Coming Of The Civil War Research Articles

“There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War

“There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War

"There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War by John L. Brooke

Reviewed by: "There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War by John L. Brooke Adam Smith (bio) Keywords Fugitive slaves, U.S. Civil War, Slavery, Fugitive Slave Act "There is a North": Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War. By John L. Brooke. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. 376. Paper, $26.95.) The premise of this important book is that to understand the coming of the Civil War we need to focus less on why it happened and more on how it did. It is probably true that, as Chris Clark argued in his book on the coming of the First World War, Sleepwalkers, historians often under-study the "how" compared with the "why." In truth, the two are often so entangled that without a careful sequencing of events and forensic attention to relationships and communication, the "why" can become an abstraction. So far as the American Civil War is concerned, no serious historian disagrees with Abraham Lincoln's observation in his second inaugural about why the war came: Slavery, he said, was "somehow, the cause of the war." The historiographical question is about that "somehow." The brilliance of John Brooke's analysis is to engage with this "how" question by setting in a single frame both the political and the cultural transformations of the 1850s, and then to offer a method for understanding the nature of their entanglement. The literature on the coming of the Civil War is usually framed (one might say "caricatured") as a debate between "fundamentalists" and "revisionists." The former emphasize the inevitability of an "irrepressible conflict" between free society and one based on human enslavement, while the latter point out that since there had been a division over slavery since at least the revolutionary era without a civil war, the critical question was what happened in the 1850s to disrupt the political order—and sometimes they have found answers that do not bear directly on slavery at all. Like the "fundamentalists," Brooke sees slavery as an intractable, deep-seated problem. Indeed, he effectively aligns himself with the most recent variant of the "fundamentalist" school as exemplified by the work of Richard Blackett and Manisha Sinha, which specifically identifies the self-emancipation of enslaved people as the critical disruptive force. But, like the "revisionists," Brooke's focus is on why, given this instability, the system broke down when it did. Until quite recently it was the accepted wisdom that the Compromise of 1850 temporarily quieted the sectional conflict until it was ripped open [End Page 171] again by the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act. That, after all, was apparently how Abraham Lincoln experienced those years. But Brooke joins many other scholars in moving the critical juncture earlier by emphasising the destabilizing, radical impact of the Underground Railroad and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The famous "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" that triggered the political realignments of the mid-1850s fell on fertile ground; the northern population had already become newly conscious of the humanity of enslaved people and the threat to the polity inherent in maintaining the slave system. The Fugitive Slave Act was a brutal manifestation of the apparent intention of the Slave Power to force the submission to their rule not just of Black people but also of white northerners who were legally compelled, in theory, to assist in the rendition of fugitives. There is a refreshing clarity to Brooke's insistence that the arena we need to focus on in is, in the end, not the South but the North. The white South, after all, knew only too well how difficult it was to maintain slavery. Whatever the proslavery literature claimed to the contrary, the obvious reality that enslaved people wanted to be free drove the politics of the South. Slaveholders needed the Federal government to be strong enough to be coercive and willing to uphold the doctrine of property in man. As Brooke writes, the white South would never have been willing to accept a Federal government controlled by a party that did not accept the legitimacy of slave property. That had been as...

