It begins today: the 150th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. My post on the 50 Greatest Names in the Civil War will appear at The Weeklings this Thursday, in honor of the conclusion of both the last major southern invasion of the North and the surrender of the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg. Come check it out.
Far from being civil, the war was distinctly cruel (though, as The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out numerous times, the preceding centuries had been as cruel or crueler to the slaves who did so much to build this country). One theory I’ve come across – and am sorry I can’t source – suggests that it was so unrelenting in large part because both sides were democracies. This goes against the grain of much contemporary political theory, which holds that democracies tend to work out their differences with each other by more peaceful means. There may be something to the latter idea, but the flip side is that when they do go to war, governments of, by, and for the people do so with a vengeance. This makes sense if you think about the fact that if a government that accurately reflects the will of its people decides to fight, those people are probably willing to suffer great hardship to see the struggle to its successful conclusion. When absolute rulers went to war in the late medieval and early modern periods, they could typically only rely on the loyalty of their vassals and their hired mercenaries, which seldom lasted past a few successful battles and one failed one. That’s part of why partisans on both sides of the American Civil War assumed that their war would be over soon. They assumed that after a few battles demonstrated which side had won, the other side would give up. But this was a different sort of conflict. Majorities in both the North and the South valued the cause they were fighting for enough to risk their loved ones, their households, and their sanity. There are few if any clearer instances in the country’s history of people making sacrifices on behalf of something greater than themselves. Nor have we ever been exposed to such sustained horror.
I said something to Chef Robert once about not quite knowing why I was so interested in the Civil War, and he responded, “You’re from the South. Of course you’re interested in the Civil War.” And that’s fair. I’m not just from the South, I’m from Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. And the county Lincoln was born in supposedly only gave him three votes in the 1860 election. (That may be an exaggeration, but he couldn’t have gotten many tallies.) Kentucky, like every border South state except for Virginia, stayed in the Union, but its allegiance was strained, as evidenced by the fact that it was Lincoln’s worst state in his 1864 reelection. By a margin about roughly 70% to 30%, Kentucky voters went for the Democratic candidate, former general George B. McClellan, who promised a return to a more limited war, restoring the Union without emancipating the slaves. They hadn’t given up the hope for a country that had ceased to exist and could never be again.
Trying to understand this perspective has led me down various paths through the endless woods that is the scholarship on the Civil War era. Recently I’ve been reading about the Whig party, and have run across a few surprising insights there. I had underestimated how early and how thoroughly slavery had begun to split the sections. I had thought that the Whigs started out fairly unified on economic issues – they were the “liberal” party, supporting higher taxes (in the form of tariffs), infrastructure projects (mainly roads and canals, and later railroads), and national institutions (particularly banks) – but fell apart in the 1850s over the expansion of slavery. But in fact, the Southern and Northern wings of the party were at odds from the beginning. At its midpoint, the devastating election of 1844, the Whig’s great champion Henry Clay struggled and failed to keep both portions happy, never finding a position on the annexation of Texas and the consequent expansion of slave territory that satisfied southerners without alienating increasingly abolitionist states such as New York. Had slavery not been an issue in that contest, the Whigs would likely have won, and many of the nationalizing projects that the Republicans ended up passing after so many southern representatives and senators departed Congress in the 1860s might have gone through much earlier, and American history might have progressed entirely differently. But it always had been an issue, and couldn’t help being one. What had brought the Whigs together was opposition to the allegedly monarchical tendencies of President Andrew Jackson. But this was a flimsy basis for a coalition, tying together as it did those who wanted a weaker executive and a stronger nation with those who wanted a weaker executive and more independent states – most of all, so that the United States would never be sufficiently powerful to abolish slavery. There’s a great early Simpsons episode when Apu is applying for citizenship. When his interviewer asks him what caused the Civil War, Apu begins a long dissertation on the complex economic and social forces that had increasingly divided the two sections over decades, and the interviewer interrupts and tells him, “Just say ‘slavery.'” It’s funny, but maybe for the wrong reason. The deeper I dig on the Civil War, the more I find slavery at the bottom. It’s been called America’s original sin, and I’m inclined to agree.
The other finding that’s surprised me is how much the political parties of the era were explicitly founded in opposition to particular groups. The best example of this is the American party, also known as the Know-Nothings. The Whig party did fall apart in the early 1850s, largely because the southern wing thought the northern part was too abolitionist, even though abolitionist voters in the North thought the Whigs were too pro-slavery – because of their affiliation with the party’s southern wing. The Republicans – a distinctly anti-slavery and almost entirely Northern party – were the ultimate beneficiaries of this collapse, but that wasn’t inevitable. The Americans, their main rival, won many state-level elections in both the North and the South. Like the Whigs, they tried to avoid questions about slavery. But rather than stressing economic issues, they instead focused on opposing immigration and immigrants – particularly Catholics. The Democratic party was splitting on sectional lines at this point too. The electoral weight leaned toward Illinois’s Stephen A. Douglas and his principle of popular sovereignty – the right of each state to decide whether or not it would have slavery. This was almost surely the median position of the country’s voting population as a whole, but by this point it had become anathema not just to abolitionists but to the pro-slavery faction as well. When Douglas and his platform won out at the 1860 Democratic national convention, the bulk of the southern delegates walked out and held a separate convention to select their own candidate, which ultimately handed the Presidency to Lincoln. And so, during this period pretty much the only party with claim to a truly national constituency was the Americans. Or to put this another way: the fight over slavery so divided the South and the North that the only thing a significant section of the electorate across both regions could agree on was how much they distrusted Catholic immigrants.
It’s a problem of collective action. For a nation to be more than a loose collection of individuals, we need a cause greater than our solitary self-interest. But as Machiavelli knew, fear is the easiest group motivator. Most white southerners were so scared of slave revolts that it led them to try to destroy the country. Northern Republicans were scared of the spread of slavery and the loss of the West for expansion by free-soil whites. Americans were scared of all the Irish and Germans they thought were taking their jobs and spreading crime. These were all ideals strong enough to bring parties together. And I find that scarier than I find it inspiring.
And yet, and yet. Our ancestors did fight that war. And they did end slavery. It’s sad that that’s what it took. It’s sadder still that the further struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery lasted another century and more. But today I suggest that we celebrate even the country’s imperfect triumphs, along with its never-ending effort to deliver a “new birth of freedom.“
