Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

the American republic complete title to all their remaining colonial lands below Canada, stretching west beyond the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. Then, in 1803, President Jefferson bought up 830,000 square miles of old Spanish land beyond the Mississippi River for the United States for $15 million in spot cash from Napoleon Bonaparte, who had finally despaired of his project to re-create a French colonial empire in America. Both the midwestern land won from the British and the western lands bought by Jefferson originally had next to nothing in the way of American settlers in them, but there was no reason any of them could not soon fill up with settlers, organize themselves as federal territories, and then petition Congress for admission to the Union as states on an equal footing with the original states.

Because the Northwest Ordinance had already barred slavery from the upper midwestern land, the territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan all entered the Union as free states; slaveholders, skirting southward below the Ohio River, were content to organize Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana as states where slavery would remain legal. The trouble began when people started to look westward, beyond the Mississippi, where no Northwest Ordinance mandated the slave or free status of the land. Southerners anxious to keep open the way to new cotton land reasoned fearfully that if nonslaveholding Northerners squatted in the Louisiana Purchase lands and settled them as free states, the South could easily find itself barricaded in behind the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Surrounded by free states on the Mississippi and Ohio lines, and by Louisiana’s border with Spanish-held Mexico, cotton and slavery would suffocate, no matter what the Constitution said.

And so came the first of the great angry Southern demands for assurances about the future of slavery, in the form of the Missouri controversy of 1819, and with that controversy, the first in a series of threats that the slave states would leave the Union if sufficient assurances were not forthcoming. Then, and again in 1850, slaveholders would turn the Garrisonian gospel on its head and ask the rest of the United States to choose between slavery and the Union. Both times, desperate politicians would find a way to avert the choice, until finally, in 1861, the choice had to be made.

And the war came.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GAME OF BALANCES

The fatal sequence of public events in the United States that stretched from 1820 until 1861 and the outbreak of the American Civil War can be visualized as a game of balances, with the Union as the balance point along the beam, and the two trays representing the interests of North and South, slave and free. During those years, the federal Union became increasingly threatened and unstable as states or sections or interests laid the weight of their demands on one or the other of the trays and waited to see if the other states or sections or interests would produce reassurances and compromises weighty enough to right the balances.

Of all the issues that divided Americans and provoked them to threaten that equilibrium—tariffs, trade, banks, reform—nothing proved so heavy or so liable to plunge the balance off the table entirely as slavery. Slavery pitted cultures, economic interests, and moral antagonisms against each other; worse, it pitted states against other states; worst of all, it pitted whole associations of states (in this case, the South), which could plausibly regard themselves as a nation, against other whole associations of states (namely, the free North of the old colonies and the free West of the Northwest Ordinance). It was bad enough that in 1832 one single state had been willing to defy and disrupt the Union over the tariff question. It was almost unimaginable what might happen if several states, sharing common borders in a common section of the country, with a common culture and common economy, came to believe that their very way of life was at stake, and decided that self-preservation required disunion. Had slavery been legal only in far-removed places such as Minnesota and Florida, or Maine and Alabama, it is hard to see anyone there arguing that they could stand independently on their own among the nations of the world. There would be no such difficulty, however, if the fifteen slave states were grouped together in a single landmass, comprising 750,000 contiguous miles, and thus able to cooperate, communicate, and support one another. They would look like a nation, rather than just islands of complaint.

So long as some Americans still believed that the Union was only a federal union—only a league or federation of quasi-independent states that could be terminated at will—and so long as Southerners continued to believe that northern anti-slavery attacks on slavery constituted a real and present danger to Southern life and property, then disunion could not be ruled out as an ugly resort. And if the Northern states, and the federal government in Washington, failed to place on their balance pan a weight of assurances equal to Southern demands for reassurance about slavery, then the South would drop onto its pan the immense and destructive weight of disunion and the balance would be wrecked, perhaps forever.

That made the threat of secession useful.

The key word in understanding the South’s behavior throughout the four critical decades before the Civil War is threat. The Union had increasingly taken on the lineaments of a nation ever since the ratification of the Constitution, no matter what the secession-mongers liked to say, and the American Constitution had become increasingly intertwined with the idea of an American nation. It would always be easier to challenge both the Union and the Constitution in fustian rhetoric, but in practice, compromise within the Constitution would always get the greatest applause. Of course, in any compromise situation, threats are the weightiest chips to bargain with. So from the 1820s onward Southerners would begin talking a great deal about seceding from the Union, but frequently it was little more than intimidating talk, meant to squeeze