• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The West was also the chessboard in the Great Game between North and South. For decades, each new expansion of the country had set off a flurry of tactical moves: advances, flanking maneuvers, sometimes grudging withdrawals. Each new line across the map—whether territorial boundary, national road, railway, or telegraph route—threatened to redraw the entire board, or so it often seemed. Sometimes the slave-state interests advanced; sometimes the free-state. More often, as with so much in the antebellum years, each set of moves ended in a carefully negotiated stalemate.

Recently, however, the game had seemed to tilt decisively toward the North. Eighteen sixty was a federal census year, and the results had begun coming in early that autumn—with exquisitely poor timing, as far as Southern paranoia was concerned.14 Preliminary figures confirmed what many suspected: that immigration and westward expansion were shifting the country’s centers of population and balance of power. Since the last count, in 1850, the North’s population had increased an astonishing 41 percent, while the South’s had grown only 27 percent. States like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois would each be gaining multiple seats in Congress; Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee would be losing some. Tellingly, the statistical center of national population had shifted for the first time not only west of the original thirteen states but also from slave territory into free: from Virginia to Ohio. (The New York Herald did find at least one source of comfort for the South: the paper’s statistician declared it “very certain” that the nation’s slave population would reach fifty million by the year 1960.)15

Southern leaders did not lack for an expansionist strategy of their own in the years before the war. The more radical among them spoke of spreading American dominion through Latin America and the Caribbean, forming dozens of new slave states. The filibusters, as we have seen, even took matters into their own hands. In fact, there were occasional successes—and splendid ones—as when Southern planters moved into the Mexican state of Texas, eventually to take it over and annex it to the United States. The ensuing war added vast new territory to the southern half of the country, and many assumed that slavery would be legal there.

Nor did the South lack its own Hiram Sibleys, its own tough and resourceful breed of capitalists. But its Sibleys, by and large, did not invest in building railroads and telegraph lines: instead, they bought slaves and cleared new land for cotton.

All too often, the most visionary schemes for the West ended up stalled endlessly in Congress, victims of sectional infighting. Such was the case with the transcontinental railroad, an idea that had been under discussion for twenty years. Each time it came up for debate, Northerners refused to approve a Southern route and Southerners refused to approve a Northern route. When Congress did finally vote to fund a survey, it reached a compromise by sending out five separate expeditions to find suitable pathways at five different latitudes. Not surprisingly, the man who supervised this entire process—Secretary of War Jefferson Davis—was able to recommend the southernmost one, fudging a bit of data to support his argument. (Davis had already managed to orchestrate a major U.S. land acquisition from Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase—to serve as a southern corridor.)* Not surprisingly, Northern congressmen balked at this, and by the end of the 1850s, the rail line to the Pacific was still nothing more than a figment of the American imagination.16

As anxious as Southerners were to extend slavery through the Union’s new states and territories, Northerners were anxious to contain it. The Hiram Sibleys may not have cared much about the plight of the poor downtrodden Negroes, but their own financial interests did demand a West that was free, open, modern, untrammeled—a place, in short, where Yankees could do business. They were