Themes of the American Civil War

New England distinctiveness and moral superiority, and commentators in the s began to speak of the universal Yankee nation that was spreading from the Northeast westwards into New York and Ohio. But most other northerners, including religious Dissenters of New England origin, could not accept Yankee cultural hegemony and there was little evidence of a distinctive Northern nationalism before the s. The emergence of a distinctive regional identity in the Old Northwest combined happily with popular allegiance to the American nation.
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Similarly, the parallel sense of Southern nationalism gained its first formal articulations in the South Carolina upcountry in the s, but it did not reflect the reality of Southern sentiment, for the South continued to share many loyalties—partisan, religious,
associational, commercial, and familial—with residents of the free states.
Moreover, the South was culturally and economically less distinct from the North than Southern nationalists claimed. Indeed, their abortive attempts late in the antebellum period to create a separate Southern culture,
Southern economic independence, a Southern literature, were all tacit acknowledgments that in reality southerners—like New Englanders—
continued to be part of the rich tapestry of American national life.
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Though some sense of Southern distinctness existed from before the
Revolution, for most southerners allegiance to the South did not contradict allegiance to the Union—any more than the sense of American distinctness had contradicted loyalty to Britain before 1763. Even in independent
Texas, between 1836 and 1845, the Fourth of July had been celebrated along with the anniversary of San Jacinto, since the sense of Texan nationality never excluded affection for the American Union.
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Before southerners could think of creating a separate nation they had to go through a process akin to that of 1763–1776: their commitment to Southernism and Americanism had to be transformed into the sense that non-southerners were twisting
Americanism into something that contradicted traditional shared values.
Undeniably that sense of revulsion accelerated in the crisis of the late 1840s,
as Virginia demonstrated in 1849 when it repealed the oath of loyalty to the United States customarily required of state officeholders. Yet most southerners hesitated and continued to cling to the Union in 1850, despite all the warnings of Southern nationalists and proslavery radicals.
Through the s many southerners continued to work within the federal system to achieve their ends. As the Democratic Party became the main vehicle through which the majority of southerners expressed their political aspirations after 1850, so they were able to command the party that automatically became the majority party nationally. Secure in their influence over Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, they were able to ensure that federal power was used only in ways that were acceptable to the South.
They pressed for foreign policies that might gain more slave territory and so increase the number of slave states in the Union. They actually opened to
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slavery territories like Kansas that had long been guaranteed free soil,
and prevented the exercise in the territories of federal powers that had been commonplace in the Union’s Western empire of 1787–1848. The only positive uses of federal power most southerners now favored concerned the protection of slavery, as they insisted on the execution of the new, more arbitrary Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and finally, in 1860, demanded that
Congress impose a slave code on the territories.
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The South’s ability to dictate federal policy derived from the usual divisions within Northern society and politics. Indeed, in areal sense, the
North had never existed the various distinct regions north of the Mason–
Dixon Line and the Ohio River were united by little beyond their economic interconnections, their partisan ties, and their common commitment to the
Union. The term the North had been imprecise and was often used—even as late as simply for New England.
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But when southerners ripped up the Missouri compromise in 1854 and seemed determined to impose proslavery policies on the Union, they prompted the creation and electoral growth of a purely Northern political party—the Republicans—that reflected not the tradition of sectional compromise but the defense of non-Southern interests. In the process, northerners began to create an ideology that projected a clear idea of what a nation uncorrupted by the slave power”
should be and should do.
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The Republicans were able to become the official spokesmen fora Northern version of American nationalism because Southern leaders in
Washington rejected policies that had won the Democratic Party support in the North in the past. Thus southerners enabled the Republican Party to broaden its policy stance from its original single issue—the exclusion of slavery from the Far West by congressional law—and embrace the idea that the federal government must be freed from the denying hand of Southern negativity. In particular, Southern politicians were preventing the federal government from taking practical steps to alleviate the North’s economic difficulties following the Panic of 1857. The Secretary of the Treasury,
Howell Cobb, of Georgia, refused to ease the financial situation by using the monetary instruments that his predecessors had developed. The recession hit the iron and coal industries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern
Ohio especially hard, largely, it was claimed, because Congress had reduced the tariff to its lowest levels early in 1857, but the Southern Democrats refused to restore even the modest level of incidental protection available between 1846 and 1857. Southerners also persuaded the President, in and 1860, to veto measures that might speedup the settlement of the territories, even though until recently many southerners had been willing to support federal financing of internal improvements or the granting of western land to actual settlers on generous terms. Similarly, the proposal that federal aid for higher education should be granted to all states in the form
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of land grants was vetoed by President Buchanan after it passed Congress.
