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Clash of Extremes
The Economic Origins of the Civil War
By Marc Egnal Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Marc Egnal
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4389-5
CHAPTER 1
Foundations
The Compromise of 1850 was the last hurrah for the Second Party System, which had emerged in the 1820s. For almost three decades Democratic and Whig politicians had stood shoulder to shoulder on national unity, while fighting each other over economic policies. Now that system was breaking down, as the voices of sectional spokesmen grew ever louder. With so much at stake the old guard, who had created and steered the two national parties, came together to rally the troops one last time. Henry Clay of Kentucky, founder and revered leader of the Whig Party, urged his fellow congressmen "solemnly to pause — at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawing abyss below." Stephen Douglas of Illinois, a leading Democrat and so often Clay's opponent, joined with the Kentuckian in supporting the Compromise. Douglas concluded his remarks with a note of cautious optimism: "The excitement is subsiding, and reason resuming its supremacy. The question is rapidly settling itself, in spite of the efforts of the extremes at both ends of the Union to keep up the agitation. The people of the whole country ...will not consent that this question shall be kept open for the benefit of politicians, who are endeavoring to organize parties on geographical lines."
Events would prove Douglas's optimism unfounded. Even though the Compromise of 1850 was adopted, "parties on geographical lines" soon replaced the national organizations of the Second Party System. In little more than a decade the "efforts of the extremes" drove the nation into that abyss Clay so feared. That was the end of the era of compromises. But how did it all begin? It started with the unifying impact of the American economy in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s and with a remarkable set of party builders: Clay, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.
I.
The economy of the young republic provided the foundations for an era of sectional compromise and resilient national parties. To begin with, in the West the Mississippi River formed a powerful North-South axis, bringing together the Northwest and Southwest. In October 1811 the steamboat New Orleans made a historic voyage, traveling from Pittsburgh to the Crescent City. In New Orleans this first steamboat to appear on the "Western waters" took on cargo and made the trip back upriver to Natchez. Robert Fulton, the artist and inventor who had helped design and finance the vessel, was delighted. "The Mississippi ...is conquered," he exclaimed to his friend Joel Barlow, and added, "These are conquests perhaps as valuable as those [of Napoleon] at Jena." Before the voyage of the New Orleans, rafts and keelboats had brought goods down the Mississippi, but the return voyage had been slow, arduous, and expensive. The steamboat changed all that. The cost of goods imported through New Orleans fell precipitously, as did traveling times in both directions.
Despite the voyage of the New Orleans, the age of the steamboat on Western waters did not arrive until the 1820s, when trade along the "Father of Waters" began to grow rapidly. As late as 1818 only thirty steamboats operated in the West. By 1830 more than 150 steamboats plied the Mississippi and its tributaries. That number increased to nearly 500 in 1840 and over 600 in 1850. Trade expanded still more rapidly than these numbers suggest, as steady technological advances (at least until the 1840s) allowed vessels to carry more cargo, more quickly, more safely, and for more days each year.
The expansion of trade on the Mississippi and its tributaries had far-reaching ramifications. It tied the Western states together and defined, for many Americans, a capacious, fertile region that transcended North-South divisions. Many politicians extolled the unity and power of the Great Valley. Among them was John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina leader who hoped support from the Valley along with his popularity in the South would propel him into the presidency. In 1845 he traveled to Memphis to chair the Southwestern Convention. At a gathering in New Orleans, he offered a toast: "The Valley of the Mississip[p]i. — The greatest in the world, take it all in all. Situated as it is, between the two oceans, it will yet command the commerce of the world, and that commerce may be centred in New Orleans." At Memphis Calhoun promoted a rail network to connect the Mississippi River with Charleston.
Many others shared this belief in the greatness of the Valley. Stephen Douglas built his career on the assumption of Western unity. In the late 1840s he pushed for aid to the Illinois Central Railroad and the construction of a railroad linking Mobile and Chicago as a complement to river-borne traffic. In his speech defending the Compromise of 1850 Douglas pointed to the Valley as the heart of the country. He told his fellow senators: "There is a power in this nation greater than either the North or South — a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to this nation, and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the great West — the Valley of the Mississippi, one and indivisible from the gulf to the great lakes ...There, sir, is the hope of this nation."
