• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Still, the fierce animosities the panic had fanned subsided for the moment, muted by exhaustion, political catharsis, and rising public and private employment. But the divisions the crisis had illuminated did not knit themselves up; fear and rancor smoldered, awaiting only a new crisis to rekindle them. It was not long in coming, for even as New York was congratulating itself for having survived the economic maelstrom, a political hurricane was about to slam into the city.

48

The House Divides

The Panic of 1857, coining on top of the frenzied expansion of the boom years, increased the pressure on the nation’s poorly soldered-together political system. The weakest seam did not lie along the Mason-Dixon line; in their direct dealings, North and South had managed to maintain the balancing act begun two generations earlier at the Constitutional Convention. Rather the crisis came out west, where the vast territories won from Mexico in 1848 were proving difficult to digest. In 1850 another deal was cobbled together, whose provisions included admission of California as a free state and the passage of a Fugitive Slave Act facilitating the extradition of escapees. But powerful forces in both slave and free states were no longer willing to settle their differences by a Solomonic divvying up of the spoils of empire. Neither side was willing to be excluded from the trans-Mississippi territory; increasingly, each side wanted it all.

During the long period of prosperity the South had gotten expansionist. As British industrial demand sent cotton prices soaring, planters sought to spread slave production west, along with the legal and political support system slavery required. They were seconded in this by white small farmers, squeezed into marginality by the pressures of competition with big planters and hoping migration would improve their condition. Even though some of the new western lands were not fertile grounds for cotton production, the planters nevertheless wanted new slave states carved out of them in order to maintain the balance of political power in the Congress and Electoral College.

The North had promoted expansion as well. Dynamic capitalists had grand visions of an integrated and nationwide industrial economy, stitched together by rail lines; they also dreamed, less loftily, of speculative bonanzas in cheap government lands. Small farmers wanted to reserve the new states for “free labor”: they didn’t want to compete with huge factories-in-the-fields staffed by slave labor and suffer the fate of southern poor whites.

The North was also growing more culturally aggressive. To the liberal bourgeoisie the global capitalist boom seemed conclusive proof that slave societies were contrary to history’s march—morally undesirable, economically inefficient, and doomed. While “respectable opinion” still backed away from the abolitionist call to assault the institution in its southern lair, it listened with increasing enthusiasm to the new Free Soil movement’s counsel: leave slavery alone in its heartland but block its westward expansion; penned up, it would eventually die.

Far-sighted Southerners experienced anticipatory suffocation and demanded immediate breathing room. Some went beyond insisting on the right to open new plantations in the West to calling for equal access to the North itself—regaining the right, for instance, to travel freely with their slaves. They grew ever more vehement, too, in their insistence on an explicit veto power over Democratic Party policy and federal government activity and successfully blocked programs many northerners desired: a protective tariff, a homestead bill, a northern transcontinental rail route. On the cultural front southern ideologues matched the North’s denigration of their society with a vigorous defense of paternalistic slavery as morally superior to heartless capitalism.

As each side grew more convinced that the nation could no longer exist half slave and half free, that it must become all one thing or all the other, the divided American house began to crumple.