The Civil War was about slavery, and only slavery

A few days ago, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley opined that the Civil War was about "how government was run," failing to mention what any 8th grader would know, that it was about slavery (Haley later backtracked and admitted that the war was, in fact, over slavery). In an unrelated speech, former President Trump boasted that if he had been president before the Civil War, he would have negotiated a solution to the crisis.

Both of these statements are ludicrous. For anyone unfamiliar with the subject, this explanation is from electoral-vote.com.

Noted Civil War scholar Donald Trump held a rally in Des Moines this weekend, and while he was there he decided to do a little riffing on the War Between the States, asserting that a shooting war was not necessary, and that "there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that."

For those who are interested, we will now explain why he is wrong. To start, slavery was already a hot potato by the time the Constitution was written. That is why the fellows who wrote it took great pains to avoid using the word "slavery," instead opting for euphemisms and other indirect language. While you wouldn't want to say that all 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought the same way when it came to the future of slavery, the most common viewpoint was that slavery was not the best thing for the future of the nation, and that it would hopefully die a natural death in relatively short order. The mere fact that the Constitution dealt with slavery by counting a slave as three-fifths of a person speaks volumes. Even back in 1787 it was a very hot potato.

But then, just 7 years later, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. That made it plausible for increasingly inefficient and unprofitable tobacco plantations to shift their focus to cotton. This, in turn, revitalized the slave economy, and brought an end to any real possibility of a natural death. It did take a while for the cotton gin, and the cotton industry, to spread. This meant it took a while for the interests of the slave states and the non-slave states to come into direct conflict. But that conflict finally came in 1820, when Missouri applied for admission as the 23rd state and, more importantly, the 12th slave state.

This created a situation that was unacceptable to the non-slave states, which had far more wealth and population than did the slave states. The non-slave states were willing to accept equilibrium in the U.S. Senate, wherein slave and non-slave states had equal membership. They were not willing, however, to accept a situation wherein the slave states had a majority in the upper chamber. There was enough firmness on this fact that Thomas Jefferson, who was still living in 1820, opined that the dispute was unresolvable and that it was "the death knell of union."

Jefferson was in error, of course. The Missouri crisis actually led to two new "solutions" to the slavery problem, one governmental and the other quasi-governmental. The governmental one, and the one that really matters, was the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri Compromise solved the immediate crisis by carving Massachusetts into two states, and admitting the newly created state of Maine as a non-slave state, thus maintaining the balance in the Senate.

In order to serve the longer-term crisis, the Missouri Compromise also created two seemingly simple rules that governed the admission of all future states, theoretically forestalling any future disputes of the sort that Missouri's request for admission had triggered. The first of those rules was that states would henceforth be admitted in pairs: one slave, one non-slave. The second of those rules is that the line between slave and non-slave states would be the southern border of Missouri, extended to the Pacific Ocean. Here is a map:


Yes, that means that the newly created slave state of Missouri was above the "slavery" line. That's the way it had to be; the compromise would have been unacceptable to the Northern states if the line was drawn from the state's northern border. Meanwhile, if you look closely at the line, you can perhaps see how the compromise was doomed to fail, eventually. Just in case, here's a hint: Eureka!

We'll get back to the failure of the Missouri Compromise eventually, but for now, the second, quasi-governmental solution that was produced by the crisis. The Whig Party was the second major party in that era (alongside the Democrats), and Whigs were big believers in compromise and also in the power of capital to solve problems. And so, the leading Whigs of the era—with Henry Clay, the Whiggiest Whig of them all, taking the lead—cooked up a capital-driven solution to the slavery issue. Their idea was that the federal government should purchase the enslaved people from their Southern masters and transport those people back to Africa. This scheme, effectively a reverse slave trade, was called "colonization," and was undertaken under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS was privately chartered, but got a fair bit of help from the U.S. government, thanks to the fact that the leadership of the ACS (e.g., Clay) was very well connected. In particular, the government used its influence to instigate the creation of the West African nation of Liberia for the repatriation of the freedpeople.

So, problem solved, right? Slave owners get compensated, the enslaved people get to "go home," and everyone's happy. What's not to like? A whole lot, as it turns out. To start, the slave owners were not especially interested in getting rid of slavery. Also, most of the enslaved people did not want to be returned to some random spot on the African continent, where their skills (say, rice cultivation) would not be useful and where tropical diseases were epidemic. And finally, the capital that would have been necessary to bring the project to completion was massive, and far beyond the means of the federal government or of private donors to the ACS. So, in the end, the ACS only managed to relocate several thousand enslaved people. That's a drop in the bucket for a country that already had, as Frederick Douglass put it, more than 3 millions in bondage.

Colonization, then, didn't go anywhere. On the other hand, the Missouri Compromise kept the peace... for a few decades. The "rules" that Congress created were designed for the territory of the U.S. as it existed in 1820. In other words, the question they were largely answering was: "How are we going to handle the states carved from the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase?" They were also counting on the fact that the process for achieving statehood was pretty onerous, and it tended to take a long time to achieve the required population numbers. To take one example, the Dakotas were part of the Louisiana Purchase, and they didn't achieve statehood until 1889—86 years.

In any case, the fellows who hammered out the Missouri Compromise did not foresee two things. The first was the Mexican cession of 1848, which added another big chunk of territory to the United States (which, incidentally, Southerners expected to be turned into future slave states). The second was the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848, which triggered a gold rush by 1849.

Absent the gold, maybe California would have become a slave state. We'll never know. What actually did happen is that people came to the state by the thousands, nearly all of them would-be gold miners. As a result of this, California quickly shot past the population threshold (50,000 people) required for statehood. So, in 1850, the state submitted a constitution to Congress and asked for admission as the 31st state. Because the gold miners did not want to compete against slave labor, that constitution prohibited slavery, thus making California a non-slave state.

