Civil War and Realignment

MOST OF THE leading framers of the Constitution knew that the compromise made over slavery at the Constitutional Convention would have dreadful consequences for the nation in the future. But the consensus among the framers was that the evil of disunion was greater than the evil of slavery, and they hoped eventually for a peaceful resolution to the slavery issue. The compromise left slavery standing on wobbly legs, as slavery was never mentioned by name in the Constitution. Instead, slaves were referred to as “persons held in servitude.” But this begged the obvious question of how such “persons,” possessing the same fundamental rights as all people, could be denied those rights and subjected to a condition of permanent servitude. The resolution of this debate would result in the Civil War and a complete realignment of the American party system.

By the time of the Civil War, many Americans seemed resigned to the fact that the slavery issue would ultimately be settled with bullets rather than ballots. What was surprising, however, was that the war did not take place sooner, given the intensity of passions. This delay can be explained by the way in which the American party system managed the slavery issue. Under the careful supervision of the Whigs and Democrats, severe conflict over slavery was avoided by compromise and an agreement to keep silent on the issue. The parties would focus instead on debates about issues, such as the scope of national power, particularly as it related to the development of economic enterprise, and the expansion of national territory into the west. The parties' efforts did not always succeed, as was dramatized when Congressman Preston Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate for delivering an anti-slavery speech that Brooks believed had violated the standing party agreements on rhetorical propriety. But for nearly half a century, crisis was successfully averted.

By the 1850s, however, the political landscape began to change dramatically. Westward expansion that had continued unabated during the early part of the 19th century threatened to undermine the Missouri Compromise, which had helped to maintain a balance of power between free and slave states.

As the United States sought to organize land acquired during the Mexican-American War, Congressman David Wilmot attached a rider to an appropriations bill that prohibited the introduction of slavery into the new territory. Pro-slavery reaction to the Wilmot Proviso was severe. The measure was denounced as a northern conspiracy to put an end to slavery and to deny southerners their rights. As a counter proposal, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a measure, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow incoming states to decide whether to allow slavery in their borders or not under the principle of popular sovereignty. Abolitionist reaction to Douglas's bill was equally intense, and southerners were accused of trying to spread slavery throughout the United States.

The issue of slavery came to a head in the U.S. Senate when Charles Sumner (above) was attacked by Preston Brooks.

Within the rising passions of these two factions, the parties once again tried to broker compromise and moderate the debate. But party polarization had become too powerful to overcome, and sectionalism was quickly defeating party efforts to maintain national unity. Deep fissures were emerging within the Democratic and Whig parties over the slavery issue that could no longer be managed or subdued. The first sign of the impending realignment was the emergence of numerous third-party organizations in the early 1850s. These parties drew in disaffected voters who had either lost faith in the Whigs and Democrats, or who were angered by the unwillingness of the two parties to take strong stands on slavery. These third parties included the Know-Nothings, the Free Soil Party, the Fusion Party, and the People's Party. The most significant of these parties, however, was the Republicans.

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