Causes

Abstract

This chapter surveys the principal political events that contributed to the crisis of Union. Rather than portraying a sectional South vs. a nationalist North (an old historiographical trope long displaced by current scholarship), the chapter features slaveholders, antislavery activists, and multiracial abolitionists all laying claim to the American Union. Proponents of slavery considered the United States unique because most of the world by mid-century had abolished forms of unfree labor. Only in the Union, so went the thinking, could slavery thrive and expand. But antislavery critics argued that a slaveholding Union violated the spirit of the American founding, tarnishing the republic’s unique democracy. Competing claims to American exceptionalism rooted in irreconcilable debates about slavery gave voice to Lincoln’s belief that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Union had to be either all slave or all free, a proposition that the political system strained to resolve.