Sectional conflict, or growing tensions between northern and southern states, mounted from 1845 to 1860 as the main fault lines in American politics shifted from a partisan division (Whigs versus Democrats) to a geographical one (North versus South). In broad terms, a majority of northern and southern voters increasingly suspected members of the other section of threatening the liberty, equality, and opportunity of white Americans and the survival of the U.S. experiment in republican government; specific points of contention between northern and southern states included the right of a state to leave the federal union and the relationship between the federal government and slavery. Constitutional ambiguity and the focus of both the Whig and Democratic parties on national economic issues had allowed the political system to sidestep the slavery issue in the early nineteenth century, but the territorial expansion of the United States in the 1840s forced Congress to face the question of whether or not slavery should spread into new U.S. territories. The pivotal event that irreversibly injected slavery into mainstream politics was the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso in Congress in August 1846. The slavery extension issue destroyed the Whig Party, divided the Democratic Party, and in the 1850s, enabled the rise of an exclusively northern Republican Party founded to oppose the westward expansion of slavery. When Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, his victory precipitated the immediate secession of seven states, the eventual secession of four more states, and a Civil War that lasted from 1861 to 1865.
Beginning with the annexation of Texas in 1845, the rapid acquisition of western territories stoked sectional conflict by forcing Congress to face the question of slavery’s expansion into those new territories. In prior decades, the two dominant national parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, relied on the support of both northern and southern constituencies and courted voters by downplaying slavery and focusing on questions of government involvement in the economy. Before 1845, expansion, much like support for tariffs or a national bank, was a partisan rather than sectional issue, with Democrats championing and Whigs opposing the acquisition of territory, but the annexation of Texas set in motion of series of events that would eventually realign loyalties along sectional contours.
A Mexican state from the time of Mexican independence in 1821, Texas was settled largely by white American Southerners who chafed against the Mexican government’s abolition of slavery in 1829 and broke away to form the Republic of Texas in 1836. The 1836 Treaty of Velasco between the Republic of Texas and General Antonio Lopez De Santa Ana of Mexico named the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico. But the Mexican Congress refused to ratify that boundary because the Nueces River, far to the North of the Rio Grande, had been the southern limit of Texas when it was a Mexican state, and redrawing the border at the Rio Grande gave thousands of miles of Mexico’s northern frontier (the present-day southwest) to Texas. Almost immediately, Americans in Texas began to press for the admission of Texas into the Union. When the United States annexed Texas in 1845, it laid claim to land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, which Mexico still regarded as part of Mexico, thus provoking a boundary dispute between the United States and Mexico. American president James K. Polk, an ardent Democrat and expansionist, ordered U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor to the banks of the Rio Grande, where they skirmished with Mexican forces. Pointing to American casualties, Polk asked Congress to approve a bill stating that a state of war existed between Mexico and the United States, which Congress passed on May 12, 1846.
Militarily, the Mexican-American War seemed like an easy victory for the United States, but international context and domestic politics helped make the war a spur to sectional disharmony. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, negotiated on February 2, 1848, and announced by President Polk to be in effect on July 4 of that year, the United States was to assume debts owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens and pay the Mexican government a lump sum of 
15 million, in exchange for which it would receive Texas to the Rio Grande, California, and the New Mexico territory (collectively known as the Mexican Cession). Public opinion was shaped in part by differing American reactions to the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, with some Americans interpreting the European blows for liberal democracy as mandates for the expansion of American-style democracy via territorial acquisition, while others (primarily in the North) viewed conquest as the abandonment of democratic principles. Reaction was even more acutely influenced by developments within the Democratic Party on the state level. While the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico were generally popular among the proexpansion Democratic Party in the northern as well as southern states, fear that the party was being turned into a tool for slaveholders began to percolate with the annexation of Texas and intensified in response to the war with Mexico. In New Hampshire, for example, loyal Democrat John P. Hale denounced Texas annexation and broke with the state organization to form the Independent Democrats, a coalition of antislavery Democrats, dissatisfied Whigs, and members of the Liberty Party (a small, one-issue third party formed in 1840) that grew strong enough to dominate the New Hampshire legislative and gubernatorial elections of 1846. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, some Democratic voters grew increasingly worried that President Polk had precipitated the war with Mexico specifically to expand slavery’s territory. In hopes of quelling such fears, Pennsylvania Democratic congressman David Wilmot irrevocably introduced slavery into political debate in August 1846 with the Wilmot Proviso.
Wilmot introduced his proviso when Polk asked Congress for a 2 million appropriation for negotiations with the Mexican government that would end the war by transferring territory to the United States. Wilmot added an amendment to the appropriations bill mandating that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist” in the territories gained from Mexico. The proposed amendment did not end slavery anywhere (slavery was illegal under Mexican law in the territories in question), but it did attempt to curb slavery’s extension, and from that time on, the slavery expansion question dominated congressional debate and fueled sectional conflict. With the support of all northern Whigs and most northern Democrats, and against the opposition of all southern Democrats and Whigs, the Wilmot Proviso passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate.
Outside of Washington, D.C., the impact of the Wilmot Proviso escalated in 1847 and 1848. By the spring of 1847, mass meetings throughout the South pledged to oppose any candidate of any party who supported the Proviso and pledged all-southern unity and loyalty to slavery. In the North, opinion on the Proviso was more divided (in politically powerful New York, for example, the Democratic Party split into the anti-Proviso Hunkers and pro-Proviso Barnburners). But the same strands that had come together to form the Independent Democrats in New Hampshire in 1846 began to interweave throughout the North, culminating in the Buffalo National Free Soil Convention of 1848, a mass meeting attended by delegates elected at public meetings throughout the northern states.
An incongruous mix of white and black abolitionists, northern Democrats who wanted no blacks (slave or free) in the western territories, and disaffected Whigs and Democrats, the Buffalo convention created a new political party, the Free Soil Party, based on a platform of “denationalizing slavery” by barring slavery from western territories and outlawing the slave trade (but not slavery) in Washington, D.C. Adopting the slogan, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” the Free Soil Party nominated former Democrat Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the 1848 presidential election. Van Buren did not win (Zachary Taylor, a nominal Whig with no known position on the slavery extension issue became president), but he did get 10 percent of the popular vote. In addition, 12 Free Soil candidates were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In Ohio, 8 Free Soilers went to the state legislature, where they repealed Ohio’s discriminatory “black laws” and sent Free Soiler Salmon P. Chase to the Senate. In all, the emergence of the Free Soil Party weakened the existing two-party system even as it signaled growing northern disinclination to share the western territories with slaves and slaveholders.
The growth of Free Soil sentiment in the North worried many moderate southern voters, who grew alarmed that the nonextension of slavery beyond its current limits would eventually place the slave-holding states in a minority in the Union as more free states entered and tipped the current balance. A radical group of southern separatists known as the Fire Eaters and led by men such as William Yancey, Edmund Ruffin, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, gained influence as moderates’ concern over permanent minority status grew. The Fire Eaters succeeded in convincing all slaveholding states to send delegates to a formal southern convention to meet in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 3, 1850, where delegates would discuss strategies for combating growing hostility to slavery, including secession from the Union. The Nashville Convention asserted the southern states’ commitment to slavery and assumed the rights of a state to secede if its interests were threatened, but the convention also affirmed that slavery and southern interests were best served within the Union, as long as Congress met a series of conditions. Conditions included rejection of the Wilmot Proviso, a prohibition against federal interference with slavery in Washington, D.C., and stronger federal support for slaveholders attempting to reclaim slaves who had escaped to free states. The convention agreed to reconvene after Congress had resolved the slavery extension issue to determine if the solution met its conditions.
