Antebellum Politics, Sectionalism, and the Roots of the Civil War

Question 1

Disowning Slavery - Joanne P. Melish

Answer 1

• NE gradual emancipation was filled with abuse and fraud
• New Englanders feared free blacks would cause disorder
• New Englanders sought to eliminate the memory of slavery
• Melish argues that race emerged in late 18th century, I might argue it goes back further
• The New England nationalist conception = free America as a White Republic

Question 2

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men - Eric Foner

Answer 2

• Republican free-labor ideology came to dominate the North by 1856
• Whig-Republican doctrine didn’t view labor and capital as being in conflict
• Republicans were less about big business than they were about ensuring upward mobility for laborers
• Van Buren Northern Democrats helped develop Republican free-labor ideology
• Free Soil fought slavery in part to keep land open for white men to settle
• Republican’s flawed attitude toward race via the limitations of free labor’s outlook towards blacks foreshadowed the problems of reconstruction

Question 3

The Coming of the Civil War - Avery Craven

Answer 3

• The coming of the Civil War was a “tragedy of errors” caused by a “blundering generation”
• The Civil War was not irrepressible
• Slavery was not the distinguishing feature of the South
• Garrisonian abolitionism created more problems than it solved
• Calhoun “wrecked a nation in defense of sectionalism”
• Van Buren’s defection to Free Soil broke Northern Democrats and increase sectional tensions
• Radical politicians on both sides (abolitionists and fire eaters) drove the country to war, but it didn’t have to go to war

Question 4

The Impending Crisis - David M. Potter

Answer 4

• Focus on the 1850s
• The North and South were more similar than historians give them credit for culturally, and had economies that worked well together rather than stoked conflict
• Slavery is at the crux of all explanations for sectionalism
• Slavery gave “false clarity” to sectional diversities that were in reality very minor
• Wilmot and Calhoun’s contrasting positions about slavery in the territories stoked the flames of sectionalism
• Throughout the 1850s the South came to define itself more and more on slavery over everything else, eventually leading to conflagration in 1860

Question 5

The Compromise of 1850

Answer 5

The Compromise of 1850 called for the admission of California as a free state; the strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law; popular sovereignty in Utah and New Mexico concerning the question of slavery; the abolition of the slave trade in D.C.; and the federal assumption of Texas’s debt.

Question 6

The Road to Disunion Vol II - William W. Freehling

Answer 6

• The South was not unified over slavery
• South Carolina radicals were responsible for secession, not the entire south
• slavery became characterized as a mechanism that inhibited white men’s power to govern themselves

Question 7

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

Answer 7

It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´.

Question 8

The Slaveholding Republic - Don E. Fehrenbacher

Answer 8

• The Constitution was neutral on the question of slavery
• the constitution’s neutrality on slavery was overshadowed by political and legal developments which, over time, transformed the U.S. into a slaveholding republic
• slaveholder’s control of the national government allowed them to interpret the constitution in a more pro-slavery way