#compromiseof1850

Causes of the American Civil War: Spoiler Alert: It Was All About Slavery

There was actually only one cause for the American Civil War: slavery. All the events leading to the Civil War, understood as steps moving steadily up the conflict, had slavery as the underlying cause for upset and increasing division between the North and South.

In 1935, the former Confederate captain, legislator, and historian Samuel A'Court Ashe (1840-1938) explained the reason for the Southern states' secession in his pamphlet A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and the War of 1861-1865, writing:

Seven states seceded in the winter of 1860-61, and, on March 11, 1861, formed a new Confederacy of sovereign States with virtually the same Constitution as the United States. It created "a government proper," and the laws of Congress acted directly on individuals. The other Southern States seceded later when called on to engage in a war against this new Confederacy.

Why was that first secession? African slavery had existed in every colony and State and was particularly recognized and cared for in the Constitution, every State agreeing to return to the owner any fugitive slave. Without this recognition, there could have been no Union. An eminent justice of the United States Supreme Court, Henry Baldwin, of Pennsylvania, had declared slavery "the cornerstone" of the Government (Johnson vs. Tompkins, 1, Baldwin).

In time, the Northern States, whose shipping had brought many of the Negroes into the country, abandoned slavery. Still, every man who held office swore to support the Constitution. There was only one honest way out of the obligation to respect slavery, and that was to withdraw from the Union.

(45-46)

Samuel A'Court Ashe's work is not the only one to make clear that the preservation of the institution of slavery was at the heart of the Confederacy, the reason for secession, and the ultimate cause of the American Civil War. The Constitution of the Confederacy references slavery several times, as in Article 1, Section 4:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

And in Article IV, Section 3:

No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.

These are only two citations, but there are many others in the document, making it clear that the institution of slavery was central to the Confederate States of America. Correspondence, editorials, and some, though not all, of the documents relating to the Ordinance of Secession make clear that the fear of the emancipation of the slaves by Northern states was the cause for secession, leading to the Civil War.

The events listed below, all having to do with slavery, bear this out as each one was another step leading to the eventual conflict that tore the nation apart between 1861 and 1865. In the words of the narrator of the excellent Kings & Generals video regarding the underlying cause of the war: "Spoiler Alert: It was slavery."

Invention of the Cotton Gin in 1793

Slavery was becoming economically untenable before the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, which made cotton cultivation far more profitable than it had been and increased the need for slave labor to pick the cotton to be fed into the gins. Prior to the cotton gin, one sack of cotton could be produced for sale in a day; afterwards, 50 sacks or more could be made ready for sale in the same amount of time. The gin extracted the seeds from the cotton, eliminating that step in the process, and so all a planter needed was manual labor to pick the cotton. The more workers one had, the greater one's profit, and so the need for more and more slaves.

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Zachary Taylor: Old Rough and Ready - the 12th US President

Zachary Taylor (1784-1850) was an American military officer who served as the twelfth president of the United States. Born to a family of prominent Virginian planters, Taylor joined the US Army in 1808 and eventually rose to the rank of major general. Nicknamed 'Old Rough and Ready' by his men, he played a significant role in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), leading US forces to victory in such actions as the Battle of Monterrey (21-24 Sept 1846) and Battle of Buena Vista (22-23 Feb 1847). He used his newfound status as a war hero to win election to the presidency in 1848. However, he abruptly died a little over a year into his term, on 9 July 1850.

Early Life & Military Beginnings

Zachary Taylor was born on 24 November 1784 on his family's plantation in Orange County, Virginia. He was the third of nine children born to Richard Taylor, a prominent planter and veteran of the American Revolution, and his wife, Sarah Dabney Strother Taylor. His family was an old one, with deep roots in the Commonwealth of Virginia; he was related to the distinguished Lee family of Virginia and was a distant cousin of both President James Madison (1751-1836) and Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870). But by the time of Zachary's birth, the soil on the family's tobacco plantation was almost depleted of nutrients, forcing Richard Taylor to search for more fertile lands out west. The Taylors settled in the burgeoning frontier community of Louisville, Kentucky, where they initially lived in a small cabin. Before long, they were prosperous enough to upgrade to a brick home, and by the turn of the century, Richard Taylor had accumulated 10,000 acres of land throughout Kentucky as well as 26 slaves.