Lewis Cass of Michigan was another politician who trumpeted the unity of the Great Valley — and he clung to that belief long after sectional conflict had divided the Northwest from Southwest. Born in New Hampshire in 1782, Cass moved to the Northwest Territory with his family in 1801. He stood out in the newly settled West for his education (he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and read law in Ohio) and his ability. During the War of 1812 he was appointed colonel of an Ohio regiment and rose to be major general of volunteers. President Madison rewarded Cass for his wartime services by naming him Governor of Michigan Territory, a post he held until 1831. Cass was a strong defender of Western interests, an outspoken expansionist, and by the 1830s a loyal Democrat. He became secretary of war under Jackson, ambassador to France, Democratic presidential candidate in 1848, Michigan senator, and secretary of state under James Buchanan. In the 1850s as sectional tension mounted, Cass, who was now well into his seventies, reaffirmed his lifelong faith in the importance of the Great Valley. "I have descended its mighty river two thousand miles in a birch canoe," he told his fellow senators in 1856, "when there was hardly a white man above St. Louis." He continued: "The destinies of this Republic, in the event of internal dissensions, will be found in the hearts and heads and hands of the people of the West, and there they will, I trust, be safe."
The movement of population within the Mississippi Valley reinforced these unities. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century the Northwest was settled largely by Southern migrants who were drawn to the fertile soils on the north side of the Ohio River. Fully 58 percent of the delegates who wrote the first constitution for Indiana were born in the South. After Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1819, its first two senators, its single representative, and its governor were all Southern born. Not everyone leaving the South applauded the practices of their native region. Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln, who moved with his family to Indiana before settling in Illinois, abhorred slavery. But most of these migrants remained far more sympathetic than other Northerners to the arguments put forth by the states' rights leaders.
The Border States, with their increasingly close ties to the North, comprised a second force for national unity. These commonwealths — Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — were the march lands of the slave regime and gradually were drawn into the Northern commercial orbit. The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, hailed from this region. After Clay's death in 1852, another Kentuckian, John J. Crittenden, assumed his mantle. Even as economic change after midcentury transformed the North and the cotton South, deepening the hostility between the sections, Border State politicians remained peace weavers.
A third set of economic ties — the links between the manufacturers and merchants of the North and the cotton planters of the South — also drew together the sections. Northern mills, which expanded rapidly after the War of 1812, consumed perhaps a fifth of the cotton crop. Shipments of this raw material to the North amounted to nearly $20 million a year and encouraged the mill owners to look favorably upon ties with the South. This relationship culminated in the election of a prominent "cotton Whig," Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts, as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1847. The Boston Whig harrumphed: "Mr. Winthrop is elected as the favorite candidate of the slaveholding section of the party of South Carolina."
Ties between New Yorkers and cotton planters were equally strong. New York merchants, working with their representatives in the Southern ports and smaller towns, purchased and shipped most of the cotton crop. Manhattan's position as the nation's financial capital meant that New York traders could offer their correspondents favorable terms, ousting other competitors from this commerce. Brokers were able to extend to landowners the year's credit they needed to finance their crop and to continue acquiring slaves and land. Typically, New York vessels carried the cotton directly from the South to Europe, although some of the bales were brought to docks along the East River for reshipment. New Yorkers profited from shipping, insuring, and financing the crop, as well as selling it. Manhattan traders also supplied manufactures and other finished goods to the South, and here New York's role as entrepot was unmistakable; the cloth and hardware that the planters needed arrived first in New York and then were re-shipped to the South. Many New Yorkers, rich and poor, were involved in these exchanges and came to sympathize with the South and its view of national issues.
A fourth aspect of the national economy contributed to this era of cooperation: the South, with the assistance of the federal government, grew rapidly during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. The new soils of the Southwest delivered high returns, creating a series of land rushes and waves of speculation. Virginian Joseph Baldwin, who visited Alabama and Mississippi in the mid-1830s, reported, "This country was just settling up. Marvellous accounts had gone forth of the fertility of its virgin lands; and the productions of the soil were commanding a price remunerating to slave labor as it had never been remunerated before. Emigrants came flocking in from all quarters of the Union, especially from the slaveholding States. The new country seemed to be a reservoir, and every road leading to it a vagrant stream of enterprise and adventure." Such returns were less notable in the older states of the South; by the 1820s landowners in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas complained of falling yields. But Tennessee, Kentucky, and the new states of the Southwest had rich lands to offer settlers.
