The Road to Secession

America’s path to civil war was long and tumultuous. The pressures created through settlement, independence, expansion, industrialization, sectionalism and the enslavement of African-Americans eventually exploded into four years of national conflict and the death of over 600,000.

 

Arrival of African Slaves in English North American Colonies, 1619

Library of Congress

Arrival of African Slaves in English North American Colonies, 1619

“About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr … arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope. … He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, w[hich] the Governo[r] and Cape Merchant bought for victuall[s].” This journal record written in 1619 by John Rolfe marks the beginning of 246 years of racial slavery in what would become the United States of America. These Africans brought to the English colony of Jamestown were Angolans who were captured in a series of wars between the Portuguese and the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms and other states. They were among 350 Africans who were placed on the ship San Juan Bautista bound for Vera Cruz, Mexico. In the Gulf of Mexico, two English privateering ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, attacked the vessel and took and 50 to 60 of the captives. The English ships then headed for Virginia where the captain sold the aforementioned African captives for food and supplies.

Prior to the arrival of these enslaved people to Point Comfort, slave traders had been forcibly transporting Africans across the Atlantic and into bondage for a hundred years. However, these men and women became the first enslaved people in the English North American colonies. In the coming years, thousands of others would be sold or born into the colony as slaves. The need for the white population to control this growing number of Africans and their descendants led to establishment of slave system regulated by law. Therefore, the purchase and forcible importation of “20. and odd” Africans into the Jamestown colony began an oppressive economic and social system that would define the American experience for many years, and the preservation of this system would ultimately lead to secession and the Civil War.

 

Ratification of the Constitution, 1788

As they crafted the Constitution, the founders of our country struggled with how slavery would figure into the document. Ultimately, they largely avoided the issue, but as a result of compromises, the authors did include several references to slavery. Though the Constitution itself does not use the word “slave,” several clauses that referenced slavery had a tremendous impact on how it affected the course of our nation’s history.

 

The first was the Three-Fifths Compromise, which stated that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for representative purposes. This gave the white southerners and whites in other slaveholding states more power in Congress that they could use to ensure their interests were protected. Likewise, northerners, who owned slaves in lesser numbers, were left at a disadvantage that led to growing resentment. Another clause that became a sticking point between North and South was the Fugitive Slave clause. This clause, and the federal legislation that backed it which passed in 1793, allowed for slave owners or their representatives to capture runaway slaves in free states and returned them to the South to bondage. In later decades, this caused major disagreements as northerners saw this as an unjust incursion and an abuse of power by their southern countrymen. These two clauses, along with a lack of a definitive federal stance on slavery, allowed sectional tensions to develop as free and slave states vied for dominance.

 

The Bobbin Girl by Winslow Homer

Lowell National Historical Park

The Market Revolution, 1790s

Beginning in the 1790s and continuing well into the next century, the United States saw a transformation that drastically altered the economy: factories and mechanization began to dominate the economic landscape. Beginning with the introduction of British technologies into the first textile mills in New England, manufacturing shifted from being done at home and in small workshops by skilled artisan to large factories where unskilled laborers, often times women and children, worked to run machines powered by water. The majority of these factories were clustered in New England where large cities and urban centers developed, whereas the South remained largely agricultural. The concentration of factories in one area of the country facilitated the need for transportation systems like roads, canals, and later railroads. The growth of factories and transportation systems placed commerce and business in the center of the northern economy.

However, the southern economy remained largely agricultural despite pockets of urbanization. Plantation owners in the South supplied northern industrialists with raw materials grown by enslaved people to meet their demands of their factories. With this expansion, southern plantation owners shifted more and more of their acreage to cotton to meet the ever-growing demands of the northern textile industry. This symbiotic relationship made northerners and southerners alike extremely wealthy and deepened the sectional divide as both northerners and southerners attempted to protect their financial interests: industry based in free labor or agriculture based in enslaved labor.

 

Sketch of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin

Library of Congress

Invention of the Cotton Gin, 1793

Developed in 1793 or 1794 and patented in 1794, Eli Whitney’s engine or ‘gin’ revolutionized the production of cotton and entrenched slavery in the heart of the southern economy. Prior to Whitney’s invention, the production of cotton was a time-consuming process that required the seeds and cotton fibers to be separated by hand. This meant that only largescale plantations could make a profit from cotton. Catherine Greene, widow of General Nathaniel Greene, hired Eli Whitney to come up with a solution to make growing cotton more economically efficient. The outcome was the cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton fibers from the sticky seeds making processing cotton quicker and less labor-intensive.

