Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The poverty, religion, and cultural alienation of the Irish made them triple outsiders. Anti-Catholic and ethnic riots occurred in several northeastern cities during the 1830s and 1840s. The worst erupted in 1844 at Philadelphia, where a pair of three-way battles between Protestants, Irish Catholics, and the militia left at least sixteen dead, scores wounded, two churches and dozens of other buildings destroyed.

This nativism was actually more anti-Catholic than anti-immigrant. Indeed, Protestant immigrants (especially from northern Ireland) were among the most violent “nativists.

But did domesticity constitute a real setback? Historians have begun to qualify this interpretation. The economic transformation coincided with—and in part caused—a change in the quality of family life as well as the quantity of children. As the family became less an economic unit it ripened into a covenant of love and nurturance of children. The ideal of romantic love increasingly governed the choice of a marriage partner, a choice made more and more by young people themselves rather than by their parents. And if wives now had a lesser economic role, they enjoyed a larger familial one.

Affection and encouragement of self-discipline replaced repression and corporal punishment as the preferred means of socialization in middle-class families. These families became more child-centered—a phenomenon much noted by European visitors.

For, in an apparent paradox, the concept of a woman’s sphere within the family became a springboard for extension of that sphere beyond the hearth.

Women’s advances in education were even more impressive. Before the nineteenth century girls in America, as everywhere else, received much less formal education than boys, and a considerably higher proportion of women than men were illiterate. By 1850 that had changed in the United States, where girls went to elementary school and achieved literacy in virtually the same proportions as boys—the only country where that was yet true.

Oberlin College admitted both women and men soon after its founding in 1833. Even more important, perhaps, was the feminization of the teaching profession. Like most other social and economic changes, this process began in New England and spread gradually westward and southward. By 1850 nearly three-quarters of the public school teachers in Massachusetts were women.

The new emphasis on home and family created a huge audience for articles and books on homemaking, child-rearing, cooking, and related subjects. Women’s magazines proliferated to meet the need. A paying profession arose for female writers. The expanded literacy and leisure of women, combined with the romanticism and sentimentalism of Victorian culture, also spawned a lucrative market for fiction which focused on the tribulations of love, marriage, home, family, and death.

Therefore while the notion of a domestic sphere closed the front door to women’s exit from the home into the real world, it opened the back door to an expanding world of religion, reform, education, and writing. Inevitably, women who could write or speak or teach or edit magazines began to ask why they should not be paid as much as men for these services and why they could not also preach, practice law or medicine, hold property independently of their husbands—and vote. Thus “domestic feminism"—as some historians label it—led by an indirect route to a more radical feminism that demanded equal rights in all spheres.

The evolution of the child-centered nurturing family during this era helped inspire abolitionists to focus on the greatest perceived sin of American slavery: the tragic irony that caused the institution simultaneously to encourage the slave family and to threaten it with destruction.

Recent studies of slave marriages have found that about one-fourth of them were broken by owners or heirs who sold or moved husband or wife apart from the other.44 The sale of young children apart from parents, while not the normal pattern, also occurred with alarming frequency. This breakup of families was the largest chink in the armor of slavery’s defenders.

In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of its backward institution. Slavery undermined “intelligence, vigor, and energy,” asserted New York’s antislavery Whig leader William Henry Seward in the 1840s. It had produced in the South “an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads . . . an absence of enterprise and improvement.” The institution was “incompatible with all . . . the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations.” Slavery and free labor, said Seward in his most famous speech, were “antagonistic systems” between which raged an “irrepressible conflict” that must result in the destruction of slavery.

whether or not slavery was backward and inefficient, as Seward maintained, it was extraordinarily productive. The yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800, the greatest increase for any agricultural commodity. Cotton from the American South grown mostly by slave labor furnished three-fourths of the world’s supply. Southern staples provided three-fifths of all American exports, earning foreign exchange that played an important part in American economic growth.

Yet by the 1850s Americans on both sides of the line separating freedom from slavery came to emphasize more their differences than similarities. Yankees and Southrons spoke the same language, to be sure, but they increasingly used these words to revile each other.

As for a shared commitment to Protestantism, this too had become divisive rather than unifying. The two largest denominations—Methodist and Baptist—had split into hostile northern and southern churches over the question of slavery, and the third largest—Presbyterian—split partly along sectional lines and partly on the issue of slavery.

Among antebellum men prominent enough to be later chronicled in the Dictionary of American Biography, the military profession claimed twice the percentage of southerners as northerners, while the ratio was reversed for men distinguished in literature, art, medicine, and education. In business the proportion of Yankees was three times as great, and among engineers and inventors it was six times as large.

