The Civil War, in which are included the causes and consequences, constitutes the central event
in American history. It is also America's most characteristic event which brings out all that the
United States is, and is not. It made America a nation, which it was not so before. For America,
as we have seen, was not prescriptive, its people forged together by a forgotten process in the
darkness of prehistory, emerging from it already a nation by the time it could record its own
doings. It was, rather, an artificial state or series of states, bound together by negotiated
agreements and compacts, charters and covenants. It was made by bits of parchment, bred by
lawyers. The early Americans, insofar as they had a nationality, were English (or more properly
British) with an English national identity and culture. Their contract to become Americans-the
Declaration of Independence-did not in itself make them a nation. On the contrary; the very word
nation' was cut from it-the Southerners did not like the word. Significantly it was John Marshall, the supreme federalist, the legal ideologist of federalism, who first asserted in 1821 that America was a nation. It is true that Washington had used the word in his Farewell Address, but elliptically, and it was no doubt inserted by Hamilton, the other ideologue of federalism. Washington referred to ‘the Community of Interest in one Nation,' which seems to beg the question whether America was a nation or not. And even Marshall's definition is qualified: America has chosen to be,' he laid down, in many respects and for many purposes, a nation.' This leads one to ask: in what respects, and for what purposes, was America not a nation? The word is not to be found in the Constitution. In the 1820s in the debates over theNational Road,'
Senator William Smith of South Carolina objected to this insidious word:' he said it wasa term
unknown to the origins and theory of our government.' As one constitutional historian has put it:
`In the architecture of nationhood, the United States has achieved something quite remarkable ...
Americans erected their constitutional roof before they put up their national walls ... and the
Constitution became a substitute for a deeper kind of national identity."
Yes; but whose constitution: that as seen by the North, or the one which the South treasured-or
the one, in the 1850s, interpreted by the southern-dominated Taney Supreme Court? The North,
increasingly driven by emancipationists, thought of the Constitution as a document which, when
applied in its spirit, would eventually insure that all people in America, whatever their color,
black or white, whatever their status, slave or free, would be equal before the law. The
Southerners, by which I mean those who dominated the South politically and controlled is
culture and self-expression, had a quite different agenda. They believed the Constitution could be
used to extend not so much the fact of slavery-though it could do that too-but its principle.
Moreover, they possessed, in the Democratic Party, and in the Taney Court, instruments whereby
their view of the Constitution could be made to prevail. They were frustrated in this endeavor by
their impetuosity and by their divisions-that is the story of the 1850s.
For the South, the decade began well. True, the California gold rush had been, from their point
of view, a stroke of ill-fortune, since the slavery-hating miners who rushed there frustrated the
South's plan of making California a slave state. But in some other respects the Compromise of
1850 worked in their favor. For one thing it made it possible for them to keep the Democratic
Party united, and since 1828 that party had been the perfect instrument for winning elections. All
it had to do, to elect a president of its choosing, was to hold the South together and secure a
reasonable slice of the North; then, with their own man in the White House, appointing new
Supreme Court judges, they could keep the South's interpretation of the Constitution secure too.