The Irrepressible Conflict: Reasons for the inevitability of the American Civil War (original) (raw)
Related papers
This paper explores the centrality of the Missouri Crisis to the birth of the Abolitionist Movement and how that contributed to the coming of the American Civil War. It also seeks to explain how debates during the Constitutional Era set the tone for disagreement over slavery and its relationship to westward expansion, which became a key feature of why the Missouri Crisis began in the first place and why dissent continued to grow as the United States progressed through the Antebellum Period.
“President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery”
“President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 105 (March 2019), 843 – 867
Historians have long sought to assess the role of President James Monroe in forging and then negotiating the passage of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Their assessments have been written within a historiographical tradition that praises statesmanship over sectionalism, celebrates southern statesmen's invocations of union and nationalism, and elevates compromise to the loftiest of American political values. Within that historiographical paradigm, interpretations of the politics of slavery focus on how sectional extremists exploited the fragility of the Union for their own purposes, and how moderate unionist statesmen intervened to save the Union from sectionalists. In turn, much historical writing seeks to identify sectional threats to union, castigate disunionists, and then celebrate how unionists won in every sectional crisis from the 1770s through the late 1850s, or explain how disunionists triumphed in 1860-1861. Overlapping spectrums of union and disunion, slavery and antislavery, statesmen and sectionalists form a metanarrative that provides an outline for most writing on slavery and politics from the American Revolution through the Civil War. In the broader scholarly literature on the politics of slavery, disunionism and narrow sectionalism are cardinal sins; unionism and nationalism are virtues. 1
Reconfiguring the Old South: "Solving" the Problem of Slavery, 1787-1838
Journal of American History, 2008
The Old South "Solves" the Problem of Slavery Confederation would not join the new Union. A second South Carolina delegate, former governor John Rutledge, warned his fellow delegates that "if the Convention thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will ever agree to the plan, unless their right to import slaves be untouched, the expectation is vain. The people of those states will never be such fools as to give up so important an interest." The Georgia delegate Abraham Baldwin claimed that his state too was "decided on this point," adding that Georgia viewed the slave trade question as of a "local nature," not a "national" matter.