The Irrepressible Conflict: Reasons for the inevitability of the American Civil War (original) (raw)

“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.

Fundamental Ambiguity – The Failure of Compromise during the American Secession Crisis

2014

This dissertation examines the key attempts at reaching compromise between the secessionists of the Southern States and the Republican administration of Abraham Lincoln during the Secession Crisis of 1860-61. The question of why compromise failed to prevent the Civil War is analysed first in the context of the Secession Crisis itself. Then, the nature of an American compromise and Constitutional liberty is defined with the work of philosopher George Santayana, and an overview of the three main phases of historiography, traditionalist, revisionist, and post-revisionist, is provided. After that, the two main strands of reasoning behind the long-term failure of compromise, the idea that the North and South developed irreconcilable sectional differences that could not be compromised over, and the pervasion of dualistic moral abstractions preventing reasoned discussion of political issues, are elucidated on. Ultimately, it is argued that the failure to reach an enduring compromise stemmed from fundamental ambiguity in the Constitution, particularly in regards to slavery.

States Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union

2011

On December 20 we marked-I cannot say celebrated-the sesquicentennial of South Carolina's secession. By the end of February, 1861 six other states would follow South Carolina into the Confederacy. Most scholars fully understand that secession and the war that followed were rooted in slavery. As Lincoln noted in his second inaugural, as he looked back on four years of horrible war, in 1861 "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause