North vs South: the Road to the Civil War

Two Economies, One Country

By 1850 the United States looked like two countries pretending to be one. The North was industrialising fast: by 1860 it had 1.3 million factory workers, 70% of the country’s railway track and a free-labour culture in which workers could (in theory) save, leave a job and start their own business. The South was a plantation economy whose wealth came from cotton, sugar and tobacco grown by enslaved labour. Around 4 million people were held in slavery in the South in 1860, on the eve of war. The wealthiest 1,500 families in the South — the so-called planter class — held political power in southern state capitals and shaped southern politics in Washington.

The Real Quarrel: Slavery’s Expansion

A common student answer is that ‘the Civil War was about slavery’. The historiographical consensus is sharper. The proximate fight was not over slavery’s existence in the South — the federal government did not have the constitutional power to abolish it there — but over slavery’s expansion into new western territories. The 1820 Missouri Compromise had managed the issue for thirty years. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to keep the Senate balanced, and drew a line at latitude 36°30′ across the Louisiana Purchase: north of the line, no new slave states; south of it, slavery permitted.

The Mexican Cession of 1848 dropped a vast new territory into a country whose Compromise had been written for the Louisiana Purchase. The 1850 Compromise tried to patch the system: California entered as a free state, the Fugitive Slave Act required northerners to return runaway enslaved people, and the slave trade was banned in Washington DC. The patch held for four years. In 1854 Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise altogether: in any new territory the question of slavery would now be decided by the votes of settlers themselves — popular sovereignty.

Bleeding Kansas and Dred Scott

The 1854 Act made Kansas the front line. Anti-slavery free-soilers and pro-slavery Missourians both rushed in to swing the vote. By 1856 the territory had two rival governments and open political violence: in May, pro-slavery raiders sacked the free-soil town of Lawrence; days later, the abolitionist John Brown led the killing of five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. Eastern newspapers christened the territory ‘Bleeding Kansas’. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people could not be US citizens and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in any territory — in effect declaring the entire 1820 Compromise unconstitutional. Northern opinion was outraged.

Lincoln, Davis and the Election of 1860

By 1860 the political parties had broken along the same fault line. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, opposed slavery’s expansion (though not its existence in the South). Its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, ran on a platform of stopping slavery from spreading any further west. The Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings, fielding two candidates and dividing its vote. Lincoln won the November 1860 election with 40% of the popular vote and a comfortable majority in the Electoral College — without carrying a single southern state. Within six weeks South Carolina had voted to secede; by February 1861 seven states had formed the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as president. Four more states joined after war began.

The trigger was Fort Sumter, a federal garrison in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. Lincoln refused to surrender it. Confederate forces opened fire on 12 April 1861. The fort fell within 36 hours and Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. The Civil War — the bloodiest in American history — had begun.