While opinion hardened in House districts, Congress tackled the question of slavery’s fate in the Mexican Cession. Four possible answers emerged. At one extreme stood the Wilmot Proviso. At the opposite extreme stood the doctrine, propagated by South Carolinian and leading southern separatist John C. Calhoun, that “slavery followed the flag” and that all U.S. territories were de facto slave territories because Congress lacked the right to bar slavery from them. A possible compromise, and third possible approach, was to extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way to the Pacific, banning slavery from territories north of the 36° 30′ line, and leaving territories south of that line open to the institution; this approach would permit slavery in the Mexican Cession. A final possibility (the favorite of many northern Democrats) was to apply the principle of “popular sovereignty,” which would permit voters living in a territory, and not Congress, to determine if slavery would be allowed in the territory; noted adherents such as Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas did not specify if voters would determine slavery’s fate at the territorial or statehood stage.
The Nashville Convention and the urgent press to admit California to the Union following the discovery of gold in 1849 forced Congress to cobble together the Compromise of 1850. An aging Henry Clay, whose brand of compromise and Whig Party were both wilting as the political climate relentlessly warmed, submitted an omnibus compromise bill that admitted California as a free state, barred the slave trade in Washington, D.C., threw out the Wilmot Proviso, and enacted an unusually harsh Fugitive Slave Law. Clay’s bill pleased nobody, and was soundly defeated. Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas separated the individual provisions and scraped together the votes to get each individual measure passed in what has become known as the Compromise of 1850. In reality, the measure represented a truce more than a compromise. The passage of the individual measures, however contentious, satisfied most of the demands of the Nashville Convention and depressed support for secession. Conditional unionist candidates, or candidates who advocated remaining in the Union as long as conditions like those articulated at Nashville were met, did well in elections throughout the South in 1850 and 1852.
Despite the boost that the Compromise of 1850 gave to conditional unionism in the South, two provisions of the Compromise prevented lasting resolution. One was the Fugitive Slave Law. While Article IV of the U.S. Constitution asserted the rights of masters to recapture slaves who fled to free states, the Fugitive Slave Law included new and harsher provisions mandating the participation of northern states and individuals in the recapture process and curtailing the rights of alleged fugitives to prove they were not runaways. The severity of the law and the conflict it created between state and federal jurisdiction led to controversy. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that gained great popularity in the North but was banned in the South. The New England states, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan passed personal liberty laws allowing state citizens to refrain from participating in slave recaptures if prompted by personal conscience to refrain. Rescue cases like those of Anthony Burns in Massachusetts and Joshua Glover in Wisconsin captured headlines and further strained relations between northern and southern states.
The second problem with the Compromise of 1850 was that it did not settle the question of slavery’s expansion because it rejected the Wilmot Proviso without offering an alternative, an omission whose magnitude became apparent when Kansas Territory opened to white settlement in 1854. Fearing that southern congressmen would impede the opening of Kansas because slavery was barred there by the Missouri Compromise (which prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase above the 36° 30′ latitude), Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw out the Missouri Compromise and opened Kansas and Nebraska Territories to popular sovereignty.
The result was that violence erupted between pro-slavery and free-state settlers in Kansas. Proslavery advocates from Missouri initially gained the upper hand and, in an election in which 6,318 votes were cast despite the presence of only 2,905 legal voters in Kansas, elected a proslavery convention. In 1857 the convention drafted the Lecompton constitution, which would have admitted Kansas to the Union as a slave state and limited the civil rights of antislavery settlers, and sent it to Washington for congressional approval over the objections of the majority of Kansans.
The violence in “Bleeding Kansas” and the obvious unpopularity of the Lecompton constitution did more than just illustrate the failure of popular sovereignty to resolve the slavery extension issue. Kansas further weakened the Second Party System by speeding the collapse of the Whig Party, facilitating the emergence of the Republican Party, and deepening divisions within the Democratic Party. Crippled by its inability to deal effectively with the slavery question, the Whig Party steadily weakened and for a brief time, the anti-immigrant American Party (or Know-Nothings) appeared likely to become the second major party. But when the Know-Nothings failed to respond effectively to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they lost support among Northerners.
Meanwhile, Free-Soil Democrats, former Whigs, and veterans from the Liberty and Free Soil parties united within several northern states to form a new party explicitly pledged to prevent the westward expansion of slavery. The new party allegedly adopted its name, the Republican Party, at a meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin. Discontented Democrats like Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, Joshua Giddings, and Gerritt Smith helped to knit the newly emerging state organizations into a sectionwide party by publishing “An Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States” in two newspapers the day after the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. The appeal criticized slavery as immoral and contrary to the principles of the nation’s founders, and it portrayed the question of slavery in Kansas and other territories as a crisis of American democracy because a “slave power conspiracy” was attempting to fasten slavery on the entire nation, even at the cost of suppressing civil liberties and betraying the principles of the American Revolution.
The violence in Kansas seemed to support charges of a slave power conspiracy, especially in May 1856, when proslavery settlers sacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas—just one day before South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks marched onto the Senate floor to beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner into unconsciousness in retaliation for Sumner’s fiery “Crime against Kansas” speech, which portrayed proslavery Southerners generally—and one of Brooks’s relatives particularly—in an unflattering light. “Bleeding Sumner and Bleeding Kansas” made Republican charges that a small number of slaveholders sought to dominate the nation and suppress rights persuasive to many northern voters in the 1856 election; Republican candidate John C. Frémont lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but he carried the New England states, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New York, and Republican candidates won seats in Congress and state offices in the North.
In 1857, a financial panic, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford case, and the Lecompton constitution built Republican strength in the North while the Democratic Party fractured. Dred Scott, a slave taken to Illinois and Wisconsin Territory by his master and then brought back to slavery in Missouri, sued for his freedom on the grounds that residency in states and territories where slavery was illegal made him free. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision against Scott declared that blacks could not be citizens, even though several northern states recognized them as such, and that in fact they had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect”; it also held that Congress could not outlaw slavery in any U.S. territory, and that slaveholders retained the right to take slaves wherever they pleased. By denying the right of Congress, territorial governments, or residents of a territory to ban slavery from their midst, Taney’s decision seemed to support Republican charges that southern oligarchs sought to fasten slavery onto the entire nation regardless of local sentiment. When President James Buchanan (a Pennsylvanian thought to be controlled by southern Democrats) tried unsuccessfully to force Congress to ratify the Lecompton constitution and admit Kansas as a slave state over the objections of the majority of Kansans, the Democratic Party splintered. Even Stephen Douglas faced stiff competition for his Senate seat in 1858. In a series of debates throughout Illinois, Douglas faced Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, who articulated the slave power conspiracy theme and outlined a platform of opposition to the extension of slavery. Because the Democrats retained a slim edge in the state legislature and state legislatures (not the popular vote) selected senators, Douglas retained his Senate seat. But the wide press coverage of the Lincoln-Douglas debates gained a national audience for Lincoln and his views.
