The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Inspire and Define Our Country by Howard Fineman

Author:Howard Fineman [Fineman, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-22T05:00:00+00:00

The noble aim of the Preamble notwithstanding, we have never been a perfect union. In fact, centuries before the advent of “Red v. Blue,” citizens and states were threatening to leave it altogether—even during the early years of the Republic.

The first Americans to propose breaking the new union apart were New Englanders. The Federalists loathed President Thomas Jefferson almost on more grounds than they could count: his preachy agrarianism, Deist thinking, and hypocritical usurpations of federal power. In the run-up to the election of 1804, Federalists in New York and New England convened a group they called the “Essex Junto,” and entertained the idea of withdrawing from the Union to create a “northeastern confederacy.” Ten years later the Yankee secessionists were still at it, angered by what they saw as a Virginia-based hegemony in politics. It took a victory in war, the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, to impress the world (and Americans) with the durability of federal power, and in so doing end the talk of northeastern rebellion.

The South’s fateful contribution to the idea of secession and states’ rights was to bind the idea tightly—treacherously—to the question of race and slavery. The Founders in Philadelphia knew they would lose the argument for a federal constitution if the document decreed the abolition of slavery. They also knew that the Southern states, dependent on the plantation economy, would use every ounce of their power to protect their economies as they knew them. The Founders did what President Bill Clinton called “kicking the can down the road.” They proposed that no slaves could be imported, but postponed the effective date of the ban for twenty more years (or until 1808). Other than that, everything was up to the states.

Slavery turned Madison’s optimistic vision of continental stability into a nightmare. Rather than securing peace and prosperity, as Madison had hoped, the growth of a coast-to-coast country stoked the fire of war. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as each new territory sought to enter the Union, the same questions would arise: slave or free, who should decide? The Founders had kicked the can down the road thirty-seven years to 1820, when Henry Clay fashioned the Missouri Compromise, which lasted another thirty, until the Compromise of 1850, which lasted only ten. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican victory in 1860 sparked the secession of South Carolina and ten other slaveholding states. Northerners call the result the Civil War; the Southern name, “the War Between the States,” better reflected the way most Americans saw the conflict at the time.

It remains the deadliest conflict in our history. Our habit of arguing slipped the bonds of reason, and the farm fields ran red with blood. You can’t use the term “American Argument” without pausing in reverence over this one. As the war fades further into history, it becomes harder to appreciate the nightmarish scale of it. Nearly a million Americans were killed or wounded—almost as many as in World War II. In relative terms, it was far worse.

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