Congress was very eager to establish proper civil authority in California. After all, the U.S. had just grabbed the state from Mexico, and it did not want some other nation (ahem, the U.K.) to pull the same trick. But there was no slave state ready (or even close to ready) to join with California and, besides, the Missouri Compromise line passes right through the Golden State. On top of that, partisans on both sides had been carping about the Missouri Compromise for at least a decade.

And so, it was time for a new compromise, one that became known as the Compromise of 1850. Primarily the work of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the Compromise of 1850 had five parts, though only two of those matter for our purposes here. The first of those is that California was admitted as the 31st state, without any "partner." The second of those is that Douglas, observing that Congress had dropped the ball when it came to "solving" the slavery problem, managed to persuade his colleagues to try a new approach. "Popular Sovereignty" is what it was called, and the idea was that, since the U.S. is a democracy, the people of each state should decide for themselves whether to have slavery. More specifically, the plan was that when a territory was ready for statehood, its residents would vote whether or not to have slavery.

Douglas, being a politician, managed to sneak Popular Sovereignty by Congress in 1850 by specifying that it would only be used for the territories of Utah and New Mexico. This was a sleazy politician's trick; since neither of those territories was remotely close to achieving statehood, there was no chance that they would actually put the new approach to the test. What that meant was that, after 4 years, Douglas could claim that Popular Sovereignty was a success because, after all, it had not failed. The other members of Congress bought it, and so decreed in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that Popular Sovereignty would be used to determine the fate of slavery in ALL future territories.

With that move, it did not take long for Popular Sovereignty to get a real test. Kansas was ready for statehood by 1856, and so Kansans gathered to write a state constitution and to decide whether or not that constitution would legalize slavery. If everything had been on the up-and-up, Kansas would have entered as a non-slave state, as 90% of the residents there were anti-slavery. However, Kansas is also next door to... Missouri, and election security was not so great back then. You can see where this is headed.

Ultimately, Kansas ended up with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR state constitutions, one of which legalized slavery, three of which outlawed it. On top of that, partisans on each side decided to implement a bit of their own "election security," and so open warfare erupted in Kansas, with hundreds killed on each side. Under these circumstances, Congress threw up its arms and took no action on Kansas' application for statehood. The two presidents who served during that period, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, were both Northerners with pro-Southern views (a.k.a. "doughfaces"). They supported the pro-slavery Kansas constitution, but they could do nothing without Congress' buy-in.

In short, over the course of 70 years or so, Americans tried four different approaches to the slavery issue: (1) ignore it, (2) let Congress figure it out, (3) spend lots of money to buy a way out and (4) put the question to a democratic plebiscite. All failed. If you are going to presume that you could have done better, you need to come up with something other than these four approaches.

There is also something of a postscript. When Abraham Lincoln was elected and Southern states began to secede, there were many last-ditch efforts to negotiate a compromise. The one that gained the most traction was the Crittenden Compromise. There are some nuances and subtleties, but what that compromise would have basically done is guarantee slavery in the states in which it already existed, along with resurrecting and updating the Missouri Compromise, so that new slave states would have once again been a possibility. The President-elect, and his fellow Republicans, having been elected specifically on a pledge to limit slavery to those places it already existed, said: "No way."

You may be familiar with a quote from Lincoln: "If I could save the Union without freeing a single slave, I would do it. If I could save the Union while freeing all the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving others enslaved, I would do that, too." He really did say that, but he clearly was not being 100% truthful. If all he cared about was saving the Union, he could have accepted, and lent his support to, the Crittenden Compromise. But he did not. And that, in the end, is the rub. The Southern states were determined that slavery must keep spreading, and elected leadership on that basis. The Northern states were determined that slavery must be limited to where it already existed, and elected leadership on that basis. Slavery cannot both "spread" and "be contained," and so there was no middle ground left to negotiate, even for the guy who "wrote" The Art of the Deal. The extent to which both sides were committed to their respective points of view is underscored by the fact that, within 6 months of the failure of the Crittenden Compromise, they were shooting each other.

Back to modern politics. The main point here is not that Trump is an ignorant man who doesn't even know enough to know what he doesn't know. That is certainly true, particularly when it comes to history, and even more particularly when it comes to the history of the Civil War. However, we are going to suggest that his remarks are revelatory in a different way, one that he certainly did not intend.

You see, it's not novel to suggest that the Civil War could have been avoided if the politicians of that era had just done a better job of negotiating and compromising. That thesis even has a name. It is called the "blundering generation" hypothesis, with that name coming from the title of the essay by American historian J. G. Randall, in which it was first proposed.

No modern-day Civil War historian takes the "blundering generation" hypothesis seriously. For our purposes, what matters is that this essay, this assertion that a bloody war could have been avoided if the politicians and other muckety-mucks had tried just a LITTLE bit harder, was written in... 1940. In other words, Randall was a man who lived to see the failures of the post-World-War-I "peace," and whose nation was on the brink of doing it all over again. When he was talking about the Civil War, he was also clearly projecting, consciously or not, and lamenting the failures of his own generation.

And that is what we think is going on with Trump, too. When he talks about the failed negotiations of generations past, and implies that he could have done better, what he's really saying is: "I don't have very many successful negotiations of my own, so I'll insinuate myself into negotiations I had nothing to do with, and create 'successes' that way." In other words, he's projecting, presumably subconsciously, just like Randall was. Perhaps that impresses Trump's base, but from where we sit it's really... kind of sad.