Until the late 1840s the federal government played a crucial role in promoting Southern growth. With Andrew Jackson's victory at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, in 1814 and the expulsion of the Cherokee from Georgia in 1838, the federal government drove the Indians from the fertile soils they had long occupied. Washington also pressured Spain to give up Florida in 1819 and forced Mexico to relinquish all claims to territory north of the Rio Grande in 1848. The national government provided other benefits to Dixie. French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the early 1830s, remarked that the South was "bound to wish the Union to have a strong fleet" to protect its exports, and noted that "southerners must wish to preserve the Union so that they should not face the blacks alone." Tocqueville observed that such advantages made Southerners strong supporters of the Union but added ominously, "I have no confidence in that calculated patriotism which is founded on interest and which a change of interests may destroy."
II.
The economy of the young republic helped unify Americans in still another way. It provided the basis for national parties by fostering common sets of interests and similar conflicts in every state. The growth that quickened in the 1820s divided Americans within each town and state as never before. The United States always had rich and poor people. What was new after the War of 1812 was the dramatic expansion of opportunities to rise or fall in the world. In the colonial era the standard of living rose about 0.5 percent a year; by the 1820s the pace had quickened to 1.5 percent. What these numbers mean is that, unlike the stately pace of change in colonial times, growth now was jarring and spectacular and filled with possibilities for those who dared to seize them. Americans for the first time witnessed dramatic changes in material conditions. A woman born in 1820 saw, by the time she was thirty, machine-made fabrics replace homespun, horse-drawn carriages give way to locomotives, and postal riders yield to the telegraph.
A diverse class of driven entrepreneurs emerged with this era of quickening growth. This group included merchants, manufacturers, and wealthy farmers. Visitors were struck by the American passion for making money. Tocqueville remarked, "It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity, and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it." Harriet Martineau sketched in a similar picture. Martineau was a well-known English popularizer; her books brought the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to a large audience. From 1834 to 1836 she tackled the breadth of America with the same gusto she brought to the intricacies of political economy. An intrepid traveler despite her physical problems — she had a weak heart and carried an ear trumpet to hear better — Martineau ventured from the east coast to the frontier and from Canada to New Orleans. The wealthy traders in the Eastern cities, Martineau felt, fully embodied the qualities that characterized Americans. "The spirit of enterprise is very remarkable in the American merchants," she noted. "Beginning life, as all Americans do, with the world all open before them ...a passionate desire to overcome difficulties arises in them."
These men on the make (few women ran businesses or farms) were not uniformly distributed: they clustered in cities and near transportation routes where goods were more readily available. Using window glass as an illustration, Martineau compared the lives of those near canals with homeowners in more remote areas. "Persons who happen to live near a canal, or other quiet watery road, have baskets of glass of various sizes sent to them from the towns, and glaze their own windows," she observed. "But there is no bringing glass over a corduroy, or mud, or rough limestone road."
The spirit of gain pervaded the South as well as the North, though the two sections were not mirror images of each other. Eventually, a deep commitment to the "peculiar institution" would lead planters to make decisions that showed more concern for protecting their way of life than for maximizing profits. But in the 1820s and 1830s there was no need to face such difficult choices. Fresh soils made slavery exceptionally profitable, particularly in the Southwest.
These successful individuals, including Southern planters, prosperous Northern farmers, as well as merchants and manufacturers in both sections, shared common interests, despite their geographical diversity. They praised government support for roads, river improvements, schools, and banks. They accepted the need for higher tariffs to pay for such programs, and they favored an expanding though not inflationary currency. Eventually, these individuals would come together in a national organization, the Whig Party.
The burgeoning economy also produced a large class of individuals who were less successful, less involved in the market economy, and more critical of government policies that promoted growth. Many farmers were poor and worked land far removed from the major arteries of transportation. Tocqueville came to know the isolated farms of Tennessee well since he stayed at such a homestead while recovering from a bout of illness. "The interior of these dwellings attests the indolence of the master even more than his poverty," he noted in his journal. "You find a clean enough bed, some chairs, a good gun, often books, and almost always a newspaper, but the walls are so full of chinks that the outside air enters from all sides. ... You are hardly better sheltered than in a cabin of leaves." Homes on the Michigan frontier, Tocqueville observed, were similarly crude if better insulated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Clash of Extremes by Marc Egnal. Copyright © 2009 Marc Egnal. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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