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs As we write this editors' note in summer 2021, we are hopeful that many in-person activities will soon resume, including the conferences, seminars, workshops, and writing groups that are so important to our collective work. Our issue features three research essays about men's lives that touch on politics, ideology, and power. Daniel Crofts takes a new look at a famous diarist in "Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian." An elite Philadelphian, Fisher had generally conservative political instincts. Yet he became increasingly troubled by southern politicians' demands for dominance in the 1850s, eventually siding with the Republicans and, when war came, even supporting emancipation. The story of Fisher's political evolution is a reminder of the diversity and contentiousness of the Republican coalition. In "William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker," Cynthia Nicoletti follows Trescot, a South Carolina lawyer and politician (and historian), to Washington, DC, where he lobbied President Andrew Johnson to restore land to his state's planter elite. Trescot entered directly into political negotiations about the future of land confiscated from Confederates during the war, using his legal savvy and political connections to discredit demands for land redistribution by South Carolina freedpeople and O. O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. Tarik Yiğit explores Civil War veterans in Egypt in "Reconstructing the American under the Most Unimaginable Conditions: Civil War Veterans in the 'Arabian Nights.'" Egypt's leader, Ismail Pasha, sought American advisors after the war, and many U.S. and Confederate veterans were happy to oblige. Impelled by the chance to earn an income and an associated sense of manhood, Civil War veterans in Egypt contributed their skills in surveying, military training, and armed conflict itself. Many had known each other before the war, and Egypt became a site where Americans who had fought on both sides grappled with one another and with the Civil War's legacies. In his review essay, "The Common Soldier of the Civil War: His Rise and Fall," Gerald Prokopowicz examines evolving scholarly interest in Civil War soldiers. Historical scholarship on the rank and file has been shaped by subsequent wars and by historians' changing approaches to the past. What was once represented as a generalizable "common soldier" experience—atleast [End Page 447] for Confederate soldiers on the one hand and US ones on the other—has been shattered, but questions of why people fought endure. With this issue, we say goodbye to our editorial assistant, Megan Hildebrand, a PhD candidate at Penn State, whose term is ending and whose excellent work we have appreciated tremendously. Edward Green is the new editorial assistant, and we welcome him to the team. We also express special gratitude to the authors, peer reviewers, and book reviewers who made time to contribute to the journal during the difficult months of the pandemic. We hope they and all our readers are faring well and that we'll see one another soon. [End Page 448] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian

Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

“There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War

John Brooke shows that "between 1850 and 1854, white northerners experienced fundamental political and cultural shifts that pushed enough of them towards an active antislavery politics that a conflagration with the slaveholding South became almost inevitable."

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina. By Lawrence T. McDonnell

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina. By Lawrence T. McDonnell

The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act by Alice Elizabeth Malavasic

Reviewed by: The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act by Alice Elizabeth Malavasic John R. Wunder The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Alice Elizabeth Malavasic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4696-3552-1. 280 pp. paper, $29.95. Many scholars have assessed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The clear majority of them believe its passage and implementation were prime causal factors that brought on the American Civil War. Most of these works treat two of the primary factors: the law’s significance and historic meaning and the drive to expand slavery among the states. The primary work continues to be James A. Rawley’s Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (1969), and the most recent work, The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 (2008), edited by John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross, focuses on the long neglected Nebraska aspect. Less attention has been given to the detailed political history required for the law’s passage, particularly in the US Senate, and the context of these developments. This then is the subject of the new work by Alice Malavasic, The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It appears that four senators from slave states wanted to pass this new law. They include Robert M. T. Hunter and James Murray Mason, both of Virginia; Andrew Pickens Butler, South Carolina; and David Rice Atchison, Missouri. The “F Street Four” coalesced around this potential new law, often referred to as the Nebraska bill, and even found a gathering place to live, a house on F Street—hence the title of the book. Politics was undergoing a massive change. The passings of John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay eliminated some of the law’s founding senators. These men enjoyed great respect from the F Street Four, but it was clear that all three were in their twilight years. Perhaps to some degree, the F Street Four wanted to pass a revised act as a tribute to the elder senators. The primary contribution of this tightly focused political history is its prosopography (that is, collective biography) of the four senators. Each enjoyed [End Page 92] strong support in his home state, and each fought his way to the top of his political state pyramid. In the process of writing this book, Malavasic uncovered extensive sources at the local and state levels, and she masterfully puts them all together. The result is that we have a much greater understanding of what was actually behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Of the famed four senators, Atchison is perhaps the odd man out. He was primarily concerned about western issues and potential settlement in Kansas, and he saw his alliance with the three other senators of the Deep South as a necessary aspect of freeing up the lands in Kansas and Nebraska and making further development in Missouri possible. Much of the previous historical discussion has centered on Douglas and railroad investment west of Chicago. Now that we see the actions and goals achieved by the F Street senators, that seems less important. The Civil War was not kind to any of the Southern senators responsible for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as Malavasic shows by tracing their lives during and after the war. Some escaped and returned only to find their homes burned. The last surviving senator, Robert Hunter, “remained to his death uncompromising, unsuccessful, and unrepentant, the very epitome of the Slave Power” (197). Those who contributed to America’s greatest catastrophe obtained their earned reward. John R. Wunder University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2020 The Kent State University Press

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War

Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free-Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War

Lawrence T. McDonnell. Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina.

