Perhaps the most famous words in American history are those penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 espousing the inherent equality of all mankind: “all men are created equal [and] they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” As self-evident as these truths may have been, they nevertheless left unsolved a contradiction within American liberty that would last for nearly ninety more years. That contradiction, the “peculiar institution” of American chattel slavery, would not be reconciled but by a major civil war. After it was bypassed by the Three-Fifths Compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, American politics continued to kick the proverbial can further down the road. That road, argues the noted Civil War historian Steven E. Woodworth, happened to be the road to the great American frontier, into territories which very soon became America’s “manifest destiny.”
Steven E. Woodworth has his name appended to nearly thirty books on the American Civil War and is a professor of history and Texas Christian University. [1] His 2010 work, Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War, traverses that road and examines it over the course of the politically tumultuous decade of the 1840’s. Woodworth claims that “America’s manifest destiny to overspread the continent became its manifest destiny finally to face the issue of slavery.” [2] That is, that even as the United States continued to gag discussion concerning slavery on the House floor, the seeds of dissension that would bring the contradiction to a head were actively being sown on the Oregon Trail, along the banks of the Rio Grande, and even in the gold mines of California. As American settlers, trappers, and traders crossed the Mississippi, the United States effectively crossed the Rubicon.
Woodworth’s inciting incident is the creation of a two-party system comprised of the Whigs and the Democrats, a series of events for which he gives credit largely to Andrew Jackson protégé Martin Van Buren. He writes that by “building a party that drew its strength from every section of the country, [he] could force the opposing party [the Whigs] to do the same.” The result was that “Once established, the system created a political dynamic that made slavery persistently invisible on the national political stage.” [3] Despite his defeat in his 1840 re-election bid, Woodworth writes that Van Buren was yet successful in that the “explosive issue of slavery had remained largely submerged” and that both the Whig and Democrat parties “were truly national parties.” [4] The same thing was recognized in 1840 that was recognized in 1787; that is, that the issue of slavery was too volatile, “too dangerous, too likely to tear the nation apart.” [5]
One interesting aspect of Woodworth’s book is that while his point is clear and concise, he spends the majority of his twenty chapters providing brief but thorough windows into a surprising number of facets concerning American westward expansion. He gives an account of the Oregon Trail, of John C. Fremont’s eventful life in the west, and even of the Mormons as they were forced into present-day Utah by public rejection of their teachings in the east. Woodworth also offers what is for all practical purposes a complete overview of the Mexican-American war. It can be difficult to understand how exactly such detailed examinations, departing so far from the politics of expansion and slavery, are necessary to understand Woodworth’s argument. However, these exhibits have immense value in that they showcase the incredible interconnectedness of American history in a largely overlooked decade. For example, how many times does one hear that William Clark’s son, Meriwether Lewis Clark, commanded a unit in the same war that Jefferson Davis also had a command? Or learn that Mexican War general and president Zachary Taylor was the latter’s father-in-law, and that this relationship influenced his voting decisions? Not to mention the prodigious number of future Civil War generals and officers who first made themselves known during this time.
According to Woodworth, the annexation of Texas and the subsequent war between the United States and Mexico first prompted the issue of slavery to return to the national stage. However, most Americans at the time considered slavery “only one issue among many, perhaps to be outweighed by the significance of such a vast expansion of the American empire of liberty,” her manifest destiny. [6] Additionally, Van Buren’s expectations remained correct as the two major parties in Washington City feared the issue of slavery, within the context of the Texas annexation, “would break up their parties into contentious northern and southern factions.” [7] While this would later become true, the time was not yet come and Texas would not be the catalyst. However, Woodworth observes that this issue did prompt enough prominent discussion of slavery to make the electoral map of 1844 look more like that of 1860 and less like that of 1840. [8] For the time being, though, “Manifest Destiny still reached across the sectional divide.” [9]
Even as the Mexican-American war began, Woodworth notes that other than abolitionists who considered the conflict a “conspiracy of the slave power,” most people could see in it “not a campaign to spread slavery but a fulfillment of America’s Manifest Destiny to overspread the entire continent and increase the domain of ordered, constitutional liberty.” [10] He cites the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, a attempt by Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot to prohibit slavery in a potential Texan state, as evidence of this fact. [11] Although slavery was lurking ominously beneath the surface of every political debate, Woodworth claims that “vocal opposition to the war tended to be limited to those for whom immediate abolition of slavery had become the only political issue of import.” [12]
Woodworth cites the emergence of the Barnburner wing of the Democrat Party and the formation of the Free Soil Party as examples of “new possibilities for the political cause of opposition to slavery.” [13] These threatened to draw voters away from major parties and potentially skew election results. Both of these major parties “experienced the growing difficulty of trying to hold down the political concern about the issue of slavery.” [14] Nevertheless, the election of 1848 saw “both parties [retain] most of their strength in the southern states.” [15]
The catalyst for the issue of slavery in the United States, Woodworth argues, began with the debate over California’s status as a state and was finalized in the Compromise of 1850. The pending admission of California as a state following the gold rush of 1849 “made the issue inescapable.” [16] For Woodworth, it was none other than John C. Calhoun who hammered the last nail into the veritable coffin of disunion with his provisions for a compromise to break the deadlock in Congress. Woodworth describes the dramatic scene in the Senate chamber as a fellow congressman read the aging and weak Calhoun’s address: “Senators and spectators waited in suspense to see if slavery’s chief spokesman [would back] the compromise resolutions.” Calhoun, he writes, proceeded to offer what would become a “massive obstruction to any semiamicable settlement of the sectional troubles” over slavery, seemingly “intent on destroying the country he could not rule.” [17]
Woodworth’s book constitutes a major contribution to an under-examined decade in American history. He expertly ties together two often disparate threads of the antebellum era and makes an excellent case for their correlation.Although a Christian historian, Woodworth avoids approaching his topic from a providentialist perspective.While many of the details he chooses to include appear to be extra-contextual, they yet serve to broaden the reader’s understanding of this critical period for the United States on the road to the Civil War.As Woodworth concludes, “America had reached its territorial culmination, but it was about to reap the fruits of its own internal contradiction.” [18]
ENDNOTES
[1] “Steven E. Woodworth.” OAH Directory of Lecturers. Accessed April 2020. https://www.oah.org/lectures/lecturers/view/1637/steven-e-woodworth/. [2] Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), xii. Hereafter, Manifest Destinies. [3] Manifest Destinies, 5. [4] Ibid., 24. [5] Ibid., 53. [6] Ibid., 111. [7] Ibid., 121. [8] Ibid., 136-137. [9] Ibid., 141. [10] Ibid., 167. [11] Ibid., 236. [12] Ibid., 167. [13] Ibid., 306. [14] Ibid., 311. [15] Ibid., 309. [16] Ibid., 328. [17] Ibid., 346-347. [18] Ibid., 357.
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