Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

James Ford Rhodes’s seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Compromise of 1877; Allan Nevins’s four-volume Ordeal of the Union from 1847 to 1861, and four more on The War for the Union; David M. Potter’s 600-page study The Impending Crisis 1848–1861; Bruce Catton’s three volumes on the Army of the Potomac (Mr. Lincoln’s Army; Glory Road; and A Stillness at Appomattox), his three additional volumes, The Centennial History of the Civil War, plus two volumes on Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War career; Douglas Southall Freeman’s magnificent four-volume biography R.E. Lee and his additional three-volume Lee’s Lieutenants; and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, three engrossing volumes totaling nearly three thousand pages.

The greatest danger to American survival at midcentury, however, was neither class tension nor ethnic division. Rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery.

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the United States was an insignificant nation on the European periphery. Its population was about the same as Ireland’s.

During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe’s and six times the world average.

The 9,000 miles of rail in the United States by 1850 led the world, but paled in comparison with the 21,000 additional miles laid during the next decade, which gave to the United States in 1860 a larger rail network than in the rest of the world combined.

Springing from the prairie shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago became the terminus for fifteen rail lines by 1860, its population having grown by 375 percent during the previous decade.

Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region’s proportion of the free population.

The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government. Women, children, and slaves were dependent; that defined them out of the polity of republican freemen. Wage laborers were also dependent; that was why Jefferson feared the development of industrial capitalism with its need for wage laborers. Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living.

The emergence of industrial capitalism from 1815 to 1860 thus began to forge a new system of class relations between capitalists who owned the means of production and workers who owned only their labor power.

In contrast to the United States, slave economies in most other parts of the western hemisphere reached their peak development while the African slave trade flourished. Thus they relied mainly on imports to keep up their labor supply. They also imported twice as many males as females and discouraged their slaves from forming families. In consequence, while the slave population of the United States doubled by natural reproduction every twenty-six years, slaves in other new world societies experienced a net natural decrease.

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.

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.

From 1800 to 1860 the proportion of the northern labor force in agriculture had dropped from 70 to 40 percent while the southern proportion had remained constant at 80 percent. Only one-tenth of southerners lived in what the census classified as urban areas, compared with one-fourth of northerners. Seven-eighths of the immigrants settled in free states. 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.47 Nearly twice the percentage of northern youth attended school. Almost half of the southern people (including slaves) were illiterate, compared to 6 percent of residents of free states.

So they perished—in California alone disease, malnutrition, firewater, and homicide reduced the Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to 35,000 by 1860.

James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history.

Jefferson’s Empire for Liberty had become mostly an empire for slavery. 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.

Of the congressmen who spoke on this matter, more than half expressed confidence (if southern) or fear (if northern) that slavery would go into the new territories if allowed to do so.

We must, Welles concluded “satisfy the northern people . . . that we are not to extend the institution of slavery as a result of this war.”

The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same. “As if by magic,” commented the Boston Whig, “it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.”

“The slavery question is assuming a fearful . . . aspect,” wrote Polk in his diary. It “cannot fail to destroy the Democratic party, if it does not ultimately threaten the Union itself.”

“When the warworn soldier returns to his home,” asked an Alabamian, “is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?”22 “No true Southron,” said scores of them, would submit to such “social and sectional degradation. . . . Death is preferable to acknowledged inferiority.”

Enactment of the Wilmot Proviso would yield ten new free states, warned James Hammond of South Carolina. The North would then “ride over us rough shod” in Congress, “proclaim freedom or something equivalent to it to our slaves and reduce us to the condition of Hayti. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames.”

If the North insisted on ramming through the Wilmot Proviso, warned Calhoun in sepulchral tones, the result would be “political revolution, anarchy, civil war.”

Free Soilers made slavery the campaign’s central issue. Both major parties had to abandon their strategy of ignoring the question. Instead, they tried to win support in each section by obfuscating it. Democrats circulated different campaign biographies of Cass in North and South. In the North they emphasized popular sovereignty as the best way to keep slavery out of the territories. In the South Democrats cited Cass’s pledge to veto the Wilmot Proviso and pointed with pride to the party’s success (over Whig opposition) in acquiring territory into which slavery might expand.

Those antislavery Whigs who supported Taylor in the belief that he would take their side—William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln, for example—turned out to be right. Southerners should have paid more attention to a speech by Seward at Cleveland. Affable, artful, sagacious, an instinctive politician but also a principled opponent of slavery, Seward would soon emerge as one of Taylor’s main advisers. “Freedom and slavery are two antagonistic elements of society,” he told a Cleveland audience. “Slavery can be limited to its present bounds"; eventually “it can and must be abolished.”32 But in the South, Taylor’s repute as the hero of Buena Vista and his status as a large slaveholder dazzled many eyes. “We prefer Old Zack with his sugar and cotton plantations and four hundred negroes,” proclaimed the Richmond Whig. “Will the people of [the South] vote for a Southern President or a Northern one?” asked a Georgia newspaper.

