The Confederate States of America existed for forty-five months — from the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December 1860 to the surrender of the last Confederate armies in May 1865 — and produced the largest war in nineteenth-century American history, the largest single emancipation of enslaved persons in modern history, and the constitutional reordering of the United States from a confederation of effectively sovereign states into a federal nation. The cause of the war was slavery. The cause of the war was not, contrary to a persistent post-war revisionist tradition, states' rights in the abstract, or tariff policy, or constitutional theory, or any of the substitutes proposed in the Lost Cause literature of the 1880s onward. The Confederate states said this explicitly at the time. The Mississippi Declaration of Causes of Secession (January 1861) begins: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world." The South Carolina Declaration (December 1860) is similarly explicit. The Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in his Cornerstone Speech of March 1861, said that "our new government is founded upon... the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The contemporaries knew what they were fighting for. The post-war minimisation of slavery as the war's cause was a deliberate political project of the 1870s-1890s, undertaken by white southern partisans and accepted, with regrettable speed, by white northern audiences in the interest of sectional reconciliation.
This chapter is the prelude. It covers the forty years between the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 — the long period during which the political institutions of the United States attempted to manage a fundamental moral-economic-constitutional contradiction by means of escalating compromises that could not, in the end, be sustained.
The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the existing sectional balance in the Senate (eleven slave, eleven free), and drew a line at 36°30' north latitude across the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory: north of the line, slavery would be prohibited; south of it, permitted. The compromise was negotiated principally by the Kentuckian Henry Clay; it lasted, in form, for thirty-four years. In substance, it deferred the central question — what to do as the United States expanded westward — by buying a generation's worth of partial stability.
The structural sectional divide was already clear in 1820. The northern free states had abolished slavery progressively between 1780 (Pennsylvania) and 1804 (New Jersey), with substantial transitional provisions; the southern states — South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, and after 1812 Louisiana — had not. The 1820 census recorded approximately 1.5 million enslaved persons in the southern states, an asset valued in contemporary dollars at approximately $500 million. By 1860 the number would be approximately 3.95 million enslaved persons, the asset value approximately $3 billion — more than the combined value of southern industrial capital, urban real estate, and railway systems. Slavery was the largest single capital asset in the United States in 1860. Its abolition without compensation, which the secessionists in 1860 correctly understood was the eventual implication of Lincoln's Republican Party victory, would constitute an unprecedented redistribution of property.
The 1850 Compromise
The next major sectional settlement, the Compromise of 1850, was negotiated after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 had added approximately 530,000 square miles of new territory (the future California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming) to the United States, opening the question of which of these would be slave and which free. The 1850 compromise, again negotiated principally by Clay (and after Clay's incapacitation, by Stephen Douglas of Illinois), admitted California as a free state, organised the rest of the Mexican Cession territories on the principle of "popular sovereignty" (local decision), prohibited the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and — the provision that most outraged northern opinion — strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring federal officials in free states to assist in the recapture of escaped slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act produced the substantial growth of the Underground Railroad, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, and the organisation of the new Republican Party in 1854 around opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories.
Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott
The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by Stephen Douglas, repealed the Missouri Compromise's geographic line and opened both Kansas and Nebraska Territories to popular sovereignty on the slavery question. The result in Kansas was "Bleeding Kansas" of 1854–58 — a guerrilla civil war between pro-slavery and free-state settlers, including the Pottawatomie Massacre conducted by John Brown in 1856, the sack of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces, and a series of rigged territorial elections. The episode demonstrated that the political process could not, even at the level of a single territory, produce stable answers to the slavery question.
The Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in March 1857 — Chief Justice Taney's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford — held that the federal government had no authority to prohibit slavery in any territory, that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional, that persons of African descent could not be citizens of the United States, and that enslaved persons were property whose ownership the Constitution protected absolutely. The decision was the most aggressive judicial pro-slavery ruling in the United States history; it was met, in the northern states, with substantial outrage. The Lincoln-Douglas Senate debates of 1858 in Illinois, in which Lincoln (who lost the Senate election) articulated the moral and political case against Dred Scott, made Lincoln a national figure.
The election of 1860
The presidential election of November 1860 was the trigger of secession. The Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings (Douglas and Breckinridge respectively); the new Constitutional Union party fielded John Bell; the Republican party fielded Lincoln. Lincoln won 39.8 per cent of the popular vote — entirely from the free states; in ten southern states he received zero votes, his name not having been placed on the ballot — and a comfortable electoral-college majority. The Republican Party's platform was explicit: no extension of slavery into the territories. It did not call for the abolition of slavery in the existing slave states (Lincoln consistently held that he had no constitutional authority to do that), but it did promise to halt the expansion that the slave states understood as necessary for the institution's economic survival and for the maintenance of sectional balance in the Senate as new states were admitted.
South Carolina's secession convention met on the 20th of December 1860 in Columbia, then in Charleston, and unanimously voted to leave the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed by the 1st of February 1861. The seven seceded states sent delegates to a convention at Montgomery, Alabama, in early February. On the 8th of February 1861 they adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America; on the 18th of February Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as provisional president. Lincoln was inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the United States on the 4th of March. The new president's inaugural address rejected the secessionist constitutional claim, declared the Union perpetual, and promised that the federal government would not "assail" the secessionist states but would "hold, occupy, and possess" the federal forts and properties in their territory. The constitutional collision was complete. The military collision would come six weeks later, at Fort Sumter.
End of Chapter I