Lawrence T. McDonnell. Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina.

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura Tim Roberts (bio) Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Philip F. Gura. ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 328. Cloth, $29.95.) Scholars have remarked on the litany of social experiments, many committed to moral and political reform, which flamed in the early American republic. Alice Felt Tyler's and Ronald Walters's surveys explained mass movements including temperance, school reform, and antislavery as well as the more eccentric phenomena of utopian communities and phrenology. Rooted in Protestant evangelical religion, these reforms reflected Americans' grappling with the country's diversification and expansion and the spread of market forces. Tyler attributed this reform era to Americans' general optimism, predisposing them to be open to change. Walters, conversely, located the reforms' impulse in middle-class Americans' concern about modernization, along with confidence that improved or corrected behavior could cure modernization's evils. Tyler emphasized the reformers' lasting impact after the Civil War; Walters deemed their ambition to thwart capitalism a failure.1 Philip Gura offers a different approach to explore this reform impulse, providing not a social history survey but an interpretation of selected important reformers: George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry Thoreau, and John Brown. Like his predecessors, Gura sees social reform principally characterized by faith in individual agency and in anticipation that the nation's institutions would respond to Americans' capacity for good behavior. He emphasizes, however, the central impact of the Panic of 1837, the complexity of whose domestic and international causes escaped reformers' (and most Americans') understanding. Rather than lobby for greater government control of financial institutions and/or commodity prices, reformers, reflecting a general attitude of the age previously documented by Scott Sandage, attributed the problem to individual moral corruption, which, they believed, precipitated, rather than resulted from, financial failure. But for reformers, self-examination could [End Page 192] lead to repentance; newly conscientious individuals imagined, and many constructed, various prototypes of a good society. A few radicals even engaged in dramatic acts of rebellion against the corrupted institutions of an unregulated market society.2 In its organization around selected key or representative figures, Gura's book is reminiscent of Daniel Walker Howe's study of various individuals who were intent on self-improvement as a basis for remaking themselves and their society. But while Howe noted the success stories of America's culture of self-construction before the Civil War, Gura, like Walters, emphasizes the flawed idealism of his coterie. Ripley's Brook Farm utopian community, for example, championed self-realization but could not earn enough income to be sustainable. Greeley's interests, meanwhile, were too eclectic, and his advocacy of Associationism, a model of cooperative work and living adapted from the French socialist Charles Fourier, seemed, to many Americans, too socialist. Too late, Gura implies, Greeley realized that it was slavery that needed confronting.3 Likewise, fearful businessmen blocked Greene's advocacy of mutual banking laws, a stateless system he adapted from the writings of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in which all of a bank's subscribers, regardless of financial condition, could borrow the bank's fiat money at a minimal interest rate in order to buy land. Fowler's bestselling books about how the human brain's different regions directed certain behaviors or personality traits attracted a range of readers, from women interested in the benefits of looser clothing to prison wardens seeking to cure inmates. But these fascinations hardly constituted institutional reform. Nichols, like others, eschewed abolitionism because of a "preoccupation with another kind of bondage closer to home" (204). For her this meant advocacy of women's autonomy through their education on alternative nutrition, hydropathy, sexual activity, practice of birth control, and rejection of marriage, another influence of Fourier. Of Gura's reform leaders, Thoreau and Brown came closest to grappling with what became the critical issue of the era, slavery. Thoreau famously called for civil disobedience against the Mexican War, which he considered a proslavery conquest. Yet while a man's imprisonment [End Page...

