Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

very plain fact about the United States of America: its political structure—that of a union of states—was a standing invitation to chaos.

The origins of this situation extend far into the American past, all the way to the founding of the first English-speaking colonies in North America. Beginning in 1607 with Jamestown, Virginia, these settlements had been individually laid out, funded, settled, and organized, with next to nothing in the way of supervision from the English government. Right down to the outbreak of the American Revolution, the British North American colonies operated on different currencies, commissioned separate defense forces, and maintained separate agencies in London to represent their interests to the English Parliament. A dozen years of spectacular political bungling by Parliament provoked thirteen of those colonies to declare themselves independent of British rule in 1776. But even in the face of British armies sent to suppress their revolt, the American colonies were unwilling to cooperate with each other on more than a hit-or-miss basis. The Continental army that the colonies raised as a joint defense force to fight the British was continually starved for men and supplies, while the local colonial militias played politics at home. The Continental Congress that they formed to act as their parliament looked more like a steering committee than a government, and even then its deliberations were racked with dissension and bickering. Frequently on the run from the British, the Continental Congress had no power to levy taxes and only the slimmest public credibility. Even the Congress’s Declaration of Independence, which was supposed to be the joint announcement that the colonies were now “Free and Independent States,” had been co-opted by several over-eager colonial legislatures that bolted ahead to declare their own separate independence from British rule.3

It took five years after the Declaration of Independence for the Continental Congress to persuade the new states to adopt some form of unified national government, and the states agreed only because they could not obtain an alliance with France (which they needed for survival) without forming themselves into something that the French could recognize as a government. What they finally created in 1781 was based on a flimsy document known as the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, each of the thirteen new states would receive equal representation in a new Confederation Congress, regardless of each state’s size or population—a formula that amounted to allowing the states to come to the Confederation Congress as separate but equal powers, rather than participants in a national assembly.4

There could have been only one end to this. Soon enough, individual states would find themselves quarreling with each other while the Confederation Congress stood on the sidelines, wringing its hands. Then the quarrels would explode into civil war, and the war would so weaken the United States that some powerful European monarchy (perhaps the British again) would intervene and force the Americans under European control all over again. In the 1780s almost all the rest of the world was still governed by kings who looked upon the kingless American republic as a bad example to their own restless subjects. Those kings had armies and navies that were too close to the American borders for comfort. Britain still occupied Canada to the north, and Spain still ruled the western half of North America and all of Central and South America, and neither of them liked what they saw in the new republic. If the American states divided, the European powers might take the opportunity to conquer.

So it was fear more than unity of purpose that finally drove the Americans to scrap the Articles of Confederation and write a new constitution in 1787. The Constitution equipped the national government with the power to raise its own income by imposing taxes on the states, and created an executive president who had the authority and the means to enforce the decisions of Congress. Even so, there were ambiguities and compromises in the Constitution that allowed the individual states to retain a large measure of their jealously guarded autonomy. The most obvious example of compromise concerned the Congress. The Constitution divided the old Confederation Congress into two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Members of the House were elected directly by the voters of each state, with the population of each state determining how many representatives each state could elect. By contrast, the members of the Senate were elected by the state legislatures, and each state had two senators regardless of size, giving each state equal voice in the Senate, just like in the Confederation Congress. What this meant, in effect, was that in the House, the representatives would speak for the people of the United States as a whole, but in the Senate, the senators were clearly understood to be representing the interests of the states.

There were other telltale problems, too. The Constitution created a confusing and cumbersome system for electing the national president. As it was, the Constitution did not specify who was permitted to vote for the president (the eligibility of voters was a question left to the individual states). For those who could vote, the Constitution specified that they would cast their ballots not for a particular presidential candidate but for a handful of state electors, who would then assemble in an electoral college and vote as state delegations for the next president. So it was not the people of the United States who elected a president, but committees of state electors. Ominously, the states made no pledge in the text of the Constitution to treat the arrangement as a perpetual one. Three of the state conventions that eventually ratified the Constitution—those of New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island—agreed to ratification only after adding resolutions that declared that they still retained the right to retrieve the powers they had surrendered “whensoever it shall become necessary to their happiness.”5 And some of them quickly came close to doing just that. In 1798, the second president, John Adams, attempted to quell political opposition to