Paved with Good Intentions: The Road to Civil War

In June, the Cincinnati Civil War Round Table’s distinguished President, Pat Homan, made his first presentation to the organization. Mr. Homan, currently teaching history at St. Edmund Campion Academy, tells his students that history is a wondrous story of events, which were caused by earlier events that will, in turn, cause further events, and much of this will be unplanned or unexpected. In his presentation, Mr. Homan traces the critical events that took place long before the Civil War, which through their accumulation set the stage for the inevitable conflict. Citing John C. Calhoun’s last presentation in the Senate on March 4, 1850, in which he predicted that unless prevented by some timely and effective measure, the subject of slavery would end in disunion, Mr. Homan begins to lay out the events that would lead to exactly that.

Mr. Homan argues that the seeds of the war were planted as early as 1787 when the Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. In addition to providing a plan for the eventual statehood of three to five states when the population reached a sufficient level, the ordinance also prohibited the introduction of slavery in those states.

The institution of slavery received a boost with 1792 invention of the Cotton Gin. Thereafter, huge amounts of labor were needed to grow the crop, and because of the exhaustive nature of cotton on its growing soil, huge amounts of new land were needed to replenish fallow fields. After the ban on the importation of slaves in 1808, southern states like Virginia and Kentucky became leading producers of slaves. By 1819 the need for cotton land led to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama entering as slave states. These were balanced by Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Missouri would be the twenty-third state, giving the Union twelve slave states to eleven free states. This would give the South a majority in the Senate but not the house where the population of the Northern states gave them a majority. The so-called Missouri Compromise allowed Maine to come in as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. The rest of the Louisiana Purchase above a line 36 30’ would be free area. While not part of the formal compromise, this started a thirty year custom that states would be admitted into the Union roughly in pairs, one slave, and one free.

In 1828, matters began to boil over with the enactment of a new tariff bill, called by some the Tariff of Abominations. The South had opposed tariffs since colonial times as they had always imported goods from England and France. The North, being industrial, favored protective tariffs on all imports. The South also objected to their exported product, cotton, being taxed while the North was not yet exporting many finished products that were taxed. The response by South Carolina was to renew calls for an old but yet untried concept: nullification. This is the principle that because states originally ratified the Constitution based on certain contractual representations, they could subsequently revoke their consent to ratification if there had been a breach of that contract. Nullification had been tried by some states two previous times, once in 1798 and again in 1815, but never tested.

Although the issue of slavery quieted down for several years, the annexation of Texas in 1844 reopened the slavery issue. To resolve the problem, California was admitted as a free state; the slave trade was forbidden in the District of Columbia but not slavery; and the New Mexico and Utah Territories were organized without restrictions on slavery which was to be resolved by popular sovereignty when applying for statehood. Finally, a Federal Fugitive Slave law was passed in 1851, which would be the first of a series of acts that would push the country to the brink. This was followed in 1852 by the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that ripped the blinders from the eyes of the Northern citizens.

In 1857, the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court, holding that a black man lacked standing to bring an action in court because he was property and not entitled to the same constitutional guaranties as a white man. The decision went further declaring that Congress had no power to neither forbid nor restrict slavery in any state or territory, thus holding the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and calling into question all anti-slavery legislation. The result was immediate. The ranks of the Republican party swelled almost guaranteeing its nominee would be elected president. By the summer of 1860, Southern firebrands were openly talking of disunion if a Republican won the election. In an amazing sequence of events, the Democratic Convention was deliberately split, and basically insured a Republican victory.

Looking at these events singly, it is difficult to see how they could cause the bloodshed that followed, as all were taken with the best of intentions but with little thought to possible long-term results. However the collective weight of these well-intentioned actions nevertheless moved the nation ever closer to the brink and finally pushed it over.

Return to Top