But Congress would have none of that. During the short session that expired on March 4 fistfights flared in both Houses, southern members shouted threats of secession, and no territorial legislation could command a majority. In the House, northern congressmen reaffirmed the Wilmot Proviso, drafted a territorial bill for California that excluded slavery, passed a resolution calling for abolition of the slave trade within the District of Columbia, and even considered a bill to abolish slavery itself in the capital. These actions enraged southerners, who used their power in the Senate to quash them all.

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.

“The slavery question,” wrote a Georgian, “is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.

“If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico,” thundered Toombs, “I am for disunion.” “We have calculated the value of the Union,” warned Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi. “We ask you to give us our rights” in California; “if you refuse, I am for taking them by armed occupation.” The South’s liberty was at stake as much now as in 1776, for “it is clear,” according to an Alabama congressman, “that the power to dictate what sort of property the State may allow a citizen to own and work—whether oxen, horses, or negroes . . . is alike despotic and tyrannical.”45 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.

On all these measures the divisions occurred mainly along sectional rather than party lines, another sign that the existing two-party system was crumbling under the weight of slavery.

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.

The “Battle of Christiana” became a national event. “Civil War—The First Blow Struck,” proclaimed a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper. The New York Tribune pronounced the verdict of many Yankees: “But for slavery such things would not be; but for the Fugitive Slave Law they would not be in the free States.” The conservative press took a different view of this “act of insurrection” that “never would have taken place but for the instigations which have been applied to the ignorant and deluded blacks by the fanatics of the ‘higher law’ creed.” Southerners announced that “unless the Christiana rioters are hung . . . WE LEAVE YOU! . . . If you fail in this simple act of justice, THE BONDS WILL BE DISSOLVED.”

Unionists proclaimed themselves no less ardent for “the safety . . . rights and honor of the slave holding states” than Southern Rights Democrats.

BUT—any action by Congress against slavery in the District of Columbia, any refusal to admit a new slave state or to recognize slavery in the new territories would cause Georgia (and other states) to resist, with secession “as a last resort.” Above all, “upon a faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law . . . depends the preservation of our much beloved Union.”

“A large plantation and Negroes are the ultima Thule of every Southern gentleman’s ambition,”

“I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.”

“A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights,” said a Tennessee representative, “than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage.” The government’s action proved that President Buchanan was just like other Yankees in wanting to “crush out the expansion of slavery to the South.”

Even more important than the fugitive slave issue in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.

Douglas opened the canvass with a speech on September 1 in Chicago, where a hostile crowd shouted him down for two hours until he strode angrily off the platform and headed for friendlier districts downstate.

“Mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him,” the senator’s lieutenant in Missouri exhorted a crowd at St. Joseph. “To those having qualms of conscience . . . the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your lives and property are in danger. . . . Enter every election district in Kansas . . . and vote at the point of a Bowie knife or revolver!”

One of Shannon’s first responsibilities was to enforce a slave code enacted by the legislature that imposed a fine and imprisonment for expressing opinions against slavery, authorized the death penalty for encouraging slave revolts or helping slaves to escape, required all voters to take an oath to uphold these laws, and retroactively legalized the border ruffian ballots by requiring no prior residence in Kansas in order to vote.

Four-fifths of the platform dealt with slavery; it damned the administration’s policy in Kansas, asserted the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories, called for admission of Kansas as a free state, denounced the Ostend Manifesto, and quoted the Declaration of Independence as authority for free-soil principles.

“You are here today,” the party chairman had told delegates to the Republican convention, “to give direction to a movement which is to decide whether the people of the United States are to be hereafter and forever chained to the present national policy of the extension of slavery.”

Reversing the proportions of the Republican platform, the Democratic document devoted little more than a fifth of its verbiage to the slavery issue. It endorsed popular sovereignty and condemned the Republicans as a “sectional party” inciting “treason and armed resistance to law in the Territories.” Other planks in the platform reasserted old Jacksonian chestnuts: state’s rights; a government of limited powers; no federal aid to internal improvements; no national bank so “dangerous to our republican institutions and the liberties of the people.”

Closer investigation uncovered the curious phenomenon of two remote districts with 130 legal voters having reported almost 2,900 ballots. In one case some 1,600 names had been copied onto the voting rolls from an old Cincinnati city directory. Throwing out the fraudulent returns, Walker certified a free-state majority in the next territorial legislature. This action provoked more bitter outcries from southerners against “tampering” with the returns.

(As usual, an investigation found 2,720 of the majority votes to have been fraudulent.)

Recent scholarship sustains Lincoln’s apprehension that the Taney Court would have sanctioned “some form of slavery in the North.”

Tariffs, banks, internal improvements, corruption, and other staples of American politics received not a word in these debates—the sole topic was slavery.29

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, (applause)—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Whether or not the black man was equal to the white man in mental or moral endowment, “in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.