The fast but exclusively northern growth of the Republicans alarmed Southerners who saw themselves as potential victims of a “Black Republican” conspiracy to isolate slavery and end it, sentence the South to subservient status within the Union, and destroy it by imposing racial equality. With conditional unionism still dominant throughout much of the South, many southern leaders called for firmer federal support for the Fugitive Slave Law, federal intolerance for state personal liberty laws, and a federal slave code mandating the legality of and federal protection for slavery in all U.S. territories as prerequisites for southern states remaining in the Union. The Fire Eaters added the demand for the reopening of the African slave trade, even as they increasingly insisted that southern states could preserve their rights only by leaving a Union growing more hostile to the institution on which the South depended. Fears of a “Black Republican” conspiracy seemed to be realized in 1859 when John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of overthrowing slavery by inspiring slave insurrection throughout the South. Brown failed and was executed for treason in December 1859, but a white Northerner marching South to arm slaves embodied white Southerners’ grimmest fears that the growing strength of the Republican Party could only lead to violent insurrections.
The Democratic Party split deepened in 1860, setting the stage for the election of a Republican president. In January 1860, Mississippi senator Albert Brown submitted resolutions calling for a federal slave code and an expanded role for Congress in promoting slavery. The Alabama State Democratic Convention identified the resolutions as the only party platform it would support in the presidential election; several additional southern state delegations also committed themselves to the “Alabama Platform.” Northern Democrats espoused popular sovereignty instead. When the National Democratic Convention assembled in Charleston, South Carolina, it split along sectional lines.
As the Democratic rift widened in 1859–60, the Republican Party faced the decision of how best to capitalize on its opponents’ dissent. Should it nominate a well-known candidate like senator and former New York governor William Seward, who was seen as a radical because of famous speeches declaring that slavery was subject to a “higher law” than the Constitution (1850) and that the slave and free states were locked in an “irreconciliable conflict” (1858)? Or should it nominate a more moderate but lesser-known candidate? After four ballots, the Republican convention in Chicago settled on Abraham Lincoln, a less prominent politician whose debates with Douglas and a February 1860 New York City address about slavery and the founders had helped introduce him to a national audience. The convention also adopted a platform that decried John Brown and advocated economic measures like a homestead act, but its most important plank consisted of its opposition to the expansion of slavery.
The 1860 presidential campaign shaped up differently in the North and South. Southern Democrats nominated John Breckinridge, who ran on the Alabama platform. He vied for southern votes with John Bell of the newly created Constitutional Union Party, a party that appealed to moderate Southerners who saw the Alabama platform as dangerously inflammatory and instead supported the maintenance of slavery where it was but took no stand on its expansion. In the North, Democrat Stephen Douglas and his platform of popular sovereignty opposed Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln and the Republican nonextension platform. No candidate won a majority of the popular vote. Stephen Douglas captured the electoral votes of New Jersey and Missouri. John Bell carried Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. John Breckinridge won every remaining slave state, and Abraham Lincoln, with 54 percent of the northern popular vote (and none of the southern popular vote) took every remaining free state and the election.
Anticipating Lincoln’s victory, the South Carolina legislature stayed in session through the election so that it could call a secession convention as soon as results were known. On December 20, 1860, the convention unanimously approved an ordinance dissolving the union between South Carolina and the United States. By February 1, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded in response to the election results. The secession ordinances all made clear that Lincoln’s election on a nonextension of slavery platform and northern failure to uphold the Fugitive Slave Clause entitled southern states to leave the Union. Delegates from the seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America, draft a provisional constitution, select Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens as provisional president and vice president, and authorize the enrollment of 100,000 troops.
The states of the Upper and Border South, where Constitutional Unionist candidate John Bell had done well, resisted Deep South pressure to secede immediately, and instead waited to see if Lincoln’s actions as president could be reconciled with assurances for slavery’s safety within the Union. Yet they also passed coercion clauses, pledging to side with slaveholding states if the situtation came to blows. Congress considered the Crittenden Compromise, which guaranteed perpetual noninterference with slavery, extended the Missouri Compromise line permanently across the United States, forbade abolition in the District of Columbia without the permission of Maryland and Virginia, barred Congress from meddling with the interstate slave trade, earmarked federal funds to compensate owners of runaway slaves, and added an unamendable amendment to the constitution guaranteeing that none of the Crittenden measures, including perpetual noninterference with slavery, could ever be altered. The Crittenden Compromise failed to soothe conditional unionists in the South while it angered Republican voters in the North by rejecting the platform that had just won the election. Stalemate ensued.
The Fort Sumter Crisis pressured both Lincoln and the states of the Upper South into action. When Lincoln took office in March 1861, all but four federal forts in seceded states had fallen. Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor remained in Union hands but was short of supplies. South Carolina officials warned that any attempt to resupply the fort would be seen as an act of aggression. Believing that he could not relinquish U.S. property to a state in rebellion, nor could he leave U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter to starve, Lincoln warned Confederate president Davis and South Carolina officials that a ship with provisions but no ammunition would resupply Fort Sumter. In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, South Carolina forces bombarded Fort Sumter before the supply ship could arrive; Fort Sumter surrendered on April 14. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for 90 days to put down the rebellion. In response, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded. The border slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri remained in the Union, though each state except Delaware contained a significant secessionist minority.
Fought from 1861 to 1865, the Civil War settled the question of slavery’s extension by eventually eliminating slavery. The war also made the growth of federal power possible, although dramatic growth in the federal government would not really occur until the later Progressive and New Deal Eras. Conflicts between state and federal sovereignty would persist in U.S. political history, but the Civil War removed secession as a possible option for resolving those conflicts.
See also Civil War and Reconstruction; Confederacy; Reconstruction Era, 1865–77; slavery.
FURTHER READING. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854, 2004; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, 1971; William E. Gienapp, “The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political System and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Why The Civil War Came, edited by Gabor S. Boritt, 1996; Idem, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856, 1987; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, 2007; David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976; Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, 2007; Adam Rothman, “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 2005; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860, 1976; Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink, 1990; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 2005.
CHANDRA MANNING
Jim Crow is the system of racial oppression—political, social, and economic—that southern whites imposed on blacks after the abolition of slavery. Jim Crow, a term derived from a minstrel-show routine, was a derogatory epithet for blacks. Although the system met its formal demise during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, its legacy is still felt today.
During Reconstruction (1865–77), recently enfranchised southern blacks voted in huge numbers and elected many black officeholders. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, black voting in the South was largely eliminated—first through fraud and violence, then through legal mechanisms such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Black voter registration in Alabama plummeted from 180,000 in 1900 to 3,000 in 1903 after a state constitutional convention adopted disfranchising measures.
When blacks could not vote, neither could they be elected to office. Sixty-four blacks had sat in the Mississippi legislature in 1873; none sat after 1895. In South Carolina’s lower house, which had a black majority during Reconstruction, a single black remained in 1896. More importantly, after disfranchisement, blacks could no longer be elected to the local offices that exercised control over people’s daily lives, such as sheriff, justice of the peace, and county commissioner.
