“The Stone Which the Builders Rejected”

This chapter narrates the role of the Bible in the secession crisis that erupted after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. While Benjamin Morgan Palmer and other southerners saw slavery as “a divine trust,” many northerners agreed with Lincoln’s quotation of scripture—“A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,” meaning the nation could not endure if it remained divided over slavery. In response, southerners scoured the scriptures for arguments to support white supremacy, fearing that many non-slaveholding whites in the South would refuse to support secession. In all, the Bible contributed to the righteous indignation on both sides, helping to pave the way for war.

Rule or Ruin

This chapter focuses on the 1860 presidential election and the final rupture of the antebellum Democratic Party. As Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis collided in a series of Senate debates over slavery, self-government, and the western territories, their Democratic Party self-destructed in its national convention held in Charleston, South Carolina. Unwilling to accept Douglas as a candidate or popular sovereignty as party doctrine, southern Democrats bolted the convention, nominated John C. Breckinridge for president, and campaigned on a frankly proslavery and anti-majoritarian platform. Northern Democrats rallied behind Douglas and popular sovereignty, completing the party fracture. The election of Abraham Lincoln and subsequent secession crisis pushed Davis and Douglas’s wings of the Democracy even further apart. Douglas denounced secession and urged compromise, while Davis tentatively pivoted toward Mississippi secessionists.

Introduction

Sectional tensions over slavery persisted since the writing of the Constitution and exploded into secession and the Civil War in 1860–61. The resistance to slavery of African Americans, both enslaved and free, prodded the consciences of enough Northern whites to produce the abolition movement and emerge as a political force in its own right. Southerners recognized that the morality of slavery was at the heart of the issue and sought in vain to make Northerners acknowledge slavery as a morally just institution and allow it to grow and expand. The Northern refusal to do so fueled the rise of the Republican Party and split the Democratic Party at its national convention in the spring of 1860, setting the stage for the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the secession crisis.

Direct Democracy, Constitutional Reform, and Political Inequality in Post-Colonial America

The ratification of constitutional changes via referendum is an important mechanism for constraining the influence of elites, particularly when representative institutions are captured. While this electoral device is commonly employed cross-nationally, its use is far from universal. We investigate the uneven adoption of mandatory referendums by examining the divergence between Northern and Southern U.S. states in the post-independence period. We first explore why states in both regions adopted constitutional conventions as the primary mechanism for making revisions to fundamental law, but why only Northern states adopted the additional requirement of ratifying via referendum. We argue that due to distortions in state-level representation, Southern elites adopted the discretionary referendum as a mechanism to bypass the statewide electorate when issues divided voters along slave-dependency lines. We demonstrate the link between biases to apportionment and opposition to mandatory referendums using a novel data set of roll calls from various Southern state conventions, including during the secession crisis of 1861.

Irreconcilable Differences

This chapter explores the devastating experience of the Civil War in the border South. The chapter opens with the secession crisis, which gave western Virginians their long-awaited opportunity to break away from their eastern neighbors. A close analysis of their debates and rhetoric in the secession convention, as well as in their later constitutional convention, reveals the impact of the border South’s particular form of manhood. Without their unique understanding of hierarchy, restraint, submission, and emotion, western Virginians may not have ventured down the path to statehood. This section demonstrates the importance of gendered ideals, forged within the walls of the household, to the political world. The second half of the chapter reveals how the brutal conflict in the border South reinforced the importance of domestic ties and a sense of mutuality within the home.

Marriage on the Border

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.

Black Republican

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.

Bargains Worse than Fraudulent

Antebellum Americans’ experiences in and debates about intelligence offices reflected and shaped the broader debate about northern and southern political economy occurring in the years prior to the Civil War. As politicians worried—and comic publications laughed—about the consequences of the nation divided, intelligence offices and the intense conversations swirling around them revealed the ways Americans were confronting the fact that their households were divided between kitchen and parlor, upstairs and downstairs. The secession crisis and the beginning of the Civil War exacerbated these concerns, because respectable men of business as well as impoverished workers desperately sought safe and steady positions as sources of credit and capital ran dry. Intelligence office transactions illuminated what wage labor was in well-to-do households, popular culture, and political economy in critically important ways just as northerners and southerners came into conflict about labor—how it was recruited, moved, and exploited—in the Civil War. Even though Americans despised intelligence offices, they nevertheless adopted them as models upon which to speed the flow of soldiers and workers throughout the country during the war. Out of crisis, some northerners imagined opportunity in the movement of people to accrue credit and capital.