Hence the Republican party could begin to demand that the federal government, once freed of corrupting influences, should take positive action to assist economic recovery and progress in the process it shifted the focus of Northern politics from the future of slavery to the preservation of free labor, and so broadened its appeal to ordinary Northern farmers and workingmen. As a result, the Republicans achieved in 1860 what had hitherto been impossible—a landslide in the Northern states alone sufficient to win them federal power.
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Almost inevitably, therefore, the accession to power by the Republicans was bound to see an assertion of federal power, a return to active government, such as the national Whig Party had demanded before 1854 and the South had prevented since. It was this threatened restoration of federal authority by men they could no longer trust—and who owed nothing to Southern votes—that persuaded the South to carryout what James
McPherson has called a preemptive counterrevolution hysterical with fear that Northern meddling with slavery might upset their system of racial control, they determined to secede from a Union that the “Black”
Republicans were about to command. The creation of the Confederacy in showed not that a sense of Southern nationhood already existed,
but that many southerners desired independence from external threats.
Unlike their fathers in 1776, the various states seceded individually, not as part of a consciously nascent nation, and piecemeal raked together their Confederacy as an afterthought. The best they could do was to copy,
with extra protection for slavery, the only Union they had known and revered.
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The war would demonstrate that the rebels emerging spirit of
Confederate nationalism lacked the long-established emotional roots that held the Union side together. In the course of the struggle the sense of exclusive Southern nationality would grow, forced on by the experience and necessities of the war, and yet southerners would accept forced reunification with remarkable ease after 1865. As Kenneth Stampp has commented,
Reconstruction would show that most southerners could accept the restoration of the Union but not federal intrusion in the South’s internal race relations.
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However, in seceding, the Confederate states had deprived themselves of the constitutional and political protections that slaveholders enjoyed within the old Union, and the war saw the Union strengthened—at least temporarily—in ways they could not have foreseen in their worst nightmares. In effect, the revolutionary experience of war had transformed
American nationalism, promoting—at least for the time being—the sense of a unitary nation, directed by a central democratic government that would turn national ideals into conscious reality. As a result, the victorious
North would endeavor to recreate the American nation according to the
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image it had evolved of a Union without slavery in the years immediately before the war. Yet by the late s heightened nationalist expectations had receded and the federal government had reverted to the more limited constitutional role that had traditionally proved most appropriate for the federal republic.
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The antebellum Union had survived so long because of the immense emotional and practical investment that Americans had made in it. Each year they reenacted the Declaration of Independence and revered the founders of the republic. They constantly debated the meaning of the Union, its character and its limits and while they disagreed, they nearly always assumed the desirability of its continuance. A tradition of constitutional Unionism developed that made compromise a good in itself, an expression of the highest values of the nation.
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And when the price of adhering to that Union became too great for the majority of southerners in 1860–61, Americans elsewhere—and many southerners—believed that they had no choice but to fight for the preservation of the Union and the flag that symbolized it.
Their persistence and self-sacrifice in the face of disaster, death, and destruction proved once more how truly and profoundly attached and committed
Americans were to the national (if decentralized) existence they had come to prize long before the Civil War.
Notes
1.
This chapter has been stimulated by years of discussion with the late Peter Parish, whose lectures and writings on American nationalism and the antebellum Union I learned much from, and yet I find myself still stubbornly in disagreement with him. With great generosity he made many helpful comments on my developing argument, though he always thought it wrongheaded. See especially Peter J. Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil
War, ed. Adam IP. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant (New York, 2003), esp. pp. 57–122, The editors have generously continued his constructive criticism, despite their own well reasoned views Brian Holden Reid, The Origins of the American Civil War (London, esp. pp. 35–42; Susan-Mary Grant, Nationalism in Peter J. Parish, ed, Reader’s Guide to

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