A Refusal to Compromise? Civil War Historians Beg to Differ!

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times By Jennifer Schuessler Oct. 31, 2017

Two months after President Trump stirred fierce debate with a defense of Confederate monuments, his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, has waded back into the fray of Civil War history.

Asked by the Fox News television host Laura Ingraham about a Virginia church that had recently removed a memorial to Robert E. Lee, Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, on Monday praised Lee as “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state.”

It was “the lack of an ability to compromise,” he said, “that led to the Civil War.”

“Most any measure of compromise had been tried, and had been worn out,” said David Blight, a historian at Yale University, where he has organized a conference this weekend exploring the parallels between the disunion that preceded the Civil War and our politics today. “The real story, the great tragedy of the coming of the Civil War, was that there was no middle left anymore in American politics.”

And then there was the fact that the framers, deliberately, did not explicitly mention slavery even once. David Waldstreicher, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of “Slavery’s Constitution,” said this approach created ambiguity about the framers’ intentions and the constitutionality of both proslavery and antislavery legislation.

Most Northern states passed abolition laws by 1800, but the national debate intensified as factions fought over whether slavery would be allowed in the expanding western territories. In 1820, Congress enacted the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to enter the union as a slave state but otherwise forbade slavery above the 36th parallel, effectively drawing the lines for the sectional battle to follow. In 1836, it passed what would be the first of several gag rules, forbidding antislavery petitions from even being discussed.

The Missouri Compromise unraveled with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which mandated that new states, regardless of geography, be allowed to decide the question of slavery by “popular sovereignty.”

The act unleashed violence in Kansas, as well as in Congress itself, including an infamous brawl on the floor of the House in 1858 during debate over a proposed proslavery Kansas state constitution. That constitution was later defeated by a coalition of Republicans and Northern Democrats.

[The most infamous floor brawl in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives erupted as Members debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution late into the night of February 5-6, 1858. Shortly before 2 a.m., Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt exchanged insults, then blows. “In an instant the House was in the greatest possible confusion,” the Congressional Globe reported. More than 30 Members joined the melee. Northern Republicans and Free Soilers joined ranks against Southern Democrats.]

Southern Democrats “pushed so hard for such extremely proslavery policies, they drove Northern Democrats away from them,” Kate Masur, a historian at Northwestern University, said.

As slavery spread, so did the antislavery movement. Abolitionists then were often depicted as dangerous fanatics, but in truth the antislavery movement included many compromises when it came to black equality. One was the idea of colonization, which advocated resettling freed blacks in Africa, out a belief that they could never coexist with whites.

One advocate of colonization was Abraham Lincoln, who indicated support for colonization as late as 1862.

Even as a presidential nominee, he and the Republican Party were willing to entertain deals to keep the slaveholding South in the Union, including a proposed Constitutional amendment that would allow slavery to continue without federal interference where it already existed but prohibit its establishment in new territories.

The 13th amendment, ratified in December 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, abolished slavery.