Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, by Robert W. Merry. Simon & Schuster, 528 pages.

With Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, author and former editor of The American Conservative Robert W. Merry picks up where he left off in his popular biography of James K. Polk to chronicle the deleterious path of the United States from the contentious 1849 House speakership race to the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

In his acknowledgements, Merry shares that the book’s provenance was a quote from British popular historian Paul Johnson, who wrote in 1997, “Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.” 

In nearly 440 pages, Merry expands and clarifies Johnson’s dictum, presenting Massachusetts and South Carolina, their internal debates, and their respective radicalisms’ influence on the national stage as a narrative lens for understanding the growing sectional hatreds of the 1850s and their bloody result.

That begins with the states’ colonial origins, with Merry wisely giving credit to David Hackett Fischer’s thesis that much of the regional diversity of culture in the United States originates with the people who settled these areas from the contrasting parts of Britain.

“Of all the New World colonies established in the seventeenth century, no two were as disparate in outlook, religion, moral precepts, or cultural sensibility as Massachusetts and South Carolina,” Merry writes. “Puritanism was fervent, moralistic, universalist, exhortatory; so was the secular humanitarianism of eighteenth-century Massachusetts.” The Christianity of South Carolina lacked that ardent piety, instead promoting a religious pluralism that coincided with a cavalier attitude towards wealth.

Fast-forward to the beginning of the 1850s, and slavery had been extinguished in the north and replaced by growing industry, whereas the practice had become integral to both the south’s economy and its stratified social order. The introduction of more than 500,000 square miles acquired from the Mexican–American War—territory where slavery had been illegal—ruptured the party system, as both sections hotly contested which would be allowed to grow and which would be stunted.

This great debate coincided with a generational changing of the guard. The three men who for over thirty years had personified their regions, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts were not long for this world.

These were leaders who could command—or at least find consensus among—their constituents. When no singular men could fill any of their respective shoes, what instead filled the political vacuum in their home states were disputes and power struggles.

The Massachusetts breed of “Cotton Whigs,” as they were derisively called, had opposed slavery but prioritized economic policies like Clay’s American System and maintained cordial relations with the south. They would be supplanted by the younger “Conscience Whigs,” who were more forthright and vocal in their opposition to the south’s slave system and its appetites. And on the furthest edge were the abolitionists, who demanded immediate emancipation and equal rights for blacks, and who often scorned participation in politics.

In South Carolina, Fire-Eaters were the most hardcore southern nationalists. Their rancorous demeanor often put the cart before the horse, advocating immediate secession whether circumstance or public support could justify it or not. “Let it be that I am a traitor,” Robert Barnwell Rhett proudly proclaimed before accepting a Senate seat in December 1850. (He resigned after 17 months when it was clear his constituency would not follow him into the “dark and dangerous unknown” just yet.)

On the other hand, cooperationists, while not precluding the legal right of secession as a last resort, argued that it was better to fight for their cause within the union rather than try and go it alone. The remainder of the 1850s would be a game of musical chairs in South Carolina with a small coterie exchanging and vying for power and influence based on whether the secessionist tune was playing.

The heart of the debate was whether or not slavery would be permitted in the western territories, but more broadly it was about whether slavery would be morally countenanced by the north as demanded by the south. It was not enough that the south wanted its “peculiar institution” legally protected; it wanted it socially respected. The south would not allow itself to be shamed for its character by “agitators and intermeddlers,” to quote Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, the leader of the South Carolina cooperationists.

“Some people desperately seized upon the notion that if the North would just stop its antislavery agitations and the South would cease threatening to leave the Union, some kind of mutual accommodation might be possible,” writes Merry.

It can be overwhelming for a newcomer to understand the nuances of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and how each shifted the parameters of the debate, but Merry’s account is straightforward. His work is much more focused on the goings on of the U.S. Senate than the House. A Senate debate and the chamber’s machinations may be examined for several pages, while a House vote is usually summarized in as little as a paragraph. 