The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas–Nebraska Act by Alice Elizabeth Malavasic

Reviewed by: The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas–Nebraska Act by Alice Elizabeth Malavasic Andrew F. Hammann (bio) The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas–Nebraska Act. By Alice Elizabeth Malavasic. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $29.95.) Alice Elizabeth Malavasic tells the story, and indeed the backstory, of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1854 and commonly cited by historians as the catalyst of the rise of the Republican Party and the sectional discord that became civil war. Malavasic's narrative, which spans the years 1837 to 1861, recounts how a tight-knit group of Congressmen who lived together on F Street in Washington, DC—David Atchison of Missouri, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and [End Page 605] Robert Hunter and James Mason of Virginia—came to play a decisive role in proposing and defending the most controversial element of the Kansas–Nebraska Act: the repeal of the Missouri Compromise's 36' 30" line, which banned slavery north of this latitude in the Louisiana Territory. Malavasic is not the first historian to point out that the F Street Mess wielded considerable power in shaping and passing a piece of legislation associated, most commonly, with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. She acknowledges this by pointing to past works by Michael Holt, Allan Nevins, David Potter, and, most recently, Rachel Shelden in Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013). What The F Street Mess adds to existing scholarship, Malavasic contends, is a deeper understanding of the role that the "group dynamic" among the four messmates played in constituting their outsized collective influence (14). Malavasic meticulously guides readers through the Kansas–Nebraska debates' complex politics and historical context. She explicates, often with notable clarity, a range of legal arguments made in favor of, or against repeal of, the 36' 30" line and connects these positions to the partisan agendas and personal interests (mostly land speculation and reelection) of the men who formulated them. To keep things lively, Malavasic inflects her delivery with moments of literary flair meant to conjure a sense of historical atmosphere. A good example appears in the lead paragraphs of Chapter 4 where she describes the commencement of the 1853–1854 Congressional session. Malavasic begins by panning around the vast, ornate Senate chamber and establishing each F Street Mess member's location within it. She then shifts the reader's gaze to the "small unadorned" and "spindly" current-bill box on whose bottom shelf a new Kansas–Nebraska bill would most likely soon be placed (81). With a sense of foreshadowing, she finally adds, "whether it would be one of the few [bills] to make it to the narrow top shelf" before the session's end was "uncertain"; "what it would look like if it did" was quite uncertain as well (82). The most intriguing aspect of the book lies in its overall conceptualization. Like Rachel Shelden, Malavasic points out that political histories can give insufficient attention to the ways that personal relationships shaped the political process. More commonly emphasized factors such as "ideology, party, and region" mattered, she readily acknowledges, but in certain instances "friendships" forged and sustained outside of [End Page 606] legislative halls overshadowed these factors in determining the laws produced within them (17). Malavasic contends that the Kansas–Nebraska Act, specifically the Missouri Compromise repeal article, was just such an instance. As valid and intriguing as Malavasic's framework is, it connects to an unsteady aspect of the book. While The F Street Mess provides thoughtful biographies of the individual messmates, it does not deliver a full enough sense of the Mess's group dynamic—the book's purported argumentative hinge—or the interpersonal elements that comprised it. In the first and second chapters, for instance, Malavasic makes much of John Calhoun being key to understanding the F Street Mess's cohesion and influence—"they were the heirs of Calhoun," she asserts (59). Yet these chapters, and subsequent ones, leave readers wanting deeper and more specific explanations of how each member personally understood this "inheritance" and how these understandings...