With black political clout stunted, radical racists swept to power. Cole Blease of South Carolina bragged that he would rather resign as governor and “lead the mob” than use his office to protect a “nigger brute” from lynching. Governor James Vardaman of Mississippi promised that “every Negro in the state w[ould] be lynched” if necessary to maintain white supremacy.
Jim Crow was also a system of economic subordination. After the Civil War ended slavery, most southern blacks remained under the economic control of whites, growing cotton as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
Laws restricted the access of blacks to nonagricultural employment while constricting the market for agricultural labor, thus limiting the bargaining power of black farmworkers. The cash-poor cotton economy forced laborers to become indebted to landlords and suppliers, and peonage laws threatened criminal liability for those who sought to escape indebtedness by breaching their labor contracts. Once entrapped by the criminal justice system, blacks might be made to labor on chain gangs or be hired out to private employers who controlled their labor in exchange for paying their criminal fines. During planting season, when labor was in great demand, local law enforcement officers who were in cahoots with planters would conduct “vagrancy roundups” or otherwise “manufacture” petty criminals.
Some black peons were held under conditions almost indistinguishable from slavery. They worked under armed guard, were locked up at night, and were routinely beaten and tracked down by dogs if they attempted to escape. Blacks who resisted such conditions were often killed. In one infamous Georgia case in the 1920s, a planter who was worried about a federal investigation into his peonage practices simply ordered the murder of 11 of his tenants who were potential witnesses.
While southern black farmers made gains in land ownership in the early twentieth century, other economic opportunities for blacks contracted. Whites repossessed traditionally black jobs, such as barber and chef. The growing power of racially exclusionary labor unions cut blacks off from most skilled trade positions. Black lawyers increasingly found themselves out of work, as a more rigid color line forbade their presence in some courtrooms and made them liabilities to clients in others. Beginning around 1910, unionized white railway workers went on strike in an effort to have black firemen dismissed; when the strike failed, they simply murdered many of the black workers.
As blacks lost their political clout and white racial attitudes hardened, racial segregation spread into new spheres of southern life. Beginning around 1890, most southern states required railroads to segregate their passengers, and laws segregating local streetcars swept the South soon after 1900. Many southern states also segregated restaurants, theaters, public parks, jails, and saloons. White nurses were forbidden to treat black hospital patients, and white teachers were forbidden to work in black schools. Banks established separate deposit windows for blacks. Beginning in 1910, southern cities adopted the first residential segregation ordinances.
Segregation statutes required that accommodations for blacks be equal, but in practice they never were. Blacks described Jim Crow railway cars as “scarcely fit for a dog to ride in”; the seats were filthy and the air was fetid. Convicts and the insane were relegated to these cars, which white passengers entered at will to smoke, drink, and antagonize blacks. Such conditions plainly violated state law, yet legal challenges were rare.
Notwithstanding state constitutional requirements that racially segregated schools be equal, southern whites moved to dismantle the black education system. Most whites thought that an education spoiled good field hands, needlessly encouraged competition with white workers, and rendered blacks dissatisfied with their subordinate status. In 1901 Georgia’s governor, Allen D. Candler, stated, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” Racial disparities in educational funding became enormous. By 1925–26, South Carolina spent 80.55 per capita for white students and 10.20 for blacks; for school transportation, the state spent 471,489 for whites and 795 for blacks.
Much social discrimination resulted from informal custom rather than legal rule. No southern statute required that blacks give way to whites on public sidewalks or refer to whites by courtesy titles, yet blacks failing to do so acted at their peril. In Mississippi, some white post office employees erased the courtesy titles on mail addressed to black people.
Jim Crow was ultimately secured by physical violence. In 1898 whites in Wilmington, North Carolina, concluded a political campaign fought under the banner of white supremacy by murdering roughly a dozen blacks and driving 1,400 out of the city. In 1919, when black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas, tried to organize a union and challenge peonage practices, whites responded by murdering dozens of them. In Orange County, Florida, 30 blacks were burned to death in 1920 because 1 black man had attempted to vote.
Thousands of blacks were lynched during the Jim Crow era. Some lynching victims were accused of nothing more serious than breaches of racial etiquette, such as “general uppityness.” Prior to 1920, efforts to prosecute even known lynchers were rare and convictions virtually nonexistent. Public lynchings attended by throngs of people, many of whom brought picnic lunches and took home souvenirs from the victim’s tortured body, were not uncommon.
Jim Crow was a southern phenomenon, but its persistence required national complicity. During Reconstruction, the national government had—sporadically—used force to protect the rights of southern blacks. Several factors account for the gradual willingness of white Northerners to permit white Southerners a free hand in ordering southern race relations.
Black migration to the North, which more than doubled in the decades after 1890 before exploding during World War I, exacerbated the racial prejudices of northern whites. As a result, public schools and public accommodations became more segregated, and deadly white-on-black violence erupted in several northern localities. Around the same time, the immigration of millions of southern and eastern European peasants caused native-born whites to worry about the dilution of “Anglo-Saxon racial stock,” rendering them more sympathetic to southern racial policies. The resurgence of American imperialism in the 1890s also fostered the convergence of northern and southern racial attitudes, as imperialists who rejected full citizenship rights for residents of the new territories were not inclined to protest the disfranchisement of southern blacks.
Such developments rendered the national government sympathetic toward southern Jim Crow. Around 1900, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected constitutional challenges to racial segregation and black disfranchisement, made race discrimination in jury selection nearly impossible to prove, and sustained the constitutionality of separate-and-unequal education for blacks. Meanwhile, Congress repealed most of the voting rights legislation enacted during Reconstruction and declined to enforce Section II of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires reducing the congressional representation of any state that disfranchises adult male citizens for reasons other than crime.
Presidents proved no more inclined to challenge Jim Crow. William McKinley, who was born into an abolitionist family and served as a Union officer during the Civil War, ignored the imprecations of black leaders to condemn the Wilmington racial massacre of 1898, and his presidential speeches celebrated sectional reconciliation, which was accomplished by sacrificing the rights of southern blacks. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, refused to criticize black disfranchisement, blamed lynchings primarily on black rapists, and proclaimed that “race purity must be maintained.” Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, endorsed the efforts of southern states to avoid domination by an “ignorant, irresponsible electorate,” largely ceased appointing blacks to southern patronage positions, and denied that the federal government had the power or inclination to interfere in southern race relations.
A variety of forces contributed to the gradual demise of Jim Crow. Between 1910 and 1960, roughly 5 million southern blacks migrated to the North, mainly in search of better economic opportunities. Because northern blacks faced no significant suffrage restrictions, their political power quickly grew. At the local level, northern blacks secured the appointment of black police officers, the creation of playgrounds and parks for black neighborhoods, and the election of black city council members and state legislators. Soon thereafter, northern blacks began influencing national politics, successfully pressuring the House of Representatives to pass an antilynching bill in 1922 and the Senate to defeat the Supreme Court nomination of a southern white supremacist in 1930.