To nineteenth-century Americans the West represented the future. Expansion had been the country’s lifeblood. So long as the slavery controversy focused on the morality of the institution where it already existed, the two-party system managed to contain the passions it aroused. But when in the 1840s the controversy began to focus on the expansion of slavery into new territories it became irrepressible.

From 1815 to 1850 the population of the region west of the Appalachians grew nearly three times as fast as the original thirteen states.

By the 1840s the states between the Appalachians and the Mississippi had passed the frontier stage.

the Great Basin Zion attained a population of 40,000 by 1860. Young even managed to prevent the faithful from joining the various gold rushes to California in 1849 and to the Virginia City and Denver regions in 1859. The Mormons earned more from trade with prospectors on their way to the gold fields than most of the miners did after they got there.

In 1857 President James Buchanan declared the Mormons to be in rebellion and sent troops to force their submission to a new governor. During the Saints’ guerrilla warfare against these soldiers in the fall of 1857, a group of Mormon fanatics massacred 120 California-bound emigrants at Mountain Meadows. This prompted the government to send more troops. A realist, Young accepted the inevitable, surrendered his civil authority, restrained his followers, and made an uneasy peace with the United States.

Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not.

Whigs were not averse to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to Mexicans and Indians. But they looked askance at doing so by force. Befitting the evangelical origins of much Whig ideology, they placed their faith in mission more than in annexation.

While the Democratic notion of progress envisioned the spread of existing institutions over space, the Whig idea envisaged the improvement of those institutions over time.

Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a “slave power conspiracy” to expand the peculiar institution.

James Russell Lowell’s rustic Yankee philosopher Hosea Biglow fretted that They just want this Californy So’s to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye, An’ to plunder ye like sin.

Their grievances went back to 1844 when southerners had denied Martin Van Buren the presidential nomination because he refused to endorse the annexation of Texas. The Polk administration had given the patronage in New York to anti-Van Buren “Hunkers.” Rate reductions in the Walker Tariff of 1846 embittered Pennsylvania Democrats who thought they had secured a pledge for higher duties on certain items. Polk’s veto of a rivers and harbors bill angered Democrats from Great Lakes and western river districts. The administration’s compromise on the 49th parallel for the Oregon boundary incensed the many Democrats who had chanted the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!”

When Wilmot introduced his proviso, therefore, he released the pent-up ire of northern Democrats, many of whom cared less about slavery in new territories than about their power within the party. Northern Whigs, who had a more consistent antislavery record, were delighted to support the proviso.

This was a dire omen. The normal pattern of division in Congress had occurred along party lines on issues such as the tariff, the Bank, federal aid to internal improvements, and the like. The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same.

Free-soil sentiment in 1847 can be visualized in three concentric circles. At the center was a core of abolitionists who considered slavery a sinful violation of human rights that should be immediately expiated. Surrounding and drawing ideological nourishment from them was a larger circle of antislavery people who looked upon bondage as an evil—by which they meant that it was socially repressive, economically backward, and politically harmful to the interests of free states.17 This circle comprised mainly Whigs (and some Democrats) from the Yankee belt of states and regions north of the 41st parallel who regarded this issue as more important than any other in American politics. The outer circle contained all those who had voted for the Wilmot Proviso but did not necessarily consider it the most crucial matter facing the country and were open to compromise. This outer circle included such Whigs as Abraham Lincoln, who believed slavery “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State” which “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites,” but who also believed that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils” by uniting the South in defense of the institution.

Martin Van Buren, who cared little about the consequences of slavery for the slaves and had been allied with the “slave power” until it had blocked Van Buren’s nomination in 1844.

But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing world demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South. Abolitionist attacks on slavery placed southerners on the defensive and goaded them into angry counterattacks. By 1840 slavery was no longer a necessary evil; it was “a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.”

Even those who did not expect bondage to flourish there resented the northern effort to exclude it as an insult to southern honor. The Wilmot Proviso pronounced “a degrading inequality” on the South, declared a Virginian. It “says in effect to the Southern man, Avaunt! you are not my equal, and hence are to be excluded as carrying a moral taint.”

The handsome, imposing General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a dedicated professional with a fondness for dress uniforms, and an articulate Whig, looked like a better choice if the anti-war party felt compelled to mend its image by nominating a military candidate. But Scott had the defects of his virtues. His critics considered him pompous. He had a penchant for writing foot-in-mouth public letters which made him vulnerable to ridicule.

