Americans at their best are a pragmatic “can do” folk, be it “Yankee ingenuity” or good old fashioned “get ‘r done.” We are at our worst when we stray from this pragmatic bent into the misty fields of sacerdotal ideology, which is to say when we ascribe to our pet ideologies a sacred nature, and confer a sainthood, or at the very least, a priestly ordination upon our favored ideologues. In the antebellum period, abolitionist ideology exercised over the course of time a profound effect upon the Yankee mind. More and more northerners, even those whom the abolitionists annoyed, came to accept the idiocy of the “slave power conspiracy.” For the innocent and uninitiated, this conspiracy theory asserted that southern slaveholders were planning to use the powers of the federal government to expand slavery into the territories and throughout the Union. Once this was accomplished, free white labor would be degraded, and the stout wheat farmers of the Midwest would find themselves enslaved. Of course this was nonsense.
During the crisis of the 1850s Southerners did insist on being allowed equal access to the territories, which did mean that slaveholders could settle in the territories with their slaves, but everyone knew this was not happening and was not going to happen. There was a bare handful of slaves in the territories; ironically the anti-slavery, Mormon dominated Utah territory had the most (29) according to the 1860 census. Realities, however, no longer mattered. Symbols defined people’s views of each other whether one was opposing the “Black Republicans” or the “Slave Power.” Thus Southerners and Northerners, who had a great deal in common, were now ready to kill each other.
The Inferno (Signet Cl...
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On balance, I do believe the North bears the much greater blame in all of this. Beginning with the Missouri Compromise and lasting through and after the war, Northern politicians continually painted the South as a part of Dante’s Inferno. Southern fire-eaters and pro-slavery apologists began to play the same sort of game, but they were very much Johnny-come-latelies; the most extreme pro-slavery folk were also viewed by many in the South as an eccentric minority. Also, the South’s politicians were asking for a symbolic concession on the territories issue. Which is to say that most Southerners probably understood that even if the slave property friendly Lecompton constitution was approved by the federal government for the Kansas territory, sooner or later slavery would be abolished in Kansas as more northerners than southerners made their way into Kansas. But when the symbolic becomes the real, symbolic concessions, such as what the South was seeking since the days of John C. Calhoun, become in the minds of many northerners very real and very dangerous concessions. And so to quote Father Abraham, “the war came.”
For a time it was a restrained war, a war waged by people who were on the whole Christian, through the states and a federal government, under most of the provisions, laws, and customs that governed the prosecution of conflicts. As the war progressed, civilized restraints lost their hold upon the war lords of the North. But with the exceptions of Kentucky and Maryland, where brother literally fought brother, and the Missouri—Kansas border, the war was mostly a war between the states. Where symbol most ardently challenged reality, the frontiers and borders of the Southland, that is where civil war reigned.
