Lecture: The Coming of the Civil War
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 13
Opening
Imagine you work at a telegraph office in a small border-state town, late in 1860. The key starts clicking, and you copy the message out letter by letter. A convention in Charleston has voted South Carolina out of the Union. By supper, a farm family down the road is arguing about it. Everyone at that table has a theory about why it happened.
Here's the habit I want you to leave with. When people break something apart, they often write down why. Before you guess, read what they wrote. That habit matters for a reporter, for a lawyer reading a government's own statement, and for anyone who has to tell a stated cause from a guessed one.
You've already built the pieces. In Week 4 you read the Stamp Act Congress declarations of 1765, about taxes and consent. In Week 9 you met the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In Week 12 you watched compromise after compromise fail, ending with Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.
In this lecture we go from 1858 to 1861. We'll meet a new party, two debaters, a raid, an election, a state's declaration, a new President's speech, and a fort in a harbor. Week 14 takes up the war that followed.
1. A party falls and a party rises
Think about a club with one unwritten rule: never bring up the topic that splits the members. For years the rule holds. Then the topic comes up at every meeting, and the club breaks in two.
That's the story of the Whigs. The Whig Party was a national political party that was torn apart by slavery in the 1850s, leaving room for a new antislavery-expansion party in the North. Once the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened slavery in the territories, its Northern and Southern members could no longer agree.
Opponents of that act helped found the Republican Party: the party whose members aimed to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories while saying they would not touch it in the states where it existed. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a former Whig, joined it in 1856.
Hold on to one distinction. Stopping slavery's spread is not the same as ending slavery. The Republicans were a party about expansion.
Pause and try this. Did the Republican Party of the 1850s promise to end slavery in the states where it already existed?
Think about the difference between spread and existence.
Here's the answer. No. The party aimed to keep slavery out of the territories and said it would leave slavery alone where it already existed.
2. Two candidates, seven towns
Picture two candidates for one seat sharing a stage in town after town. One talks for an hour. The other answers for an hour and a half. Then the first gets half an hour to reply, and thousands of people stand and listen.
That happened in Illinois in 1858. The Lincoln–Douglas debates were the seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, held in seven Illinois towns during their race for a United States Senate seat, in which the two men argued over slavery's future in the territories.
A quick name check. Stephen A. Douglas, the senator, is not Frederick Douglass, the writer you read in Week 12. Different men, different spellings, opposite sides.
So what did they argue about? Lincoln wanted slavery kept out of the territories. Douglas held to popular sovereignty, letting each territory's settlers vote on it. They also argued about the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln said its promise of equal rights reached Black Americans. Douglas said its signers did not mean them.
Pause and try this. Who won the Senate seat in 1858, Lincoln or Douglas?
Don't let what happened two years later fool you.
Here's the answer. Douglas kept the seat. Lincoln lost the race but became known across the country, and that fame mattered in 1860.
3. A raid at Harpers Ferry
Picture a river town where two rivers meet, with a government rifle factory at its center. One night in 1859, a small band of armed men takes that factory.
That's John Brown's raid: the attack in 1859 in which the abolitionist John Brown and a small band seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm enslaved people for a rising that never came. U.S. Marines stormed the building where Brown held out. Virginia tried him and hanged him.
The raid failed as a plan and worked as a shock. Northern abolitionists praised Brown as a martyr. White Southerners saw a direct threat to slavery, because he'd tried to put guns in the hands of enslaved people. Each side now saw the other as dangerous.
Here's a corroboration lesson, too. The two accounts linked on the readings page agree on what Brown did. They disagree about what kind of man he was. You keep the record of events apart from each writer's verdict.
Pause and try this. Did John Brown's raid free a large number of enslaved people?
Separate what was planned from what happened.
Here's the answer. No. The rising he hoped for never came, and the raid ended within days. Its power was in the fear and the praise it produced.
