The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The American Civil War took more than a century fully to germinate before it actually began. In the mid-eighteenth century, the thirteen British colonies in America were never perceived to be one single colony. Each colony was its own separate entity.
The American victory in the American Revolution was a surprise to nearly everyone, perhaps most of all to the Americans. The colonial army was outmanned, outgunned, often outsmarted, under-supplied, under-fed, and under-paid. Despite all, they won, and in 1783 a new nation, of sorts, was born.
But was it truly one nation? Apparently the signers of the Declaration of Independence thought it should be. After all, the document itself declared before its resounding opening sentence that it was “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.”
Curiously, the word “united” is not capitalized in the opening of the Declaration. It is deliberately portrayed as “the united [lower-case] States [upper case] of America.”
Why was that? Well, maybe Thomas Jefferson just made a slip of the quill pen. Jefferson being Jefferson however, that is not likely. To Jefferson, the expression “my country” always meant Virginia, not the United States of America. He referred to Virginia as his “country” to his dying day.
No, the Declaration was ultimately ratified only because the signers conceived that they were forming a political entity known as “the united States of America.” Many of the signers thought of each former colony as an independent “nation-state.” Nowadays, Americans tend to use the words “nation” and “state” interchangeably, but most other people around the world seem to prefer “state” to mean what Americans mean by “nation.”
Thus, nearly everywhere else in the world, a nation is a state; they are one and the same. Not so in the United States of America. Here it is “the United STATES of America;” it is not “the UNITED States of America.” Historically and Constitutionally, the emphasis in the USA has been on the “States” part of our official national name, not on the “United” part.
Some might ask, is this is distinction without a difference? No, this is a distinction with a huge difference. In order for the more perfect union contemplated by the Constitution to receive the necessary approval, it was deemed necessary from the beginning almost always to defer to the thirteen separate states rather than to the central, federal government.
There are several problems with the United States Constitution. Many of them were addressed in the various Amendments which were adopted over the past two-plus centuries. But the greatest problem, in my judgment, is that the Constitution granted far too much power to the states from the beginning, and far too little power to the national government. In the immortal words of Abbott and Costello, we have always made it hard for ourselves to know who’s on first.
The Tenth and last Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights says this: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means that if the federal Constitution doesn’t give specific authority to the federal government to institute policies, the individual states alone have the right and responsibility to do that.
Throughout the Revolution, there was always the threat that individual colonies or states would pull out of the conflict. As has frequently been postulated, support for the colonial cause was strong among a third of the colonists, neutral among another third, and strongly resisted by the final pro-British or Tory third of the “American” population. In order to keep as many militiamen in the fight as possible, most of the soldiers likely believed they were fighting more for Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or South Carolina that for the united (lower-case) States (plural) of America.
When the Articles of Confederation were adopted in March of 1781, they established a feeble framework for a national government while retaining most political power in the hands of the thirteen individual states. Only the states could regulate commerce and impose taxes. Congress could make recommendations on various matters, but it was up to the states to enact or enforce those recommendations. Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation declared that “each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States of America, in Congress assembled.” In other words, the federal government could do only what the States clearly mandated it to do, which was not very much.
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In order to move beyond the Articles of Confederation and to adopt a Constitution for the United States of America in 1787, several compromises had to be made with the states. There was still relatively little sentiment for a strong central governing structure. Here I shall refer to only one of those important compromises, the one which resulted in the constitutional establishment of the Electoral College.
Article II of the Constitution spells out the membership of the Electoral College. “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress.” Thus if a state had two Senators and only one member in the House of Representatives, it would have three votes in the Electoral College. If it had five Representatives, it would have seven votes, and so on. The numerical makeup of the Senate itself was largely a concession to the small states, in that all states would be equally represented with two Senators, and every state would therefore have minimally three votes in the Electoral College.