The rising economic status of northern blacks facilitated social protest. Larger black populations in northern cities provided a broader economic base for black entrepreneurs and professionals, who would later supply resources and leadership for civil rights protests. Improved economic status also enabled blacks to use boycotts as levers for social change. The more flexible racial mores of the North permitted challenges to the status quo that would not have been tolerated in the South. Protest organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and militant black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, developed and thrived in the North. Because of a less rigid caste structure, blacks in the North were less likely to internalize racist norms of black subordination and inferiority.
Jim Crow was also being gradually eroded from within. Blacks moved from farms to cities within the South in search of better economic opportunities, eventually fostering a black middle class, which capitalized on the segregated economy to develop sufficient wealth and leisure time to participate in social protest. Many blacks in the urban South were economically independent of whites and thus could challenge the racial status quo without endangering their livelihoods. In cities, blacks found better schools, freer access to the ballot box, and a more relaxed code of racial etiquette. Because urban blacks enjoyed better communication and transportation facilities and shared social networks through black colleges and churches, they found it somewhat easier to overcome the organizational obstacles confronting any social protest movement.
World Wars I and II had profound implications for Jim Crow. Wars fought “to make the world safe for democracy” and to crush Nazi fascism had ideological implications for racial equality. In 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois of the NAACP wrote: “Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” Blacks who had borne arms for their country and faced death on the battlefield were inspired to assert their rights. A black journalist noted during World War I, “The men who did not fear the trained veterans of Germany will hardly run from the lawless Ku Klux Klan.” Thousands of black veterans tried to register to vote after World War II, many expressing the view of one such veteran that “after having been overseas fighting for democracy, I thought that when we got back here we should enjoy a little of it.”
World War II exposed millions of Southerners, white and black, to more liberal racial attitudes and practices. The growth of the mass media exposed millions more to outside influence, which tended to erode traditional racial mores. Media expansion also prevented white Southerners from restricting outside scrutiny of their treatment of blacks. Northerners had not seen southern lynchings on television, but the brutalization of peaceful black demonstrators by southern white law enforcement officers in the 1960s came directly into their living rooms.
Formal Jim Crow met its demise in the 1960s. Federal courts invalidated racial segregation and black disfranchisement, and the Justice Department investigated and occasionally prosecuted civil rights violations. Southern blacks challenged the system from within, participating in such direct-action protests as sit-ins and freedom rides. Brutal suppression of those demonstrations outraged northern opinion, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation, which spelled the doom of formal Jim Crow.
Today, racially motivated lynchings and state-sponsored racial segregation have largely been eliminated. Public accommodations and places of employment have been integrated to a significant degree. Blacks register to vote in roughly the same percentages as whites, and more than 9,000 blacks hold elected office. The previous two secretaries of state have been black.
Blacks have also made dramatic gains in education and employment. The difference in the median number of school years completed by blacks and whites, which was 3.5 in 1954, has been eliminated almost entirely. The number of blacks holding white-collar or middle-class jobs increased from 12.1 percent in 1960 to 30.4 percent in 1990. Today, black men with college degrees earn nearly the same income as their white counterparts.
Yet not all blacks have been equally fortunate. In 1990 nearly two-thirds of black children were born outside of marriage, compared with just 15 percent of white children. Well over half of black families were headed by single mothers. The average black family has income that is just 60 percent and wealth that is just 10 percent of those of the average white family. Nearly 25 percent of blacks—three times the percentage of whites—live in poverty. Increasing numbers of blacks live in neighborhoods of extreme poverty, which are characterized by dilapidated housing, poor schools, broken families, juvenile pregnancies, drug dependency, and high crime rates.
Residential segregation compounds the problems of the black urban underclass. Spatial segregation means social isolation, as most inner-city blacks are rarely exposed to whites or the broader culture. As a result, black youngsters have developed a separate dialect of sorts, which disadvantages them in school and in the search for employment. Even worse, social segregation has fostered an oppositional culture among many black youngsters that discourages academic achievement—“acting white”—and thus further disables them from succeeding in mainstream society.
Today, more black men are incarcerated than are enrolled in college. Blacks comprise less than 12 percent of the nation’s population but more than 50 percent of its prison inmates. Black men are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. The legacy of Jim Crow lives on.
See also South since 1877; voting.
FURTHER READING. Edward L. Ayers, Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction, 1992; John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era 1900–1920, 1977; Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000, 2001; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, 1996; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, 2004; Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 1998; Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, 1989; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols., 1944; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd revised ed., 1974; George C. Wright, Life behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky 1865–1920, 1990.
MICHAEL J. KLARMAN
The framers of the U.S. Constitution viewed the Senate as a check on the more passionate whims of the House of Representatives. Known as the “greatest deliberative body,” the Senate has traditionally valued procedure over expediency, thereby frustrating action-oriented House members and presidents. Despite its staid reputation, however, the Senate has produced many of American history’s most stirring speeches and influential policy makers. Indeed, the upper chamber of Congress has both reflected and instigated changes that have transformed the United States from a small, agrarian-based country to a world power.
In its formative years, the Senate focused on foreign policy and establishing precedents on treaty, nomination, and impeachment proceedings. Prior to the Civil War, “golden era” senators attempted to keep the Union intact while they defended their own political ideologies. The Senate moved to its current chamber in 1859, where visitors soon witnessed fervent Reconstruction debates and the first presidential impeachment trial. Twentieth-century senators battled the executive branch over government reform, international relations, civil rights, and economic programs as they led investigations into presidential administrations. While the modern Senate seems steeped in political rancor, welcome developments include a more diverse membership and bipartisan efforts to improve national security.
Drafted during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the Constitution’s Senate-related measures followed precedents established by colonial and state legislatures, as well as Great Britain’s parliamentary system. The delegates to the convention, however, originated the institution’s most controversial clause: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof. . . .” Although delegates from large states supported James Madison’s Virginia Plan, which based Senate representation on state population, small-state delegates wanted equal representation in both the House and the Senate. Roger Sherman sought a third option: proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate. Adopted by the delegates on July 16, Sherman’s Connecticut Compromise enabled the formation of a federal, bicameral legislature responsive to the needs of citizens from both large and small states.
Compared to the representation issue, the measure granting state legislatures the right to choose senators proved less divisive to convention delegates. Madison dismissed concerns that indirect elections would lead to a “tyrannical aristocracy,” and only James Wilson argued that senators chosen in this manner would be swayed by local interests and prejudices. By the late nineteenth century, however, corruption regarding the selection of senators triggered demands for electoral reform. Ratified in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment established direct election, allowing individual voters to select their senators.
As outlined in Article I of the Constitution, the Senate’s primary role is to pass bills in concurrence with the House of Representatives. In the event that a civil officer committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitution also gives the Senate the responsibility to try cases of impeachment brought forth by the House. And, under the Constitution’s advice and consent clause, the upper chamber received the power to confirm or deny presidential nominations, including appointments to the cabinet and the federal courts, and the power to approve or reject treaties. The Senate’s penchant for stalling nominations and treaties in committee, though, has defeated more executive actions than straight up-or-down votes.
Within a year after the Constitutional Convention concluded, the central government began its transition from a loose confederation to a federal system. In September 1788, Pennsylvania became the first state to elect senators: William Maclay and Robert Morris. Other legislatures soon followed Pennsylvania’s lead, selecting senators who came, in general, from the nation’s wealthiest and most prominent families.
