Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

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.

Almost half of the southern people (including slaves) were illiterate, compared to 6 percent of residents of free states.

The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same.

“I [shall] hold no connection with a party that did not disconnect itself from those aggressive abolition movements,” declared Stephens. To resist “the dictation of Northern hordes of Goths and Vandals,” the South must make “the necessary preparations of men and money, arms and munitions, etc., to meet the emergency.”

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.”

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.

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.”47