Without the concessions to states’ rights, the Constitution very likely would not have been passed, and the USA would have limped on into an indefinite and unpredictable future with the chaotic system the Articles of Confederation almost guaranteed. For our purposes, we must note that the very questionable concept of an Electoral College has had major ramifications in subsequent American history.
The Federalist Papers, written primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, were intended to encourage a relatively powerful central government. George Washington and John Adams affirmed such a position. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a vehement proponent of states’ rights. It is significant that on his gravestone he ordered that he was to be recognized as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the statute of religious freedom of the State of Virginia, and as the father of the University of Virginia, but he refused to have it inscribed that he also was the third President of the United States. That says volumes about his fundamental political philosophy, about his devotion to “his country” (Virginia), and of his hesitancy regarding the “united States of America.”
Jefferson, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois were the most noteworthy advocates of states’ rights from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Civil War. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln were the most readily recognized spokesmen for a strong central government during that sixty-year period, although Jackson had serious reservations about a powerful federal government unless it was powerful in ways he either conceived (preferably) or approved (reluctantly).
In the election of 1824, Jackson won the largest number of votes for President, and the largest number of Electoral College votes, but he did not have a majority. Thus the election went to the House of Representatives, where Henry Clay of Kentucky threw his support to John Quincy Adams. This embittered both Calhoun and Jackson. The presidency of John Quincy Adams, like that of his father, lasted for only one term, when Jackson succeeded him in 1828.
The elections of 1824 and 1828 led to a period of partisan politics such as had not been witnessed before in American politics. That partisan trend increased into the late 1850s and the election of 1860.
The Election of 1860
If it took more than a century for the Civil War to germinate, in the decade leading up to the election of 1860 it became evident that the seed was inevitably about to sprout. Abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, added additional fuel to the fire of anti-slavery sentiment which had been growing for decades.
Politically, the federal government was faced with the decision of what to do about slavery in the West. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had decreed that Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, but that everything west and north of Missouri would eventually become free states. By 1854, California had become a state, but there were large areas of the west which had not yet officially entered the union as states. They were the territories of Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 stated that when they did become states, the Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington Territories could not allow slavery, while the Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, and New Mexico territories would become slave states.
This legislation reversed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and it did not satisfy either the pro- or anti-slavery factions in the country. Both groups strove to negate the hard-won decisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that they opposed.
Two days after President gave his inaugural address on March 2, 1857, the Supreme Court rendered its notorious decision in the Dred Scott case. We shall not delve into the arcane and complex issues of that case. Suffice it to say that the court decreed that it was unconstitutional to forbid slavery in any of the territories. This contravened the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It completely undercut the reason for the establishment of the Republican Party, which was primarily founded to oppose slavery in the territories. As much as any other single factor, The Dred Scott decision hastened the outbreak of the Civil War. Southerners and President Buchanan were delighted with the Court’s ruling, but Republicans, many Democrats, and all abolitionists were incensed.
Abraham Lincoln narrowly lost the 1858 election as US Senator from Illinois to US Senator Stephen Douglas. Despite that loss, Lincoln gained increasing awareness in the public mind because of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and because of his famous “House Divided” speech during the debates. On October 16, 1859, John Brown and a group of radicals staged a failed raid on the US arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and another incendiary incident pave the way to the seemingly unavoidable national conflagration.
The election of 1860 demonstrated the fissures in the American body politic as nothing else did. The Republican Party, after a bitterly contested convention in Chicago, nominated Lincoln as their presidential candidate. In April the national Democratic Party held its convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Stephen Douglas, who won their nomination, steadfastly maintained his principle of popular sovereignty, whereby he supported every newly-recognized state in the West deciding for itself whether it would allow or negate slavery within its bounds. The pro-slavery southern Democrats rejected that idea, and nominated Sen. John Breckinridge of Kentucky as their candidate for President, thus splitting the Democratic Party. The newly-created Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell as their candidate, with a platform not unlike that of the Republicans.