The first session of Congress opened in the spring of 1789 in New York City’s Federal Hall. After meeting its quorum in April, the Senate originated one of the most important bills of the era: the Judiciary Act of 1789. Created under the direction of Senator Oliver Ellsworth, the legislation provided the structure of the Supreme Court, as well as the federal district and circuit courts. Although advocates of a strong, federal judiciary system prevailed, the bill’s outspoken critics indicated the beginning of the states’ rights movement in the Senate, a source of significant division in the nineteenth century.
Between 1790 and 1800, Congress sat in Philadelphia as the permanent Capitol underwent construction in Washington, D.C. During these years, the first political parties emerged: the Federalists, who favored a strong union of states, and the anti-Federalists, later known as Republicans, who were sympathetic to states’ rights. The parties aired their disputes on the Senate floor, especially in debates about the controversial Jay Treaty (1794) and the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798).
Negotiated by Chief Justice John Jay, the Jay Treaty sought to resolve financial and territorial conflicts with Great Britain arising from the Revolutionary War. In the Senate, the pro-British Federalists viewed the treaty as a mechanism to prevent another war, while the Republicans, and much of the public, considered the treaty’s provisions humiliating and unfair to American merchants. By an exact two-thirds majority, the treaty won Senate approval, inciting anti-Jay mobs to burn and hang senators in effigy.
Partisan battles erupted again in 1798, when the Federalist-controlled Congress passed four bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Meant to curtail Republican popularity, the legislation, in defiance of the First Amendment, made it unlawful to criticize the government. Ironically, the acts unified the Republican Party, leading to Thomas Jefferson’s presidential election and a quarter-century rule by Senate Republicans.
The Federalist-Republican power struggle continued in the new Capitol in Washington. In 1804 the Senate, meeting as a court of impeachment, found the Federalist U.S. district court judge John Pickering guilty of drunkenness and profanity and removed him from the bench. The following year, the Senate tried the Federalist Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase for allegedly exhibiting an anti-Republican bias. Chase avoided a guilty verdict by one vote, which restricted further efforts to control the judiciary through the threat of impeachment.
Prior to the War of 1812, foreign policy dominated the Senate agenda. Responding to British interference in American shipping, the Senate passed several trade embargoes against Great Britain before declaring war. In 1814 British troops entered Washington and set fire to the Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings. The Senate chamber was destroyed, forcing senators to meet in temporary accommodations until 1819. In the intervening years, the Senate formed its first permanent committees, which encouraged senators to become experts on such issues as national defense and finance.
When the war concluded in 1815 without a clear victor, the Senate turned its attention to the problems and opportunities resulting from territorial expansion. As lands acquired from France, Spain, and Indian tribes were organized into territories and states, senators debated the future of slavery in America, the nation’s most divisive issue for years to come.
In 1820 the 46 senators were split evenly between slave states and free states. The Senate considered numerous bills designed to either protect or destroy this delicate balance. Legislation regulating statehood produced the Missouri Compromise (1820–21), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). While the compromises attempted to sustain the Union, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with its controversial “popular sovereignty” clause, escalated the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists.
Senate historians consider the antebellum period to be the institution’s golden era. The Senate chamber, a vaulted room on the Capitol’s second floor, hosted passionate floor speeches enthralling both the public and the press. At the center of debate stood the Senate’s “Great Triumvirate”: Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun.
As Speaker of the House, Clay had overseen the formation of the Missouri Compromise, which stipulated that Missouri would have no slavery restrictions, while all territories to the north would become free states. Later, as senator, Clay led the opposition against President Andrew Jackson’s emerging Democratic Party. In 1834 he sponsored a resolution condemning Jackson for refusing to provide a document to Congress. Although the first (and only) presidential censure was expunged in 1837, it sparked the rise of the Whig Party in the late 1830s.
Webster, one of the greatest American orators, defended the importance of national power over regional self-interest, declaring in a rousing 1830 speech, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” His views challenged Vice President Calhoun’s theory of nullification, which proposed that states could disregard laws they found unconstitutional. By the time Calhoun became a senator in 1832, the Senate had divided between those who promoted states’ rights and those with a nationalist view.
The Mexican-American War inflamed the issue of slavery. Led by Calhoun, the Senate blocked adoption of the House-sponsored Wilmot Proviso (1846) that would have banned slavery in the territories won from Mexico. Fearing a national crisis, Clay drafted new slavery regulations. When Calhoun, now gravely ill, threatened to block any restrictions, Webster responded with a famous address upholding the Missouri Compromise and the integrity of the Union.
After Calhoun’s death in March 1850, the atmosphere in the Senate chamber grew so tense that Henry S. Foote drew a pistol during an argument with antislavery senator Thomas Hart Benton. After months of such heated debates, however, Congress passed Clay’s legislation. As negotiated by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, allowed New Mexico and Utah to determine their own slavery policies (later known as popular sovereignty), outlawed the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and strengthened the controversial fugitive slave law.
Webster and Clay died in 1852, leaving Douglas, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, to manage statehood legislation. Catering to southern senators, Douglas proposed a bill creating two territories under popular sovereignty: Nebraska, which was expected to become a free state, and Kansas, whose future was uncertain. Despite the staunch opposition of abolitionists, the bill became law, prompting pro- and antislavery advocates to flood into “Bleeding Kansas,” where more than 50 settlers died in the resulting conflicts.
Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act formed the modern Republican Party, drawing its membership from abolitionist Whigs, Democrats, and Senator Charles Sumner’s Free Soil Party. In 1856 Sumner gave a scathing “crime against Kansas” speech that referred to slavery as the wicked mistress of South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler. Three days after the speech, Butler’s relative, Representative Preston S. Brooks, took revenge in the Senate chamber. Without warning, he battered Sumner’s head with blows from his gold-tipped cane. The incident made Brooks a hero of the South, while Sumner, who slowly recovered his health, would become a leader of the Radical Republicans.
In the late 1850s, to accommodate the growing membership of Congress, the Capitol doubled in size with the addition of two wings. The new Senate chamber featured an iron and glass ceiling, multiple galleries, and a spacious floor. It was in this setting that conflicts with the Republican-majority House led to legislative gridlock, blocking a series of Senate resolutions meant to appease the South. In December 1860, South Carolina announced its withdrawal from the Union. One month later, in one of the Senate’s most dramatic moments, the Confederacy’s future president, Jefferson Davis, and four other southern senators resigned their seats, foretelling the resignation of every senator from a seceding state except Andrew Johnson, who remained until 1862.
Following the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Washington, D.C., was poised to become a battle zone. A Massachusetts regiment briefly occupied the Senate wing, transforming it into a military hospital, kitchen, and sleeping quarters. Eventually, thousands of troops passed through the chamber and adjacent rooms. One soldier gouged Davis’s desk with a bayonet, while others stained the ornate carpets with bacon grease and tobacco residue.
Now outnumbering the remaining Democrats, congressional Republicans accused southern lawmakers of committing treason. For the first time since Senator William Blount was dismissed for conspiracy in 1797, Senate expulsion resolutions received the required two-thirds vote. In total, the Senate expelled 14 senators from the South, Missouri, and Indiana for swearing allegiance to the Confederacy.
