Civil War Prevention: Learning from History

Introduction

The two most pressing problems for the US, which appeared long before the start of the war, were the abolition of slavery and the bourgeois-democratic solution to the land question. However, before the outbreak of hostilities, a political split of the country took place, so the reunion of the US was added to the relevant tasks to be solved. The secession of the states was maintained by the slave-owning South. Most of the citizens were interested in solving of these three issues.

Main body

The colonization policy caused mass migration and exacerbated the problem of slavery. Southern planters insisted that the right to use slave labor be extended to new territories. The constitutions of the northern states banned slavery and opposed its proliferation. The conflict was resolved in 1820 when the parties agreed that the territory west of the Mississippi River would be divided into the southern part where slavery remained and the northern regions where it was forbidden.¹ However, the problem of slavery re-emerged and led to debates in Congress and society. In 1850, Senator Clay came up with a compromise but efforts to realize it failed. Later, in 1854, democrat Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the choice of slavery to the discretion of local authorities.² In fact, he inadvertently provoked a civil war in Kansas.³ It might be assumed that constant compromises were an attempt to smooth contradictions, but not to resolve them.

The plethora of unsteady agreements did not remove the problem of the political split as well. The abolitionist movement realized that it was impossible to fight legally against slavery and resorted to extremist methods such as John Brown’s raid in 1859. The Republican Party was gaining an increasing number of supporters. Soon, Lincoln became one of the greatest Republican leaders. He did not see the abolition of slavery as a primary political goal. His main goal was to preserve the integrity of the US.⁴ However, when opposed doctrines were tearing the country, Lincoln would have had to wage the Civil War sooner or later.

All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume that the imminent inevitable conflict in the US was not straightforward. The situation in the country depended on the real balance of power. Hence, the numerous, but not steady, compromises between the bourgeoisie of the North and the planters of the South on many problems took place. Constant contradictions that were eroding the US’s integrity made the Civil War unpreventable.

References

1. Shi, David E., and George Brown Tindal. America: A Narrative History. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.
2. Fortaleza Klinger, Julius. Road to the Civil War: The Missouri Compromise. PDF. Maneto Undergraduate Research Journal, 2018.
3. Guelzo, Allen C. “Lincoln and the Abolitionists.” The Wilson Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2000): 58–70.

Footnotes

1. Julius Fortaleza Klinger, Road to the Civil War: The Missouri Compromise, PDF, Maneto Undergraduate Research Journal, 2018.
2. David Emory Shi and George Brown Tindal, America: A Narrative History, 9th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 618.
3. Shi and Tindal, America, 619.
4. Allen C. Guelzo, “Lincoln and the Abolitionists,” The Wilson Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2000): 70.