The pages of history fetishize great figures, but what we call “greatness” is often the correction of generational dereliction, when a few people, touched by genius or blessed with high character, heal the rifts in a society caused by the many. Leo Tolstoy best captured this common view of Abraham Lincoln in particular, calling him “a Christ in miniature … bigger than his country [and] all the Presidents put together” — ironic for the author who wrote the greatest case for the opposing view of history, one driven by impersonal forces rather than exceptional individuals: War and Peace, first drafted in 1863, the decisive year of America’s Civil War that would leave over 600,000 dead.
Robert W. Merry’s new book Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 underscores, however, the limitations of focusing too narrowly on exceptional personalities at the expense of broader historical context. A former journalist who covered Washington for the Wall Street Journal for a decade and the acclaimed author of biographies of James K. Polk and William McKinley and their times, Merry writes lucidly, often grippingly, about the political current of the age, as seen through the eyes of the lesser-known politicians of two states, Union Massachusetts and Confederate South Carolina — while the road to “compromise,” if there ever was one, narrowed to finality.
Merry’s approach explains how America descended into war more fully than an account relying more mainly on individual characters, yet does so without discarding the importance of political prodigy (Lincoln was exceptional, after all), mainly through its absence: Lincoln does not appear until 300 pages in. As such, it is far deeper than its title suggests. It serves as the story of how the preconditions for dialogue and accommodation, essential in a healthy democracy, were corroded as certain causes became fused with identity politics, making reconciliation between two sides impossible. It, therefore, serves as a general explanation of how democratic politics can break down and create the conditions for war.
By example, Merry illustrates how compromise, when it existed, was predicated on the ability to see one’s opponents in rational, not merely emotional, terms, and to speak freely without fear of consequence from one’s own side. He expertly shows how, in the years preceding the Civil War, slavery, despite attempts at concession such as the Compromise of 1850, gradually eroded such principles, becoming symbolic of what it meant for slave-owners to be Southern and, ultimately, “American.” Each political generation’s failure to find a middle way saw the problem fester as each side diverged.
That is not to say, however, that the division between North and South was only rooted in the matter of slavery. One of the most interesting chapters in the book explores the differences between the Puritan North, whose religious viewpoint would later fuel the abolition movement, and the more mercantilist, Anglican South, eager to pursue finance by whatever means available, which would later radicalize the slave-owners. This was despite, for Merry, the “cyclical trap” they were falling into. For, as he writes, “to maintain economic growth, they needed to cultivate more and more acreage for their staple crops … to do that they needed more slaves; but, as the slave population grew, so did anxieties about the threat of insurrection; as anxieties grew, institutional controls over those in bondage tightened; as they tightened, the prospect of rebellion increased.” This fear, of one day being outnumbered by an enemy within, only grew throughout the 1850s.
Yet Northerners were fearful, too — of God’s judgment, if nothing else, which fed divisions. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who Lincoln allegedly though probably apocryphally called “the little lady who started this great war” thanks to her book’s influence in popularizing abolitionism, encapsulated a Puritan absolutism with the concept of human progress “developed by contemporary New England thinkers,” creating a “zeal for humanitarian reform” intertwining “religious and secular sensibility.” Thus, the idea of a higher law transcending human affairs, infused with a vision of progressive politics in direct conflict with slavery, undermined the former pre-eminence of the Constitution and the 1850 Compromise. This enabled Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator for Massachusetts, to declare that “everything which elevates man” — including the “steam engine,” “railroad,” and “telegraph” — gave “new encouragement to the warfare with slavery.”
No wonder, then, that in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, “violence … was becoming more and more acceptable in the minds of many antislavery activists.” So, too, was absolutist, clerical language, with politicians North and South seeing themselves as embodying destiny for their causes. After blood was shed on the floor of the Senate when Preston Brooks, the pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, attacked Sumner, a Rubicon was crossed, with Southern newspapers praising the assault. In this context, the killing of five pro-slavery settlers by abolitionist extremist John Brown in the Pottawatomie massacre, inspired by Sumner’s caning, was less of an outlier than is often assumed. As Merry writes, Brown’s later debacle at Harpers Ferry could, in less volatile times, have seen Brown “dismissed as the charlatan that he always had been in just about every walk of life that he had pursued.” Alas, “the collective psychology of the nation in those turbulent times rendered impossible such a commonplace evaluation on either side of the sectional divide. Instead, the man immediately took on a mythic symbolism, with many in the North hailing him as a paragon of higher law purity, while Southerners conjured up visions of a gigantic threat to life and livelihood germinating in the land of the enemy.”
If Brown was less of an aberration than the logical end point of a decaying politic, so too was Lincoln. No stranger himself to a sense of destiny, his ideology, remarkable though it remains, becomes more of its time in Merry’s telling: a man who saw and articulated clearly the now irreconcilable nature of the problem facing the nation. A Southern Cavalier on his mother’s side and a New England Puritan on his father’s, he understood, and one might say represented, where the nation had ended up: “It will become all one thing or all the other.”
He, too, like America, would become “all one.” But not without bloodshed.
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Francis Dearnley is an assistant editor at The Telegraph of London and presenter of its award-winning daily podcast Ukraine: The Latest.