Growing up, Zachary Taylor received some formal education, but he was mostly educated at home by his mother. The Kentucky of his childhood was a dangerous place, the scene of bloody fighting between Anglo-American settlers and various Native American peoples that was part of the Northwest Indian War (1785-1795). Taylor would have been acutely aware of this bloodshed and indeed, this frontier violence may have influenced him to pursue a military career. He joined the Kentucky militia in 1806 and, two years later, was commissioned in the US Army as a first lieutenant. His first assignment was to a military camp near New Orleans in 1809, which was disease-ridden and woefully undersupplied. Taylor soon fell sick and returned home to Louisville to recover. While there, he met Margaret Mackall Smith, the daughter of a wealthy Maryland planter. They were married in June 1810 and soon moved into a small cottage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

After the outbreak of the War of 1812 (1812-1815) between the United States and the United Kingdom, many Northwestern Native American nations decided to ally themselves with the British, seeing the war as their best chance to resist US encroachment onto their remaining lands. Taylor, now a captain, was ordered to take command of Fort Harrison in the Indiana Territory, which was vulnerable to Native attack. On 4 September 1812, Fort Harrison came under siege by a 600-man force consisting of Miami, Potawatomi, Winnebago, and Kickapoo Indians. Despite being hopelessly outnumbered, Taylor refused an offer to surrender – that night, one warrior set fire to the fort's blockhouse as a distraction while the rest assaulted the west wall. Taylor organized a bucket brigade to put out the fire, putting his surgeons and the wives of his soldiers to work, while the garrison held back the attackers.

Though the fire was eventually put out and the Native Americans repulsed, the next morning found that most of the garrison's food supply had been destroyed in the fire; all the besiegers had to do now was starve them out. Luckily for Taylor, a detachment of 1,000 reinforcements arrived on 12 September, lifting the siege and forcing the Indian attackers to melt back into the woods. Taylor had held the fort at a time when the US sorely needed victories – he was rewarded with a brevet promotion to major. He would spend the rest of the war fighting Indians on the frontier, at places such as Wild Cat Creek (Nov 1812) and Credit Island (Sept 1814).

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Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was a series of five bills passed by the US Congress in September 1850 to diffuse a sectional crisis brewing between the 'free states' of the North and the 'slave states' of the South. The crisis was sparked by a disagreement over whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the so-called 'Mexican Cession', the 529,000 square miles of territory seized from Mexico after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Under the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted into the Union as a free state, while slavery in the rest of the territory – such as in New Mexico and Utah – would be decided through 'popular sovereignty,' meaning that settlers would decide on whether to prohibit slavery or not. This compromise did not resolve the dispute but only postponed the conflict over slavery that would culminate in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Background: Mr. Polk's War

In 1844, James K. Polk (1795-1849) won election to the US presidency on a platform of expansionism; promising to lead the United States toward its 'Manifest Destiny', Polk declared his intention to wrest the Oregon Territory from the British, seize all Mexican territory north of 31°, and annex the newly independent Republic of Texas. Initially, this ambitious policy fell quite short of its goals. Polk was forced to settle for a treaty that established the Oregon boundary at the 49th parallel – less than was hoped for – while Mexico declined to sell any territory at all. But when Texas joined the Union in December 1845 as the 28th state, Polk saw a new opportunity for conquest; Mexico had not recognized Texas' independence and viewed its annexation by the US as a hostile act. Polk and his partisans continued to provoke Mexico, ultimately leading to the Mexican-American War. At the end of that conflict, Mexico was forced to give up vast amounts of territory, including Utah, New Mexico, and California. Polk had achieved his goal – by the end of his single term, the United States had expanded by two-thirds, growing more than it had under any other president.