Within the Republican majority, the Senate’s Radical Republican contingent grew more powerful during the war. Staunch abolitionists formed the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to protest President Abraham Lincoln’s management of the army. Radicals demanded an end to slavery and investigated allegations of government corruption and inefficiency. They also passed significant domestic policy laws, such as the Homestead Act (1862) and the Land Grant College Act (1862).
When a northern victory seemed imminent, Lincoln and the congressional Republicans developed different plans for reconstructing the Union. In December 1863, the president declared that states would be readmitted when 10 percent of their previously qualified voters took a loyalty oath. Radicals countered with the Wade-Davis Bill requiring states to administer a harsher, 50 percent oath. Lincoln vetoed the legislation, outraging Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Henry W. Davis.
In the closing days of the war, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, the new president, former senator Andrew Johnson, infuriated congressional Republicans when he enabled Confederate politicians to return to power and vetoed a bill expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau, which assisted former slaves. Republicans, in turn, enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, providing blacks with citizenship, due process of law, and equal protection by laws.
Chaired by Senator William P. Fessenden, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction declared that the restoration of states was a legislative, not an executive, function. Accordingly, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which divided the South into military districts, permitted black suffrage, and made the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment a condition of state readmittance. To protect pro-Radical civil officials, Republicans proposed the Tenure of Office Act, requiring Senate approval before the president could dismiss a cabinet member.
Johnson violated the act by firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and the House of Representatives impeached him on February 24, 1868. A week later, the Senate convened as a court of impeachment, and on May 16, 35 senators voted to convict Johnson, 1 vote short of the two-thirds majority needed for removal. The case centered on executive rights and the constitutional separation of powers, with 7 moderate Republicans joining the 12 Democrats in voting to acquit.
While Johnson retained his office, he was soon replaced by Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general. Marked by corruption, the Grant years (1869–77) split the congressional Republicans into pro- and antiadministration wings. The party was weakened further when representatives and senators were caught accepting bribes to assist the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad. And after two senators apparently bought their seats from the Kansas legislature, much of the press began calling for popular Senate elections to replace the indirect election method outlined by the Constitution.
Meanwhile, Republicans still dominated southern state legislatures, as most Democrats were unable to vote under Radical Reconstruction. In 1870 Mississippi’s Republican legislature elected the first black U.S. senator, Hiram R. Revels, to serve the last year of an unexpired term. Another black Mississippian, Blanche K. Bruce, served from 1875 to 1881. (Elected in 1966, Edward W. Brooke was the first African American to enter the Senate after Reconstruction.)
The 1876 presidential election ended Radical Reconstruction. Although the Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote, ballots from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were in dispute. To avert a constitutional crisis, Congress formed an electoral commission composed of five senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices, who chose Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by a one-vote margin. As part of the Compromise of 1877, Republicans agreed to end military rule in the South in exchange for Democratic support of the Hayes presidency.
During the late nineteenth century, corruption permeated the public and private sectors. While the two major parties traded control of the Senate, the Republicans divided between those who wanted institutional reform and those in favor of retaining political patronage, the practice of dispensing government jobs in order to reward or secure campaign support.
New York senator Roscoe Conkling epitomized the problem of patronage. In the 1870s, he filled the New York Custom House with crooked friends and financial backers. Moderates from both parties called for a new method to select government workers. In 1881 a disturbed patronage seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield. The act motivated Democratic senator George H. Pendleton to sponsor legislation creating the merit-based civil service category of federal jobs.
In 1901 William McKinley’s assassination elevated progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, while Republicans once again dominated the Senate. As chairman of the Republican Steering Committee, as well as the Appropriations Committee, William B. Allison dominated the chamber along with other committee chairmen. In a showdown between two factions of Republicans, Allison’s conservative Old Guard blocked progressives’ efforts to revise tariffs. Despite the continued opposition of conservatives, however, Roosevelt achieved his goal of regulating railroad rates and large companies by enforcing Senator John Sherman’s Antitrust Act of 1890.
Prior to World War I, Progressive Era reformers attempted to eradicate government corruption and increase the political influence of the middle class. The campaign for popular Senate elections hoped to achieve both goals. In 1906 David Graham Phillips wrote several muckraking magazine articles exposing fraudulent relationships between senators, state legislators, and businessmen. His “Treason of the Senate” series sparked new interest in enabling voters, rather than state legislatures, to elect senators. But although the Seventeenth Amendment (1913) standardized direct elections, the institution remained a forum for wealthy elites.
In 1913 reform-minded Democrats took over the Senate, as well as the presidency under Woodrow Wilson, resulting in a flurry of progressive legislation. Wilson’s Senate allies, John Worth Kern and James Hamilton Lewis, ushered through the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). As chairman of the Democratic Conference, Kern acted as majority leader several years before the position was officially recognized, while Lewis served as the Senate’s first party whip. As such, he counted votes and enforced attendance prior to the consideration of important bills.
Following Europe’s descent into war in 1914, domestic concerns gave way to foreign policy, and Wilson battled both progressive and conservative Republicans in Congress. On January 22, 1917, Wilson addressed the Senate with his famous “peace without victory” speech. Shortly thereafter, a German submarine sank an unarmed U.S. merchant ship, and the president urged Congress to pass legislation allowing trade vessels to carry weapons. Noninterventionist senators, including progressive Republicans Robert M. La Follette and George W. Norris, staged a lengthy filibuster in opposition to Wilson’s bill, preventing its passage. Furious, Wilson declared that a “little group of willful men” had rendered the government “helpless and contemptible.” Calling a special Senate session, he prompted the passage of Rule 22, known as the cloture rule, which limited debate when two-thirds (later changed to three-fifths) of the senators present agreed to end a filibuster.
The 1918 elections brought Republican majorities to both houses of Congress. As the Senate’s senior Republican, Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s conference. Angered by the lack of senators at the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the de facto floor leader attached 14 reservations to the war-ending Treaty of Versailles, altering the legal effect of selected terms, including the provision outlining Wilson’s League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations), which Lodge opposed. The Senate split into three groups: reservationists, irreconcilables, and pro-treaty Democrats, who were instructed by Wilson not to accept changes to the document. Unable to reach a compromise, the Senate rejected the treaty in two separate votes. Consequently, the United States never entered the League of Nations and had little influence over the enactment of the peace treaty.
In the 1920s, the Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Fearing the rising numbers of eastern Europeans and East Asians in America, congressional isolationists curtailed immigration with the National Origins Act of 1924. Senators investigated corruption within the Harding administration, sparking the famous Teapot Dome oil scandal.
Two years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, Rebecca Latimer Felton, an 87-year-old former suffragist, served as the first woman senator for just 24 hours between November 21 and 22, 1922. Felton considered the symbolic appointment proof that women could now obtain any office. The second female senator, Hattie Wyatt Caraway, was appointed to fill Thaddeus Caraway’s seat upon his death in 1931. She became the first elected female senator, however, when she won the special election to finish her husband’s term in 1932. Caraway won two additional elections and spent more than 13 years in the Senate.
In 1925 the Republicans elected Charles Curtis as the first official majority leader, a political position that evolved from the leadership duties of committee and conference chairmen. Curtis had the added distinction of being the first known Native American member of Congress (he was part Kaw Indian) and was later Herbert Hoover’s vice president.
