Themes of the American Civil War

PART
One and Inseparable
I

CHAPTER
The State of the Union, 1776–1860
DONALD RATCLIFFE
Historians of the American Civil War are often tempted to exaggerate the weakness of the Union before 1860. If the ties holding the various states together were fragile, it is easier to explain why the Union broke apart in the secession winter of 1860–61. Accordingly, historians often argue that state loyalties had always been stronger than national loyalties, that long- established differences between the states made a powerful central authority inappropriate and impossible, and that therefore the federal government had always been weak and inactive in the antebellum years. The story can then emphasize how the success of federal forces in the Civil War finally established the principle that the Union was sacrosanct and perpetual, while the undoubted expansion of federal power during the conflict created central institutions such as the Union had never previously possessed. Thus an
American nation, based on a true American nationalism, developed only after 1860, largely as a consequence of four years of bloody internecine strife between North and South. In this respect, at least, many modern Civil War historians would agree with the epic filmmaker D. W. Griffith for them too,
the events of the s marked The Birth of a Nation.”
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This view is, however, fundamentally misleading. In the first place, it underestimates the strength of the Union between the sand the 1820s.
Powerful nationalizing forces in the late eighteenth century created the
United States as a coherent—if highly variegated and decentralized—
republic that was bound together by a widely felt sense of shared political identity. In this respect America was typical of the many European and
European-settled nations that developed an exclusive self-awareness between
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1765 and 1815 in response to either increasingly restrictive colonial rule or foreign conquest. Second, the system of federal government adopted in the United States in 1787–88 incorporated a central government with more real power than historians of the mid-nineteenth century often concede.
Those powers were deliberately used in the decades following 1789, enabling the federal government to make a decisive contribution to the survival,
development, and further integration of the United States. Thus a proper appreciation of the true strength of the antebellum Union, and the forces underlying it, requires careful consideration of the period before the
Missouri crisis.
Even after that sudden revelation of deep sectional differences over slavery in 1819–20, the internal political dynamic of the Union served to mitigate the sense of state and regional distinctiveness. American political conflicts after 1828 operated within a national party system that had the effect of easing, and at times directly counteracting, sectional differences. Thus tendencies towards the creation of regional nationalisms were repeatedly overwhelmed by internal partisan divisions that led minorities to look for allies in other states and regions. The dominance of national parties devoted to maintaining a nationwide partisan consensus made possible the successful engineering of sectional compromises, which after 1828 increasingly meant reducing the scale of action of the federal government. In effect, the South’s growing concern for its own peculiar minority interests severely limited the exercise of federal power in the immediate antebellum decades, which explains why historians have sometimes exaggerated the inherent weakness of the Union before the Civil War. The strengthening of national power in the s reflected, in part, the restoration of the political situation that had existed before the South began to impose its deadening hand on the Union in the thirty years before the war.

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