A lesson learned from DECADE OF DISUNION: HOW MASSACHUSETTS AND SOUTH CAROLINA LED THE WAY TO CIVIL WAR, 1849-1861, by Robert Merry

 Without clear-headed and moral leadership, the loudest and most emotional voices win.

          Robert Merry’s Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 is an excellent new study on the political chaos of the 1850’s, that fascinating and crucial decade where the original American nation collapsed into regional conflict, and set up a civil war that built a new American nation on its ashes. Merry focuses his study on the leaders of Massachusetts and South Carolina, the two states which were famously at the leading edges of abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, respectively. One clear lesson which becomes obvious from Merry’s work is that a clear factor in the disintegration of the antebellum political order, was the complete lack of competent national leadership, as a series of ineffectual presidents in the 1850’s completely failed to unify the country behind any kind of clear national vision. That allowed the extremists of the North and South to send the country careening headlong toward crisis, as people increasingly began to believe in conspiracy thinking and extreme solutions, any bonds of national affection broke between the two different regions.

            Of course by 1849, the national crisis over continued toleration of slavery had been brewing for decades. America’s founding generation had infamously punted on the issue, making the controversial call that the issue was too divisive for a brand new nation to handle (a decision historians debate to this day as to whether it was the correct one), and instead allowed the institution to take root in the South even as Northern states adopted gradual emancipation and phased it out. One strategy that the Democratic and Whig parties adopted in the mid-1800’s was to simply ignore the issue, and allow their northern and southern factions to take wildly different positions on the issue. By the time Merry’s book begins in 1849, that strategy had become untenable as America’s new conquest of western territories away from Mexico had immediately opened up a massive national debate as to whether slavery would be allowed to spread into these new territories. Given the immorality of slavery and the Southern ideological and economic investment in it, some type of bloody civil war was likely inevitable in order to finally have mass emancipation, but there was no doubt that terrible national leadership in the 1850’s exacerbated the crisis and growing national divisions.

            The decade’s first president was the old stubborn general Zachary Taylor (a president I read up on a lot as a kid, for obvious reasons). A massive slave-owner who was nonetheless not particularly sympathetic to rabid Southern rhetoric, he made some effort to prevent slavery’s expansion into the West, but was also an incompetent politician who utterly alienated allies who might have helped him in Congress. Any chance a national anti-slavery policy had was snuffed out with Taylor’s sudden death from cholera in 1850, and that brought on a wave of three consecutive presidents (Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan) who argued that the only way to preserve national peace was to focus on accommodating Southern slave-owners and allow them to spread the institution across the West. The utter immorality and fecklessness of the national government pushed more and more Northerners to follow the lead of the state of Massachusetts and the abolitionist movement, which castigated white Southerners as sinners who were in need of being crushed; in turn, more slave-owners were pushed into the arms of South Carolina, which had long embraced the rhetoric of building an independent Southern nation based on slave wealth and building a slave empire across the Western Hemisphere.

            Merry’s book focuses on a series of colorful characters who became national leaders in the 1850’s, all of whom were deeply flawed and alienating to those who disagreed with them. One of South Carolina’s key leaders in the decade was Senator James Hammond, a man who was ostensibly a political moderate by the state’s standards, but was also a deeply selfish sexual predator who was incapable of self-reflection (he assaulted not only his female slaves—which was sadly common in the South—but his own teenage nieces). White Southerners also gravitated toward Robert Rhett, a hardcore secessionist with delusions of grandeur who saw himself as a future Southern president, even as most of the people who actually had to interact with him saw him as an obnoxious blowhard who was incapable of leading anything. Meanwhile, one of the North’s most famous abolitionists was John Brown, an Old-Testament quoting renegade who meted out violent justice on Southern slave-owners, and whose status as a hero or a murderer historians debate to this day (Merry falls on the side of many modern historians that Brown was a bit of a crank and fraud whose greatest achievement was his martyrdom on behalf of abolitionism, when the government executed him for treason when he tried to incite a slave rebellion).

            With no direction or inspiration coming from the national government, Americans in the 1850’s felt little choice but to gravitate to these deeply flawed and often immoral leaders, and they embraced conspiracy theories about how the Northerners or Southerners were actively out to destroy them and were enemies who needed to be brought to heel. The failure of national leaders to provide clear and competent direction for the people bred a general environment of hatred and chaos, and made the national trauma of a massive and bloody civil war inevitable. Merry’s book is a well-written and thoughtful work that shows the dangers of when a national government encourages all of the nation’s worst impulses rather than its best ones, and the dark directions that people can subsequently follow.