With the increase in speed and ease of separating cotton fibers, cotton production became highly lucrative for southern slaveholders. Production doubled each decade after 1800 and, in turn, fueled the rise of textile manufacturing in the North. Though the gin made separating seeds from cotton more efficient, it still sparked an expansion of the system of slavery as southern plantation owners bought more and more enslaved people to grow and pick the cotton. The 1790 census showed 697,897 enslaved people in the United States and by 1810 that number had increased 70% to 1.2 million. These drastic changes placed slave-produced cotton at the center of the southern way of life.

 

Louisiana Purchase, 1803

In 1803, the United States nearly doubled in size with purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. For a cost of about $15 million dollars, the United States acquired 827,000 square miles of land and secured control of the Mississippi River. This massive expansion of territory opened the floodgates for western settlement. The land acquired by the purchase would eventually be carved into 13 states including Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. The admission of these new states became a battleground that stretched into the 1850s as northern, anti-slavery and southern, pro-slavery leaders debated whether slavery should be prohibited or allowed in each state. The decision was critical as each group vied to maintain a majority in Congress.

 

Missouri Compromise, 1820

The Missouri Compromise marked the first of a series of major political contests over the future of slavery in the western territories. Though this particular dispute ended in compromise, the ones to follow would not be as easy to legislate. Following the Louisiana Purchase, settlers rushed to take advantage of the land. The arrival of new settlers meant that by 1819, the Missouri Territory had the population necessary to apply for statehood. The admission of Missouri as state would offset the balance of Congress between the free and slave states, meaning that one side would gain the political advantage. Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to swing the political advantage in favor of free northern states. He argued that Missouri could be admitted as a state on the condition that residents and emigrants could not bring new slaves into the state and that owners would be required to emancipate the slaves currently in the territory gradually over time. This amendment, known as the Tallmadge Amendment, outraged white southerners who unanimously voted against it seeing it as a threat to both slavery and the balance of power in Congress. The amendment failed in the Senate, and the fate of Missouri and of slavery’s expansion was left undecided.

 

Library of Congress

Henry Clay would change that. The legendary Speaker of the House and ‘Great Compromiser’ provided a solution to keep the number of free and slave states balanced. He recommended that Missouri enter the Union as a slave state, and Maine, currently a part of Massachusetts, would become a free state. This, along with an amendment proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois to prohibit slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel (Missouri’s southern boundary), became known as the Missouri Compromise, and lasted for nearly 25 years. As new states were carved out from the Louisiana Purchase, whether a state allowed or prohibited slavery was determined based on its location north or south of the 36°30’ parallel. The Missouri Compromise marked the beginning of a decades long battle over the expansion of slavery into new western territories.

 

Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831

August 1831 in Southampton, Virginia was the setting for one of the largest and deadliest slave rebellions in American history. Led by religious prophet and enslaved man Nat Turner, the rebellion struck fear into the hearts of whites throughout the South and left aftershocks that would last well into the post-Civil War era. The rebellion began on the night of August 21, when Turner, possibly inspired by a solar eclipse which he believed to be a religious sign, led a group of six slaves from plantation to plantation killing white people as they went. They hoped this would inspire other slaves to join them; Turner would eventually gather over fifty others who joined him in killing nearly sixty white people, including women and children, before white militiamen stopped the rebellion. Turner eluded capture for over two months, but he was eventually executed along with about fifty other African Americans. Though the rebellion lasted less than three days, the equally violent response further complicated the status of slavery in the United States for decades.

The rebellion caused panic among the whites of Southampton. Many fled their homes, and a white militia force assembled to put down the rebellion and capture Turner’s men. However, the trials and executions were only the beginning of the violence. As fear spread throughout the region, whites retaliated and killed an estimated two to three hundred African Americans. Eventually, the government of Virginia intervened to end the carnage, but the damage was already done. Since the successful slave rebellion in Haiti in 1791, whites across the South had lived in constant fear of slave insurrections and faced the question of how to protect themselves, especially in the areas where the enslaved population outnumbered the white population. With Turner’s Rebellion their worst nightmares had come true. Legislatures across the South passed laws to pile even more restrictions on free and enslaved African Americans including forbidding them from preaching, gathering, traveling in groups, and learning to read and write. Fear of slave rebellions highlighted how interconnected political, social, and economic aspects of slavery were and the central role of violent coercion in maintaining this system.

 

William Lloyd Garrison

Library of Congress

The Rise of the American Abolitionist Movement, 1830s

Though individuals and small groups were protesting the existence of slavery in the United States prior to the nation’s independence, the American abolitionist movement did not break onto the national stage until the 1830s. Inspired by the strategies of their British counterparts, American abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, began to establish anti-slavery societies throughout the northern states. These societies worked to gain support for their cause on a national scale through petitions, speeches, and publications. Though abolitionists were later divided over the best way to accomplish their goals, the men and women of the movement brought the horrors of slavery to the forefront of the national consciousness. This new focus on slavery and the call for its abolition forced southerners to respond by defending their way of life. Southern slave owners, led by John C. Calhoun, defended slavery not as a necessary evil as they once had, but as a mutually beneficial system ordained in the Bible: a positive good. Several state legislatures banned anti-slavery material and, in some cases, white southerners even physically attacked abolitionists. Northern and Southern white perspectives on the moral acceptability of slavery had begun to starkly diverge, which had significant implications.