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus

A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Gerald Horne (bio) A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. 281. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $28.95.) This is an important book that sheds light on contemporary dilemmas. For almost nine decades following the launching of the successful revolt against British rule in North America in 1776, the anticolonial rebels and their successful republican project endured what could easily be termed "low-intensity conflict" in the form of resistance by the enslaved and uprisings by the Indigenous—often aided by London and related external foes—not to mention anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon conflict. Yet what Kay Wright Lewis focuses on in A Curse upon the Nation is not just resistance by the enslaved but also the oft-expressed desire to "exterminate"—her unearthing of the repeated use of this term is itself remarkable—this troublesome property, along with their real and imagined allies among "Free Negroes." At the same time, Lewis adroitly shows that the intended victims were not exactly dormant and in their attempt to escape oppression and persecution were not necessarily opposed to exploring their own liquidating enterprise, targeting their tormentors. In some ways, this worthy book tracks the conclusions presented in Carl Paulus's The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War (2017), and, indeed, the two can be read together profitably. Both suggest that the U.S. Civil War, with its massive bloodshed, should be seen not as a rupture from the past but, instead, as a simple escalation of what had been occurring in any case. The author seeks to trace this genocidal trend back to the colonial era, beginning with the brutal suppression of the Irish, then the North American Indigenes. With subtlety and sympathy, she limns the genocide against the Indigenous beginning in the early seventeenth century—including the Paspahegh, Chickahominy, Pamunkey, Doeg, Nanzemond, Portobacco, and Patawomeck—and the many ethnicities that were liquidated. She continues the downgrading and devaluation of Nathaniel Bacon and his eponymous 1676 rebellion against colonial rulers, who were thought not to be moving in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to eliminate the original inhabitants of this bountiful land. Page after page, the author tells the bloodthirsty story of how an alleged "empire of liberty" was created by [End Page 302] dint of the ouster of the Westos, Savannahs, Apalachees, Lower and Upper Creeks, Yamasees, and Tuscaroras, not to mention the Narragansetts, the Mohegans, the Pequots, the Lenni Lenapes, the Shawnees, and the Senecas. Lewis crosses the Atlantic and takes a look at war in Africa, with many warriors winding up enslaved in North America and the Caribbean, this perilous status emerging as a result of their being on the losing side in African wars and being sold to rapacious slave dealers. Those arriving on these shores, she argues, arrived with "military skills" honed in "Central Africa, from the Congo-Angola region to the island of Madagascar" (38). Thus, she explains, "Africans in the diaspora used their military backgrounds to foment insurrections and revolts across the Atlantic World. They attempted to kill whites to free themselves and their families from enslavement, while whites enacted internecine violence against blacks to maintain or reinstate enslavement" (59). Like Paulus, Lewis emphasizes the Haitian Revolution, which "served as a sober reminder of the powerful capacity of the African military forces that white Americans might face among their own slaves in rebellion. White fears were not without cause, as [Jean-Jacques] Dessalines did encourage those enslaved in Martinique and other parts of the diaspora to rebel" (73). Thus the electrifying events in Hispaniola from 1791 to 1804 can fairly be said to have inaugurated a general crisis of the entire slave system—including in North America—that could only be resolved with this system's collapse, notably after independent Haiti pushed London toward abolition and then allied with this power against independent—and slave-owning—Texas. This slave power's retreat into the arms of Washington and relinquishment of...

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina by Lawrence T. McDonnell

Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina by Lawrence T. McDonnell

Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War

Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War, by Carl Lawrence Paulus

Contrary to the claims of the 45th President of the United States, plenty of people have asked why the American Civil War took place. Generations of historians have debated, at length, the causes of the Civil War and why sectional tensions culminated in a bloody internecine conflict. Most modern scholars would agree that ‘slavery’ is the short answer to the above question, but it is also a beguilingly simple one; slavery, as an institution, had diverse political, social, economic and cultural influences on nineteenth-century America and so what, in particular, made it such a divisive element? Carl Lawrence Paulus’s book locates the persistent fear of black insurrection in the slaveholding South as central to this sectional division because it helped foster a regionally distinct vision of American exceptionalism. The South’s vision of America was ‘one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at the forefront of the nation’s purpose. As the planter elite lost power in the 1840s, they came to think that the Constitution and the Union they participated in no longer formed an exceptional government’ (p. 6). When they perceived, by the end of 1860, that they could no longer dominate the federal government nor rely on the Constitution or the free states to protect them sufficiently in the event of insurrection, the southern political class looked toward secession and potential civil war as a safer bet than remaining within the Union.

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War