ve their disagreements over the issue, Americans in both North and South would literally destroy the Union in their quest to prevail in the debate. That is why even abolitionists turned to violence as a means to achieve their ends toward the end of the period analyzed by Freeman. Their doing so constituted an acknowledgement that politics had failed. This is important because violence prevails in spaces where politics has already failed.
Yet implicit in Freeman’s account is her belief that violence caused politics to fail in this instance. This is the central flaw in her otherwise remarkable narrative. Moreover, the fact that Congress continued to debate and legislate on major issues throughout this period cannot be reconciled with Freeman’s assertion that an average of three non-violent incidents a year were sufficient to plunge the nation into Civil War.
Blood Flows When Politics Ends
The violence documented so thoroughly by Freeman was merely symptomatic of a more significant problem that had long plagued the American Republic—the inability of the political system to resolve sectional differences over slavery. This was not unique to the 1830s, 1840s, or 1850s. However, Freeman wrongly attributes inaction on slavery to “a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government who strategically deployed violence to get their way.” Considering that “get their way” meant stopping efforts to restrict the spread of slavery and abolition of the slaves, equal representation of the states in the Senate and the commitment of the Democratic and Whig parties to presidential tickets that were regionally balanced was far more important to the South than its pugnacious reputation and ability to bully individual congressmen from the North into not forcing abolition before the Civil War. It also overstates the commitment to abolition in the North prior to the 1850s. When taken together, these arrangements ensured that the majority of Americans, not just southerners, worked hard to keep slavery off the agenda.
Westward expansion and the annexation of Texas, ironically championed by the South, combined with the Industrial Revolution, which increased the power of the North, sparked a recurring struggle between slave states and free states that would eventually undermine the sectional balance of power in the Senate and destroy the second party system’s intersectional alliances. Consequently, slavery was thrust onto the agenda and the country was forced to grapple with it. No longer able to ignore it, members of Congress from the North and the South turned to violence as a means to mediate their disputes precisely because they never had a mutually agreed upon space in which to bargain, negotiate, persuade, and compromise on how to deal with the issue. Violence did not cause political conflict over slavery to deepen. The issue was not susceptible to compromise (i.e., the sine qua non of politics). Only then does sustained violence in relation to the issue make an appearance.
When it became apparent that the numerically superior North would not back down, southerners concluded that they could no longer achieve their goals within the framework erected by the Constitution. So they left that framework, and the world of ordinary politics, choosing instead to take up arms against their erstwhile countrymen. Lying on his deathbed in 1850, John C. Calhoun perceived what was to come. “The Union is doomed…within twelve years,” observed Calhoun. “The probability is that it will explode in a presidential election.” Calhoun was right. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the first president elected exclusively with the support of one section. Once the results were in, many in the South were out. Freeman’s poignant description of southern delegations bidding their colleagues goodbye as their states seceded underscores the reality that they knew they were leaving the world of politics.
When juxtaposed with today’s Congress, the unique nature of our present dysfunction becomes apparent. It results from the absence of conflict inside the House