4. The election of 1860
Imagine a school election with four candidates. The biggest group splits its votes between two of them, and a third candidate wins every classroom on one floor. That's enough to win.
The election of 1860 was the presidential election in which the Democrats split into Northern and Southern wings and Abraham Lincoln, the Republican, won the presidency without carrying a single Southern state. Douglas ran for the Northern Democrats on popular sovereignty. The Southern Democrats' candidate wanted slavery protected in every federal territory. A fourth party ran on keeping the Union together and setting the slavery question aside.
Notice what all four have in common. Every one of them is an answer to the same question: would slavery spread west?
Lincoln won in November 1860, but he would not take office until March 1861. In those months, the country came apart.
Pause and try this. Which candidate in 1860 stood for keeping slavery out of the territories?
Match each stand to its party.
Here's the answer. Lincoln, the Republican. Douglas left it to settlers, and the Southern Democrats wanted slavery protected everywhere in the territories.
5. South Carolina names its cause
Think about a resignation letter. It says who is leaving, when, and why. You check all three, and then you ask what it leaves out.
Secession is a state's claim to withdraw from the Union by a vote of its own convention, which South Carolina made first, late in 1860. A declaration of causes is a document in which a seceding state's convention stated, in its own words, the reasons it gave for leaving the Union.
South Carolina's declaration is this week's workshop document. Its sourcing: the people of South Carolina in convention; 1860; a declaration of causes; kept by the Avalon Project. It opens with history, from 1765 and 1776 to the Constitution of 1787, and claims the Revolution's right of a people to leave a government. Then it names the cause. It points to "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery". It charges the free states with refusing to return people who had escaped slavery, and it objects to a President whose opinions and purposes were hostile to slavery.
This is a documented fact, not a debate. The convention wrote down its reason, and the reason was slavery.
Pause and try this. What does South Carolina's declaration show, and what doesn't it show?
Try to say it in one sentence.
Here's the answer. South Carolina's declaration shows that its convention named slavery as the cause; it does not by itself show what every Confederate soldier believed.
6. The right to do what?
You've probably heard someone say a fight was "about principles." The useful question back is: which principle, exactly?
A common story says the South left over tariffs, or over states' rights in the abstract. So test it against the document. The declaration does use the language of the rights of states. But the right it defends is the right to hold people as property. And the duty it says the North broke is the duty to return people who escaped slavery, under the fugitive clause you read in Week 6.
One more close-reading fact: the word tariff never appears in the declaration's text. When a cause matters to the people writing, they tend to name it. This convention named slavery again and again.
Here's a caveat I want you to keep. This doesn't tell you what every white Southerner felt in 1860. It tells you what one convention wrote. That's a smaller claim, and a much stronger one.
Pause and try this. When the declaration speaks of a state's rights, what right does it spell out?
Read past the label to the thing itself.
Here's the answer. The right to hold people as property. The states' rights language in this document serves slavery, the cause it names.
7. A second witness, and two claims
If one witness tells you why a group acted, you'd want a second witness before saying the whole group agreed. Historians do the same with documents.
Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas also issued declarations of causes, and they too name slavery in their own words. Mississippi's names slavery in its opening lines, and it even refers to John Brown's raid without naming him. That corroborates South Carolina from another state.
Now use the course's evidence-claims set. Item 7 says South Carolina's declaration names hostility to slavery as a cause of secession. Item 8 says every Southern state seceded for exactly the reasons South Carolina gave. One of those stays inside the source, and one doesn't.
This is correlation in a source versus cause in the past. A document shows what its authors claimed. It can't, alone, prove what everyone else thought.
Pause and try this. Which of the two items goes beyond the source, item 7 or item 8?
Ask how many states one document can speak for.
Here's the answer. Item 8 goes beyond it. Item 7 shows what the source says, because the declaration's own words name hostility to slavery.
