The Road to War

The American Civil War did not begin with the first cannon shot at Fort Sumter. It began decades earlier, in the slow, grinding failure of the American republic to resolve the contradiction at its founding: a nation built on the principle that all men are created equal, that held four million people in bondage.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 drew a line across the continent — slavery permitted south of 36°30', forbidden north. For a generation it held. Then came the Mexican War and its vast new territories, and the question erupted again: would slavery expand west?

The Compromise of 1850 was a patchwork; Kansas-Nebraska in 1854 tore it apart, allowing settlers to vote on slavery and igniting guerrilla warfare in 'Bleeding Kansas.

The Dred Scott decision of 1857 infuriated the North: the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans could never be citizens, and that Congress had no power to ban slavery anywhere. The raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 — John Brown's doomed attempt to spark a slave uprising — terrified the South.

And the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, on a platform of containing (not yet abolishing) slavery, was the final straw.

South Carolina seceded in December 1860. By February 1861, six more Deep South states had followed, forming the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as President. When Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, the war that had been coming for forty years finally arrived.