The USA as Humpty Dumpty: Musings of a History Teacher

In the first leg of my post-college life, I've been teaching 8th grade US history. At this time of year, 8th graders learn about sectionalism, Andrew Jackson, and the problems of the 1820s and 1830s that festered and eventually exploded into a civil war (yet that war was not necessarily inevitable, as my students seem to think. 20-20 hindsight and teleology, however, are subjects for another day). This is a period of time that I have not studied since the 11th grade, but I'm starting to develop a new appreciation for our nations past as I probe these issues in order to teach them to my students.

The issue I'm pondering today: Why did we have a civil war?

I've been in conversations where people will shout simple answers until they are blue in the face. The debate goes as follows:
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SLAVERY!!!!!! Or STATES' RIGHTS!!!!!

.(if you live in the north) (Maryland and points south)

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When I was in 11th grade, my teacher led my class in a discussion on this very topic. We listed probably thirty reasons for the Civil War and then went back and labeled the reasons that involved slavery in some way. And that was nearly all of them. So I left high school with this vignette in my back pocket ready to explain when people said to me, "You study history? Tell me, what caused the Civil War?" (never mind the fact that I studied European history.) My boss (at my part-time, non-school related job) adamantly claims that interstate commerce caused the War Between the States. Interesting theory. One to which I will return later. So let's add that to our list:

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SLAVERY!!!!! STATES' RIGHTS!!!!! INTERSTATE COMMERCE!!!!!

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In light of my recent lessons on the Missouri Compromise and the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833, I think the issue is much more complicated than any of these positions would lead us to believe. And I think understanding these complexities will give us a new and perhaps more holistic understanding of how our country was put together, torn apart, and then put back together again.

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The United States wasn't always the one nation, indivisible, that it seems to be today. From colonial times into the early 1800s, people saw themselves as citizens of a state, not a country, and politicians were more often interested in the best interests of their region than they were in the best interests of the Union (perhaps this is still true today...but that would be another essay). Sectional (read: North/South) divisions complicated the writing of the Constitution and resulted in the notable compromises on slavery and representation and the composition of the legislative branch that became part of the new system of government.

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These differences played out during the administrations of the first few presidents and only deepened as the West expanded and the North and South developed different economies and different societies. These tensions manifested themselves and could have brought the nation to war as early as 1820. In this year, the Missouri Compromise provided a temporary resolution of sectional tensions by maintaining the balance between slave and free states and defining how slavery would expand as the country expanded into the Louisiana Territory. It was less about the question of slavery than it was about two contrasting ways of life (political, economic, social, philosophical) and how those ways of life could be housed in one country under one federal government.

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Fast forward to 1828 and 1832. Congress passed tariffs designed to protect American manufacturers and promote the purchasing of American goods. Reasonable, yes? Well, the South depended on European manufactured goods bought with the proceeds from cash crops (namely cotton), and they balked at the thought of paying more for European goods. Enter John C Calhoun and the philosophy of nullification. Calhoun's South Carolina refused to pay these tariffs and threatened in 1832 to secede from the Union. The subsequent conflict, which saw the passage of another compromise and of an act authorizing the president to use force to enforce federal laws within states, was not really about tariffs or slavery (slaves after all produced the cotton sold in return for manufactured goods and drove the Southern economy). The conflict was really about the authority of the federal government and how that power and the authority of the states fit together. It was about defining federalism. Calhoun made it about the source of federal power--he argued that it came from the states, while folks like Daniel Webster of New England argued that federal power came from the people. Thanks to another compromise from the hand of Henry Clay (architect of the Missouri Compromise), another argument was resolved. But sectional tension persisted for the next thirty years and exploded at various points during that time before the pot boiled over in 1860 and 1861 in what we know as the start of the Civil War.

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So why was the Civil War fought? To preserve the Union? Maybe. South Carolina and ten other states left, and Lincoln sent troops to bring them back. To secure states' rights? States' rights to own slaves, nullify federal laws, develop their own political and economic systems without the interference of Washington? Maybe. To free the slaves? Depends who you ask. Abolitionist sentiment had been simmering in the North for decades, Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a ruckus, and slavery was intimately involved in the problems in Missouri and Kansas in the years before the war broke out. But Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until 1862 after a major Union victory at Antietam, and then the declaration only applied to the states that had seceded, leaving slaves in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri still enslaved. According to an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend, Ulysses Grant, the great Union General, did not seek the abolition of slavery. Even though he thought the South's "peculiar institution" would be a casualty of the war, he was motivated more by the threat secession posed to "democratic republican government, of which Lincoln said...there was no "better or equal hope in the world.""

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So where does that leave us? Maybe it's a tragic oversimplification to say that the Civil War was fought over slavery or states' rights or interstate commerce. Perhaps these are manifestations of some larger questions. What if the War Between the States was fought in order to find out:

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1. How is our country put together? Where is the power? Where does it come from, and how do we share it?

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2. What if a state that joined the Union voluntarily by democratically ratifying the Constitution disagrees with the direction of public policy and/or no longer wants to be part of the Union?

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3. Who does our government protect? If power comes from the people, who are "the people"?

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4. How do we resolve our problems? Is there room in the Union for a very diverse set of interests and cultures?

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Perhaps by asking these questions of the past, we might understand better the tensions that

brought us to a civil war and the answers the war and Reconstruction provided. Maybe also these are questions we need to ask ourselves and our own political leaders as we face new tensions and new divisions in our modern, indivisible, one nation.