangelical Protestantism, economic advancement, and social progress, Northerners and Southerners nonetheless convinced themselves that the other had forsaken the American heritage and threatened to dismantle all that the Founding Fathers had built. They assumed that their region, culture, and beliefs embodied the truth of the Republic. The Civil War was thus also a struggle over the meaning of history.

Change itself was the enemy that all Americans faced in the three or four decades before the war. Although the market revolution of the early nineteenth century forged a host of new economic opportunities, it also dissolved the social, political, and familial bonds that had traditionally defined American life. The allegiance to local communities and the embrace of state rights left many Americans, northern as well as southern, uneasy about, and suspicious of, the potential tyranny that the manufacturing, commercial, and financial interests could effect should they ever gain control of the national government. The economic growth, urban development, and geographic expansion of the United States that took place between 1800 and 1850 engendered not only a sense of fulfillment, abundance, and power, but also a sense of impermanence, uncertainty, and fear, which, in turn, induced a variety of responses to cope with the attendant upheaval and dislocation. By the early 1830s, the opposition to, or the defense of, slavery had become for many Americans the focus of an anxious debate about the future of the Republic.

Twenty years later, the existence of the ominous "Slave Power" provided the new Republican Party with the means to forge economic ambition and moral desire into an ideology that appealed to a majority of Northerners. Encapsulated in the slogan "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," the Republican program linked the quest for economic progress to the quest for moral order. (3) The Republicans sought both to profit from the market revolution and to temper the bewildering and destructive moral and social consequences that it produced. The synthesis of the western and eastern economies, which the market revolution had consummated, made the Republicans' dynamic economic agenda politically viable. During the 1850s, conservative western farmers and conservative eastern businessmen recognized the divers and intimate connections that linked the economies of East and West. (It was no accident, for instance, that railroads ran along east-west rather than north-south lines.) Easterners and Westerners joined the Republican party to further a legislative program that was mutually beneficial, including such measures as expanded federal subsidies for internal improvements, a high protective tariff, and a more generous land policy designed to ease the settlement of the western territories.

Southerners consistently objected to these measures. Discord over economic policy had become a familiar occurrence in the antebellum United States, and was intimately related to longstanding disagreements about political theory. The Constitution itself aroused friction, since it had granted to Congress the ability to impose taxes and to regulate trade. Averse to relinquishing control of their economic life, and thus entrusting their welfare, to a potentially antagonistic northern majority, Southerners had early voiced their misgivings about a consolidated national government. Alexander Hamilton's nationalist economic program confirmed their worst suspicions, prompting them to reassert the influence of the states and to guard against any encroachment upon their authority. After 1828, the tariff became the focus of contention, for, as the principal source of federal revenue, it promised to strengthen the national government at the expense of the states. Power followed money and, from the southern perspective, where there was money to spend there was evil to do.

The high rates mandated in the so-called Tariff of Abominations (1828) and repeated in the Tariff of 1832 drew southern criticism, first, because they raised prices on the manufactured goods that Southerners purchased, thereby increasing their costs of living and production, and, second, because they induced the governments of other nations to retaliate by levying duties on southern exports, thereby making them less attractive on the world market. Shielding northern manufactures from foreign, chiefly English, competition, the tariff exposed Southerner planters to multiple disadvantages whether they entered the market as buyers or as sellers. Federal support for internal improvements, federal aid to private corporations, and federal grants of public land, which diminished the income that land sales generated, all ensured that tariff rates would remain excessive. For more than thirty years, southern grievances met only with escalating northern impatience and acrimony.