The splintering of the Democrats into northern and southern factions, the demise of the old Whig Party and the genesis of the four-year-old Republican Party, and the vote-siphoning of the brand-new Southern Democratic Party and the Constitutional Union Party virtually assured a hopelessly fractured presidential election. When the votes were tallied, Lincoln won 1,866,000 votes, Douglas 1,375,000, Breckinridge 848,000, and Bell 590,000.
The Electoral College vote, however, did not reflect the popular vote by any measure. Lincoln won 180 votes in the Electoral College, Breckinridge 76, Bell 39, and Douglas received just 12 Electoral College votes, even though Douglas won 34% of the total popular vote.
Reflections on the Election of 1860
The election of 1860 is an excruciating demonstration of the inherent injustice of the Electoral College. Lincoln won the presidency in that year with a plurality of 40% of the votes, while Douglas, who garnered 34% of the total votes, was awarded only 12 electoral votes, which was just 2.5% of the total electoral votes. This proves the painfully obvious: whether a presidential candidate wins or loses the Electoral College vote depends entirely on where he wins his votes. Stated another way, it doesn’t matter how many popular votes you win; it’s in which states you win them that matters. Stephen Douglas won 34% of all the votes cast in 1860 for the presidency, but he was unable to concentrate his votes in the right states to have his vote total earn its greatest value.
Furthermore, that particular election is illustrative of the damage that is done to the body politic when there are more than two serious parties vying for the presidency. The four sizable party vote tallies greatly added to the divisions of an already divided nation.
If an Electoral College tally is as skewed as that of the final composition of the electors in 1860, there is bound to be a huge public outcry, if not an armed insurrection. The nation was literally torn apart by that election, but especially by the gaping disparities made evident by the Electoral College.
Has there been no Southern Democratic Party candidate and no Constitutional Union Party candidate, Stephen Douglas almost certainly would have won the election of 1860. What would have transpired thereafter is anyone’s guess. But Lincoln was elected, and the dogs of war were unleashed.
The Democrats had existed since the election of 1796. The Republicans were a new national party in 1856. Of course the Southern Democrats and the Constitutional Union Party came into being solely because of the 1860 election. That glaring degree of political volatility rendered the Civil War tragically unavoidable.
South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20 of 1860, almost three months before Lincoln even took office. By May 20, 1861, North Carolina, the eleventh of the eleven Confederate states, had seceded.
The war began in what then was called “the West,” with relatively small battles in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, and then a huge and very bloody battle in Shiloh, Tennessee on April 6 and 7. In the East the first major battle at Bull Run occurred on July 1, 1861. That was the battle observed by many hundreds of civilian Washingtonians, who rode out in their carriages to witness what they assumed would be a resounding Union victory. Instead it turned out, as did many subsequent battles, to be a rout of the Union Army by the Confederates.
From the standpoint of the Confederacy, the Civil War was fought over what they considered to be the overarching issue of American government, namely, states’ rights. Southerners believed that each state had the right to determine most of the important political principles and laws which were enacted within their borders. By 1861, slavery was the single most important concern of the South, because they were convinced their economy was fundamentally based on the peculiar institution, and it could not thrive without slaves. Furthermore, the ownership of slaves represented a very high percentage of the economic wealth of the South.
From the standpoint of the Union, preserving the Union was the reason given for its willingness to go to war. Therefore the very concept of the Confederacy was considered to be illegal and unacceptable.
Underlying the stated purposes of the war, however, was a festering issue which one side perceived to be a moral question, and the other side perceived to be an economic question. Even prior to the American Revolution, slavery had always been the American “elephant in the room.” To the South, the states alone had the authority to decide the legality of slavery. To the North, the Union (the federal government) would have to decide it. Believing their differences were intractable, the carnage began to be waged in earnest.
The 1860 election was both a symptom and a cause of the gargantuan unresolved issues facing the United States of America. The results of the Electoral College tabulation further exacerbated the problems. With a result that showed that much political disparity and disenfranchisement, it is little wonder that guns started firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.