And Taylor had the virtues of his defects, as the image conveyed by his sobriquet of Rough and Ready illustrates. Many voters in this new age of (white) manhood suffrage seemed to prefer their candidates rough-hewn. As a war hero Taylor claimed first priority on public affection. Although Scott had planned and led the campaign of 1847 that captured Mexico City, Taylor’s victories of 1846 along the Rio Grande and his extraordinary triumph against odds of three to one at Buena Vista in February 1847 had made his reputation before Scott got started.

Rehearsing a long list of northern “aggressions"—including the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, state personal liberty laws that blocked recovery of fugitive slaves, and the Wilmot Proviso—the Address reiterated Calhoun’s doctrine of the constitutional right to take slaves into all territories, reminded southerners that their “property, prosperity, equality, liberty, and safety” were at stake, and warned that the South might secede if her rights were not protected.

A free California might not have raised southern hackles so much had not other developments caused southerners to view Taylor as a traitor to his class. Forty years in the army had given old Rough and Ready a national rather than sectional perspective.

Through three weeks and sixty-two ballots the House failed to elect a speaker. Threats of disunion became a byword during this crisis. “If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico,” thundered Toombs, “I am for disunion.”

Several fistfights broke out between southerners and northerners in the House. The Senate caught the same fever. Jefferson Davis reportedly challenged an Illinois congressman to a duel, and Senator Henry S. Foote (also of Mississippi) drew a loaded revolver during a heated debate.

When Toombs and Stephens appealed to him as a southerner, warning him that the South would not “submit” to these insults, Taylor lost his temper. In unpresidential language he told them that he would personally lead an army to enforce the laws and hang any traitors he caught—including Toombs and Stephens—with as little compunction as he had hanged spies and deserters in Mexico. Taylor afterward commented to an associate that he had previously regarded Yankees as the aggressors in sectional disputes, but his experience since taking office had convinced him that southerners were “intolerant and revolutionary” and that his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis was their “chief conspirator.

In this crisis Henry Clay strode once more on stage and offered a plan to buy off southern threats, as he had done twice before in 1820 and 1833. The ensuing debates of 1850 became the most famous in the history of Congress. Sharing the footlights with Clay were Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the other two members of the great Senate triumvirate that had dominated American statesmanship for decades.

On January 29, 1850, Clay presented eight resolutions to the Senate. He grouped the first six in pairs, each offering a concession to both sections.

The eventual Compromise of 1850 closely resembled Clay’s proposals. But seven months of oratory, debate, and exhausting cloakroom bargaining lay ahead. And the “Compromise” that finally emerged was not really a compromise in which all parties conceded part of what they wanted, but a series of separately enacted measures each of which became law with a majority of congressmen from one section voting against a majority of those from the other. The Compromise of 1850 undoubtedly averted a grave crisis. But hindsight makes clear that it only postponed the trauma.

Into this volatile atmosphere came a new crisis in late June. A handful of civilians and soldiers had convened a convention in Santa Fe to write a free-state constitution. It was ratified by an electorate casting fewer than eight thousand votes. Taylor urged the admission of New Mexico along with that of California, thereby doubling the insult to southern honor. Meanwhile the governor of Texas threatened to uphold with force his state’s claim to Santa Fe and all the rest of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande. A clash between Texans and the U. S. army seemed imminent.

Whether for weal or woe, Taylor’s death marked a turning point in the crisis. The new president, Millard Fillmore, was a New York Whig hostile to the Seward faction in his own state. Sympathetic to the Compromise, this northern president tilted almost as far South as the southern President Taylor had tilted North.

Representing the new generation, Stephen A. Douglas came on stage to star in the third act. A man whose capacity for liquor was exceeded only by his capacity for work (the combination would kill him eleven years later at the age of 48), Douglas earned the sobriquet Little Giant for his great political prowess contained in a frame five feet four inches tall. Never a believer in the omnibus strategy, Douglas stripped the vehicle down to its component parts and put together a majority for each of those parts.

Several slaveholders carried their property to Utah, where Governor Brigham Young and his legislature obliged them by legalizing the institution in 1852 (the same year that the Saints openly endorsed polygamy). New Mexico also enacted a slave code in 1859. But neither territory was likely to strengthen the South in Congress.

On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.

indeed, professional slave catchers did not always take pains to make sure they had captured the right man nor did every judge go out of his way to ensure that a supposed fugitive matched the description on the affidavit. A good many slave catchers did not bother to take their captured prey before a court but simply spirited it south by the quickest route. To remedy such abuses, several northern states enacted personal liberty laws.

In some areas of the North, owners could not reclaim their escaped property without the help of federal marshals. Black leaders and sympathetic whites in numerous communities formed vigilance committees to organize resistance to such efforts.