Outside of Washington, the reader is always brought back to the “homefront,” whether that’s Faneuil Hall in Boston or the South Carolina low-country to understand how folks at home were reacting to national events and instructing their elected officials. This concentration precludes other areas like the Midwest, and prominent Republicans like Salmon Chase and Joshua Giddings are only mentioned in passing.

Merry’s writing style is wordy but never dense, and a novice on the antebellum era could enjoy his work without having to chew too hard on the material. The standouts are his terrific and often hilarious sketches of the major players, giving life and familiarity to men born two centuries ago.

I know of no other book where you can read Senator Stephen Douglas described as “built like a block of wood, with a smaller block of wood atop serving as his head. But inside that head was a remarkable mind directing an iron will.” Decade of Disunion is made richer by this humanization.

If there is a main character, it is Charles Sumner, who ascended to the U.S. Senate in 1852, the same seat that had been occupied by Webster two years prior. Along with his colleague Henry Wilson, they “represented a dawning new era for their state, a shift in the balance of power toward a new level of antislavery vigor and aggressive agitations against the slave power.”

Sumner’s background, personality, growth in office, and speeches receive significant space, including his dynamic with Pickens Butler. The two “who personified the slavery chasm between their states and within the nation” formed a good-natured and mutually helpful friendship on Capitol Hill.

That couldn’t and didn’t last. “The tensions roiling the two senators’ relationship went deeper than the slavery issue, as fundamental and emotional as it was. They stretched back into the divergent cultural attitudes, mores, and folkways of the two states they represented—the austere Calvinism of the old Massachusetts Puritans vs. the Cavalier sensibilities of the early Carolina swashbucklers,” writes Merry.

In one of his most notable speeches, Sumner cut into Butler, “once his unlikely friend, then his friendly adversary, then his nettlesome foe, and now his political enemy.” In retaliation, and to appease southern “honor,” Butler’s cousin and a member of the U.S. House, Preston Brooks, entered the Senate floor and with his cane beat an unarmed Sumner until he was bloodied and debilitated. 

The caning of Sumner, which coincided with an outburst of violence in Kansas (the subject of Sumner’s speech), forms the fulcrum of Merry’s narrative and in many ways the pivot point of the decade. What had up to that point been boisterous arguments and unsatisfactory compromise turned into bloodshed.

“The gathering Kansas disruption was becoming a touchstone issue for more and more Americans. The political passions unleashed in the territory were seeping increasingly into the American consciousness, and it was becoming clearer by the day that the issue could not be avoided,” Merry writes. “Everyone eventually would have to choose sides​​—and, having chosen, would have to muster a rationale of justification. Thus was Kansas pushing increasing numbers of Americans to one side or the other of a widening national divide.”

When Stephen Douglas had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he hoped that not only would it pave the way for a transatlantic railroad along his preferred route, but that it would permanently end the slavery debate by removing it from the hands of Congress. In theory, through popular sovereignty, residents would democratically choose their own future. But in reality, a free-for-all brawl brought chaos to the frontier.

Bands of “Border Ruffians” from neighboring Missouri, sometimes financed and led by prominent political leaders, regularly rode wild into Kansas, harassing free staters and committing voter fraud. “Of 2,871 votes cast, only 1,114 were legal. One polling place recorded 604 voters, only twenty of them legal,” Merry writes of a congressional delegate election.

“Kansas has been invaded, conquered, subjugated by an armed force from beyond her borders,” wrote one of her territorial governors. Aid societies across the north responded by raising money to send rifles to Kansas (along with real settlers); but the most well-known and homicidal retribution came at the hands of John Brown, whom Merry does not handle with kid gloves.

In 1857, the Supreme Court stepped in with an infamous opinion whose “bludgeon words… were breathtaking in their sweep, dogmatism, defiance, and, for many, perversity.” Written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott decision promulgated that blacks could not be recognized as American citizens and conferred “on southern slaveholders a constitutional right, superior to congressional prerogative or voter sentiment, to carry slaves into territorial lands prior to any statehood application. This meant, in practical terms…that all territories were essentially slave territories prior to statehood.” 