 

South Carolina Congressman John C. Calhoun

Library of Congress

Nullification Crisis, 1832-1833

The Nullification Crisis marked the first major threat of secession by a state government. Tensions began after the passage of a protective tariff that those who opposed it deemed the “Tariff of Abominations.” Protective tariffs were a common practice at the time; however, many white southerners thought this tariff was too high and foresaw economic impacts as foreign markets refused to purchase southern cotton at steep prices. In protest, eventual Vice President and South Carolina Congressman John C. Calhoun anonymously published “Exposition and Protest,” a work which introduced the Doctrine of Nullification. Calhoun argued that the federal government was created by a compact of states and that those states had the right to reject or nullify any law created by the federal government that they found unconstitutional. Despite widespread support for the doctrine among white southerners, its advocates lacked political position to act.

However, in the 1832 election, a large number of nullification supporters won seats in the government of Calhoun’s home state, South Carolina. They quickly formed a convention that ratified the Ordinance of Nullification. The authors of this ordinance declared that the tariffs were, "unauthorized by the constitution of the United States, and violate the true meaning and intent thereof and are null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State." The Ordinance further stated that if the federal government attempted to force South Carolina to comply with the tariffs, the state would secede from the Union. President Andrew Jackson took South Carolina’s threat seriously and publicly denounced the state’s right to nullification and secession. He ordered the Secretary of War to prepare to use force to make South Carolina comply. This marked a changed in state and federal relations. It was the first time the federal government threatened force to assert its supreme authority. Along with preparing for war, Jackson attempted to resolve the conflict politically. He turned to ‘the Great Compromiser’ Henry Clay who helped push a series of lower tariffs through Congress to appease white South Carolinians. They accepted these new, lower tariffs and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification. The immediate crisis was over, but it had become clear how profoundly the system of slavery affected nearly every aspect of American life, especially the American economy.

 

Mexican-American War, 1846-1848

Heavily influenced by the expansionist principles of Manifest Destiny, President James K. Polk called for war with Mexico in May 1846. His goal was to expand the United States and acquire territory in the present-day southwest. In 1835, Texas gained its independence after war with Mexico. Texas remained an independent nation despite Mexico’s refusal to agree to a defined border. In spite of the possibility of incurring the wrath of Mexico, Polk’s predecessor, John Tyler, annexed Texas in 1845. Though Mexico failed to follow through with their threat of war following the annexation of Texas, tensions remained strained over the disputed border between Texas and Mexico. Polk exploited these tensions. He ordered U.S. troops, under future president Zachary Taylor, to occupy the disputed land between Mexico and Texas. While there, they skirmished with Mexican troops and Polk used this fighting to convince Congress to declare war on Mexico on May 13, 1846.

 

"A little more grape Capt. Bragg" - General Taylor at the Battle of Buena Vista, February 23rd, 1847

Library of Congress

The U.S army was highly successful in Mexico and captured the Mexican capital by September 1847, effectively ending the fighting. The war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. In this treaty, the United States, in exchange for 15 million dollars, received California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. This cession reduced the size Mexico by half and added 525,000 square miles to the United States. However, the war intensified sectional tensions. Many northerners opposed the war as they felt it was an unjustified attack on weaker nation designed by southern politicians to acquire more land in which to expand slavery. Their fears were confirmed with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which added vast amounts of land to the United States that had the potential to become slave states. The abolition or acceptance of slavery in these incoming states threw the balance of power in Congress into question.

 

Congressman David Wilmot

Library of Congress

The Wilmot Proviso, 1846-1850

“As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico, by the United States, … neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any part of said territory.” These words were part of anti-slavery amendment that freshman Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed that further divided the nation over the future of slavery in the growing Untied States. This amendment, later called the Wilmot Proviso, showed the growing strength of sectional politics. The House voted to attach the Wilmot Proviso to President Polk’s appropriations bill, which called for two million dollars to pay Mexico for any territory required from the Mexican-American War. The bill passed the House twice, but the Senate refused to vote on the bill until the restrictions on slavery were removed. Polk’s appropriations bill eventually passed without the Wilmot Proviso. However, though it was never passed, the debates over the Wilmot Proviso signaled a political shift. The outcome of both votes on the bill in the House of Representatives landed squarely on sectional lines. Both northern Democrats and Whigs supported the amendment, while southern Democrats and Whigs voted against it. This sectional vote showed a major change in American politics—the predominance of political parties began to fade in favor of sectional allegiance.

 

Go to Part 2 of the Road to Secession