Mr. Polk's War, as the conflict had been derisively called, was quite polarizing – while Polk's own Democratic Party supported the expansion of the United States by any means necessary, members of the Whig Party viewed the conflict as an unjust war and believed that its main objective had been to expand the institution of slavery and increase the political power of the slave-holding South. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had fixed the boundary between 'slave states' and 'free states' by prohibiting slavery north of the 36°30' north latitude parallel. But since most of the land conquered from Mexico was beneath that boundary, several new 'slave states' could potentially be carved out from the territory. In 1846, anti-slavery representatives tried to prevent this with the Wilmot Proviso, which declared that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part" of the territory acquired from Mexico – the proviso passed in the House, but it was defeated in the Senate, where the South exerted greater power. Though the Wilmot Proviso failed, it rejuvenated the national debate over the question of slavery, an issue that had been festering beneath the country's surface for decades.

Opponents of slavery – often called Free Soilers – believed that the institution was not only a moral evil but also stood in the way of progress. As historian James M. McPherson writes, Free Soilers argued that "free labor was more efficient than slave labor because it was motivated by the inducement of wages and the ambition for upward mobility rather than by the coercion of the lash" (55). Slavery must therefore be kept out of the new territories to encourage free labor and progress there. But the slave-holding South interpreted these statements as an attack against its social system. As the global demand for cotton grew, Southern planters became more reliant on slave labor to cultivate the crop. Additionally, it was believed that slave labor was necessary to allow the slave-holding gentry time to cultivate the arts, literature, and to pursue public office. An attack on slavery was therefore viewed as an attack on the Southern way of life; to preserve this, Southerners sought to expand slavery wherever they could, to maintain a strong pro-slavery voting bloc in Congress.

The question of whether slavery would be allowed in the newly acquired territories threatened to dominate the US presidential election of 1848. Polk had declined to seek re-election; worn out by his time in office, he would be dead before the end of the decade. Instead, the Democrats nominated Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, who championed the idea of 'popular sovereignty' – this meant that the settlers of the territories should decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery or not. The Whigs, needing to carry states where annexation had been popular, decided to avoid the question of slavery for the time being and nominated General Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), hero of the Mexican War. Taylor was an odd choice – he had been mostly unpolitical prior to his run for office, leaving many Americans unsure as to what his political positions were. However, he was a slaveholder who owned over a hundred slaves himself, leaving many pro-slavery voters feeling comfortable that he would support their position. Taylor won the election, carrying 8 of the 15 slave states, and was inaugurated on 4 March 1849. But little did anyone realize that Taylor's election heralded a political storm that was just about to break.

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Henry Clay: The Great Compromiser

Henry Clay (1777-1852) was an American lawyer and statesman, one of the defining political figures of his age. Over the course of his several decades on the stage of national politics, Clay helped lead the United States into the War of 1812 (1812-1815), diffused several sectional crises over slavery, introduced an economic plan known as the 'American System', and founded the Whig Party in opposition to his rival Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). Clay served as the Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, and made three unsuccessful bids for the presidency. Known as the 'Great Compromiser' for his roles in the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Clay is recognized as part of the 'Great Triumvirate' of US Congressmen alongside John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) and Daniel Webster (1782-1852).