This judicial capitulation to what was labeled the Slave Power met near universal opposition above the Mason–Dixon. When it had been founded in 1854, the Republican Party cast a wide net of supporters across the north, who all congregated around a singular principle: no expansion of slavery into new territories.

Their motivation had little to do with racial tenderness. “They didn’t want slavery because they didn’t want blacks and they didn’t want to compete with slave labor,” Merry explains.

“So strong was the coalescence that the party platform, just nine resolutions that could be read in less than ten minutes, was approved in a voice vote,” writes Merry about the 1856 Republican National Convention. Dred Scott was not going to alter that conviction.

More words have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other president. But even readers well versed in his biography will still find Merry’s chapter on Lincoln’s down-and-up political career refreshing, and the author’s analysis of the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates not at all weighed down. 

If there is a disappointing chapter, it’s the coverage of the 1860 election following the nominating conventions. Merry gives short shrift to the fall campaign, and Lincoln’s electoral college victory can come across as a fait accompli. The Republican strategy to campaign against the Buchanan administration’s epidemic corruption instead of spotlighting the slavery issue goes unmentioned.

“The vote totals in Massachusetts and South Carolina reflected the chasm separating those two states stretching back to the early decades of the English colonial experience,” Merry writes. While Massachusetts Republicans came within range of capturing two-thirds of the popular vote, the South Carolina legislature, in its aristocratic tradition, bypassed a vote by the citizenry and instructed its electors to vote for Vice President John C. Breckinridge, who swept the Deep South.

Despite the book’s central focus on the influential radicalism of the Palmetto and Bay States, it’s clear from the text that Merry is more sympathetic to the “Irrepressible Conflict” School of historiography. This interpretation, whose name comes from an 1858 address by William Seward, interprets the Civil War as unavoidable due to the irreconcilable differences of political economy, culture, and morality between the north and south.

In contrast, proponents of the “Blundering Generation” School argue that shortsighted politicians and inept national leadership allowed intemperate radicals on both sides to dictate policy and drive an unnecessary sectional wedge, and that better compromises and cooler heads could have prevented secession and the war.

Merry believes that the failure of negotiations like the Crittenden plan after Lincoln’s election “reflected an underlying reality: the time for compromise had passed. The South’s demand for a territorial slave code couldn’t be meshed with the Republicans’ ironclad opposition to slavery extension.”

Successive generations have struggled with what even many contemporaries recognized: how could so many millions be so impassioned and unyielding, so inescapably willing to kill and die for what amounted, in 1860, to an abstraction?

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On paper, the most contentious divisions of the 1850s had been put to rest. Kansas was admitted as a free state in January 1861. The Supreme Court had ruled that slaveholders must be able to enter all territories with their “property.” No amount of leverage by the Slave Power could make the New Mexico or Dakota territories hospitable to plantation economics or a slave society. Republican leaders from Lincoln to Sumner loudly acknowledged they had no constitutional authority (and the northern public no interest) to interfere with slavery where it already existed in the southern states.

But these facts on the ground couldn’t withstand a decade’s worth of pent up panic and indignation. “Southerners couldn’t get beyond [Lincoln’s] view of slavery as a moral wrong and thus couldn’t draw a distinction between Lincoln and, say, a [William Lloyd] Garrison or a [Wendell] Phillips,” Merry writes, and “those efforts of past intellectualism were giving way more and more now to sentiments of a burgeoning emotionalism on both sides, far more difficult to counter or adjudicate than intellectual arguments.”

Lincoln himself recognized this intractable problem of convincing the south. I will give him the final word. “We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task,” he said in his Cooper Union address of February 1860, the speech that paved the way for his nomination and victory in November. “The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us…Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.” Decade of Disunion is an able and compelling addition to the public’s comprehension of the causes of what will forever remain the most transformative event of American history.