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By Root 6217 0

in Northern transportation. But issues like these, however hard fought, were subject to political accommodation. Slavery was not. “We must concern ourselves with what is, and slavery exists,” said John Randolph of Virginia early in the century. Slavery “is to us a question of life and death.” By the 1850s, Randolph’s observation had come to fruition. The “peculiar institution” now permeated every aspect of Southern society—economically, politically, and socially. For a minority in the North, on the other hand, slavery represented a profoundly disturbing moral issue. For many more Northerners, the expansion of slavery into the territories threatened the triumph of the free labor movement. Events of the 1850s would put these “antagonistical elements” on a collision course.

“It is a great mistake,” warned John Calhoun in 1850, “to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process…that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important.” If these common cords continue to rupture, he predicted, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.”

The spiritual cords of union—the great religious denominations—had already been fractured along sectional lines. The national political parties, the political cords of union, would be next, splintered in the struggle between those who wished to extend slavery and those who resisted its expansion. Early in the decade the national Whig Party, hopelessly divided on slavery, would begin to diminish and then disappear as a national force. The national Democratic Party, beset by defections from Free Soil Democrats, would steadily lose ground, fragmenting beyond repair by the end of the decade.

The ties that bound the Union were not simply institutions but a less tangible sense of nationhood—shared pride in the achievements of the reolutionary generation, a sense of mutual interests and common aspirations for the future. The chronicle of the 1850s is, at bottom, a narrative of the increasing strain placed upon these cords, their gradual fraying, and their final rupture. Abraham Lincoln would correctly prophesy that a house divided against itself could not stand. By the end of the decade, as Calhoun had warned, only force would be left to sustain the Union.

Was this outcome inevitable? It is not a question that can be answered in the abstract. We must begin with the historical realities and ask if the same actors with the same convictions, emotions, and passions could have behaved differently. Possibly, but all we can know for certain is that they felt what they felt, believed as they believed, and did as they would do. And so they moved the country inexorably toward Civil War.

AS THE 31ST CONGRESS OPENED, the rancorous discord boiled to the surface. All eyes turned to the seventy-three-year-old Henry Clay, who, Lincoln later said, was “regarded by all, as the man for a crisis.” Henry Clay had saved the Union once before. Now, thirty years after the Missouri Compromise, the Congress and nation looked to him once again. Already Clay suffered from the tuberculosis that would take his life two years later. He could not even manage the stairs leading up to the Senate chamber. Nonetheless, when he took the floor to introduce the cluster of resolutions that would become known as the Compromise of 1850, he mustered, the New York Tribune marveled, “the spirit and the fire of youth.”

He began by admitting he had never been “so anxious” facing his colleagues, for he believed the country stood “at the edge of the precipice.” He beseeched his colleagues to halt “before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.” He prophesied that dissolution would bring a war “so furious, so bloody, so implacable and so exterminating