Early Life

Reflecting on his childhood, Clay would later say that he was "born a democrat – rocked in the cradle of the revolution" (quoted in Peterson, 8). He was born in Hanover County, Virginia, on 12 April 1777, less than a year after the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain. The seventh of nine children born to Reverend John Clay and his wife Elizabeth Hudson Clay, Henry's earliest years were suffused with tragedy – most of his older siblings died in childhood, and his father, a popular Baptist minister, died in 1781, when Henry was only four. That same year, the American Revolution came to Virginia. Clay would recall how his family homestead was raided by the British Legion under Banastre Tarleton and how the British dragoons stuck their swords into the grave of his father in the hopes of unearthing hidden treasure. The raid left the family in a dire financial situation, which was assuaged when Clay's mother remarried Captain Henry Watkins, a successful planter. Elizabeth would go on to have six more children with Watkins, who proved to be a kind stepfather and had a good relationship with Clay.

In 1791, Watkins moved the family to Kentucky, driven by rumors of good, fertile lands to be had out West. Clay declined to follow – already insatiably ambitious at 14 years old, he had obtained a position as deputy clerk for the Virginia Chancery Court in the capital of Richmond and was determined to see it through. As biographer Bernard Mayo put it, "Virginia's high courts and legislative halls were to be his preparatory school"; Clay, who had only received three years of formal education, developed his logical and oratorical skills by observing the lawyers and statesmen in the capital. Clay not only learned how to think like a Virginian lawyer but also how to party like one – much of his free time was spent attending lavish balls or risking his money at gambling taverns. Before long, he was reading law under the guidance of George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Clay was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1797 and, that same year, decided to follow his family to Kentucky to seek his fortune as a frontier lawyer.

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John C. Calhoun: Champion of the Antebellum South

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was an American lawyer and statesman, one of the key political figures of the Antebellum Era. Initially a nationalist, Calhoun spent his early career trying to strengthen and modernize the federal government, but by the 1830s, he had become a strong advocate for states' rights and slavery, leading South Carolina into the Nullification Crisis (1832-33). Calhoun served as vice president under two different presidents and spent decades in Congress, where he became recognized as part of the 'Great Triumvirate' of influential US congressmen alongside Henry Clay (1777-1852) and Daniel Webster (1782-1852). He played a major role in uniting the American South behind the institution of slavery – which he referred to as the 'peculiar institution' – in the decades prior to the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Early Life

John Caldwell Calhoun was born in the Abbeville District of South Carolina on 18 March 1782. He was the fourth of five children born to Patrick Calhoun, a Scotch-Irish immigrant, and his second wife, Martha Caldwell. He was named after his maternal uncle, Major John Caldwell, who had been murdered by Tories (Americans loyal to Britain) a few months earlier. There were no schools in the South Carolina backcountry where Calhoun grew up, leaving him isolated and practically illiterate for most of his childhood. Then, in 1795, the 13-year-old Calhoun was sent to an academy in Georgia run by his brother-in-law, Moses Waddel; though the academy was discontinued shortly thereafter, Calhoun gained access to Waddel's vast library and spent much of his time reading. After his father's death, Calhoun returned home to help manage the family farm. He often plowed the fields himself, working alongside the family's slaves, and spent his free time reading, hunting, and fishing. In the autumn of 1802, Calhoun went to New Haven, Connecticut, to study at Yale College, financed by his older brothers. He was a diligent student who made friends easily, and, in September 1804, he graduated with distinction.

The following year, he began reading law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. He returned to his home district of Abbeville, where he opened a lucrative law practice and rode the circuit of county courts. Unlike other frontier lawyers like his future colleague Henry Clay, Calhoun took no joy in riding the court circuit; solemn and disciplined, Calhoun "rarely, if ever, swore, smoked, drank, or jested" (Peterson, 24). He was respected in his community and was elected to the state legislature in 1808. During his brief stint, he began courting his first cousin, Floride Bonneau Colhoun (1792-1866), from afar. Having first met Floride during his time in New England, Calhoun began periodically sending her letters and communicating through her mother, who was anxious to make the best match for her daughter. They were married outside Charleston in January 1811 and would ultimately have ten children. That same year, he was elected to the US House of Representatives and left South Carolina for the national capital of Washington, D.C., to take his seat in the fateful Twelfth Congress.

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