8. Secession in stages, and Lincoln's promise
Picture a group chat where people leave one at a time. A few go the first week. Others wait and watch. Some never leave. Saying "everyone left at once" gets the story wrong.
Secession went the same way. South Carolina went first, late in 1860. By the time Lincoln took office in 1861, seven states of the Deep South, the cotton-growing states of the lower South, had seceded. Other slave states, Virginia among them, left only after the fighting began. And the border states, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, the four slave states that stayed in the Union, never left at all.
Then Lincoln spoke. His First Inaugural Address is the speech he gave on taking office in 1861. In it he said he had no purpose to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed, and he noted that he was repeating his own earlier speeches. He even said he had no objection to a proposed amendment, already passed by Congress, that would bar federal interference with slavery in the states. He also held that no state could lawfully leave the Union, and he closed, "We are not enemies, but friends."
One more detail. The oath that day came from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who had read the Dred Scott opinion.
Pause and try this. Did Lincoln promise in 1861 to abolish slavery in the states?
Date the claim before you answer it.
Here's the answer. No. He promised the opposite: no purpose to interfere with slavery where it existed, while holding the Union together.
9. Two causes, and an open question
Think of two towns that each broke away from a larger county. Both said they were defending their rights. One objected to a tax it never voted on. The other objected because the county would no longer protect a practice the rest had turned against.
That's the pair of causes this course keeps apart: the causes of the Revolution versus the causes of the Civil War. The Stamp Act Congress declarations of 1765 object to taxes imposed without consent. South Carolina's declaration of 1860 names hostility to slavery. That's 95 years apart. The declaration borrows the Revolution's history, but the cause it names is its own.
Now a real debate: was the war inevitable? It's a debate historians still have over whether the conflict over slavery's expansion made war certain by 1860 or whether different choices by leaders could have avoided it. One side points to failed compromise after failed compromise, and to Lincoln's own words that slavery's extension was the only substantial dispute. The other side points to contingency: the Democrats didn't have to split, Congress offered an amendment, and someone still had to decide to fire on Fort Sumter. The course settles neither case.
Pause and try this. Is the cause of secession part of that debate?
Separate the cause from the question of whether war had to follow.
Here's the answer. No. The secessionists named the cause themselves. The open debate is only about whether war had to come.
10. Fort Sumter, and the week in order
Picture a brick fort on an island in Charleston's harbor. Early in 1861 a supply ship bound for it is fired on and turned back. Batteries of the new Confederacy ring the harbor.
Fort Sumter is the federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, whose bombardment by Confederate batteries in April 1861 began the Civil War. A ranger there points out that even the first shot has several claimants. Sourcing again.
Let's put the week in order. The Fugitive Slave Act is 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854, Dred Scott 1857, South Carolina's declaration 1860, and Lincoln's First Inaugural Address 1861. The gaps are 4 years, 3 years, 3 years, and 1 year. Add them and you get 11, the span from 1850 to 1861. And from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to South Carolina's declaration is 40 years.
Three fragments, two documents: one from South Carolina's declaration and two from Lincoln's address.
Pause and try this. Which came first, South Carolina's declaration or Lincoln's inaugural address?
Put the two years side by side.
Here's the answer. The declaration came first, in 1860. Lincoln's address followed in 1861, so the declaration was not answering it.
Closing
Let's pull it together. The Whigs broke over slavery, and the Republicans rose to stop its spread. Lincoln lost to Douglas in 1858 but gained a national name. Brown's raid failed and still hardened both sections. Lincoln won in 1860 without a single Southern state. South Carolina's convention named slavery as its cause, in its own words, and its states' rights language served that cause. Mississippi corroborates it, and you know item 7 from item 8. Secession came in stages, and Lincoln promised to leave slavery alone where it existed. The causes of the Revolution and of the Civil War stay apart, and whether the war was inevitable stays a debate. Then came Fort Sumter.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then Week 14, The Civil War, follows a war for union as it becomes a war for freedom.
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