The 1929 stock market crash signaled the onset of the Great Depression and the end of Republican rule. Democrats swept the elections of 1932, taking back Congress and the White House under Franklin Roosevelt, who promised a “new deal” to address the nation’s economic woes. The first Democratic majority leader, Joseph T. Robinson, ushered through the president’s emergency relief program, while other senators crafted legislation producing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Social Security Administration, and the National Labor Relations Board.
In 1937 the Senate majority leader worked furiously to enlist support for Roosevelt’s controversial Court reorganization act, designed to expand the Supreme Court’s membership with liberal justices. Prior to the Senate vote, though, Robinson succumbed to a heart attack, and the president’s “Court-packing” plan died with him. The debate over the bill drove a deep wedge between liberal and conservative Democrats.
In the late 1930s, another war loomed in Europe. Led by Republican senators William E. Borah and Gerald P. Nye, Congress passed four Neutrality Acts. After Germany invaded France in 1940, however, Roosevelt’s handpicked Senate majority leader, Alben W. Barkley, sponsored the Lend-Lease Act (1941), enabling the United States to send Great Britain and its allies billions of dollars in military equipment, food, and services. The monumental aid plan invigorated the economy, ending the Depression, as well as American neutrality.
During the war, little-known senator Harry Truman headed the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Elected as Roosevelt’s third vice president in 1944, Truman assumed the presidency when Roosevelt died three months into his fourth term. The new president relied heavily on Senate support as he steered the nation through the conclusion of World War II and into the cold war.
The Senate assumed a primary role in shaping the midcentury’s social and economic culture. In 1944 Senator Ernest W. McFarland sponsored the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. Better known as the GI Bill, the legislation provided veterans with tuition assistance and low-cost loans for homes and businesses. In 1947 the Republicans regained Congress and passed the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act (1947) over Truman’s veto. The act restricted the power of unions to organize and made conservative senator Robert A. Taft a national figure. Responding to the Soviet Union’s increasing power, the Foreign Relations Committee approved the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshall Plan (1948), which sent billion of dollars of aid and materials to war-torn countries vulnerable to communism.
The Senate itself was transformed by the Legislative Reorganization Act (1946), which streamlined the committee system, increased the number of professional staff, and opened committee sessions to the public. In 1947 television began broadcasting selected Senate hearings. Young, ambitious senators capitalized on the new medium, including C. Estes Kefauver, who led televised hearings on organized crime, and junior senator Joseph R. McCarthy from Wisconsin, whose name became synonymous with the anti-Communist crusade.
In February 1950 Republican senator McCarthy made his first charges against Communists working within the federal government. After announcing an “all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,” he gave an eight-hour Senate speech outlining “81 loyalty risks.” Democrats examined McCarthy’s evidence and concluded that he had committed a “fraud and a hoax” on the public. Meanwhile, Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, gave a daring speech, entitled “A Declaration of Conscience,” in which she decried the Senate’s decline into “a forum of hate and character assassination.”
Nevertheless, McCarthy continued to make charges against government officials, and as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he initiated more than 500 inquiries and investigations into suspicious behavior, destroying numerous careers along the way. In 1954 McCarthy charged security breaches within the military. During the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, the army’s head attorney, Joseph N. Welch, uttered the famous line that helped bring about the senator’s downfall: “Have you no sense of decency?” On December 2, 1954, senators passed a censure resolution condemning McCarthy’s conduct, thus ending one of the Senate’s darker chapters.
A new era in Senate history commenced in 1955, when the Democrats, now holding a slight majority, elected Lyndon B. Johnson, a former congressman from Texas, to be majority leader. Johnson reformed the committee membership system but was better known for applying the “Johnson technique,” a personalized form of intimidation used to sway reluctant senators to vote his way. The method proved so effective that he managed to get a 1957 civil rights bill passed despite Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-breaking filibuster, lasting 24 hours and 18 minutes. In the 1958 elections, the Senate Democrats picked up an impressive 17 seats. Johnson leveraged the 62–34 ratio to challenge President Dwight D. Eisenhower at every turn, altering the legislative-executive balance of power.
Johnson sought the presidency for himself in 1960 but settled for the vice presidency under former senator John F. Kennedy. Although popular with his colleagues, the new majority leader, Mike Mansfield, faced difficulties uniting liberal and conservative Democrats, and bills affecting minority groups stalled at the committee level. Following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Everett M. Dirksen engineered the passage of Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. They did so by first securing a historic cloture vote that halted a filibuster led by southern Democrats Robert C. Byrd and Richard B. Russell. Johnson and Mansfield then won additional domestic policy victories, including the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Medicare/Medicaid health care programs (1965).
The president’s foreign policy decisions, however, would come to haunt him and the 88 senators who voted for the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Drafted by the Johnson administration, the measure drew the nation into war by authorizing the president to take any military action necessary to protect the United States and its allies in Southeast Asia. As the Vietnam War escalated, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Senator Frank F. Church led efforts to reassert the constitutional power of Congress to declare war, culminating in the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which required congressional approval for prolonged military engagements.
Although the Democrats lost the presidency to Richard M. Nixon in 1968, they controlled the Senate until 1981. In 1973 the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities investigated Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party’s National Committee office in the Watergate complex. Chaired by Senator Samuel J. Ervin, the select committee’s findings led to the initiation of impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. In early August 1974, prominent Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Senator Barry Goldwater, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes, informed Nixon that he did not have the party support in either house of Congress to remain in office. Rather than face a trial in the Senate, Nixon resigned prior to an impeachment vote in the House.
From 1981 to 1987, the Republicans controlled the Senate and supported White House policy under President Ronald Reagan. During this period, the Senate began televising floor debates. Televised hearings, however, continued to captivate followers of politics, especially after the Democrats regained the Senate in 1987 and conducted hearings on the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.
In 1987 the House and Senate held joint hearings to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. Later that year, senators grilled conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, before defeating his appointment. Nominated for defense secretary in 1989, retired Republican senator John G. Tower suffered a humiliating rejection from his former Senate colleagues, and in 1991 Clarence Thomas survived the Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of his Supreme Court nomination despite allegations of sexual harassment by his former staff member Anita Hill.
In 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” female candidates won elections nationwide, including five seats in the Senate, with Carol Moseley Braun serving as the first African American woman senator. President Bill Clinton’s early domestic policy initiatives, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993), reflected the influence of mothers serving in Congress. In 1994, however, the “Republican revolution” brought the Senate under conservative rule, and Republicans thwarted Clinton’s legislative agenda while they investigated his public and personal activities.
In December 1998, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment against Clinton: lying under oath and obstruction of justice regarding a 1994 sexual harassment case and an affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. With Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist presiding, the Senate convened as a court of impeachment in January 1999. Although several Democratic senators voiced objections to Clinton’s behavior, on February 12 every Democrat, as well as a few moderate Republicans, voted for his acquittal.
The 1990s closed with a divided Senate, bruised from in-fighting and media reports criticizing the influence of lobbyists in Washington. While it did not reduce candidate spending, the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Bill limited “soft money” contributions and regulated the broadcast of issue ads. The bipartisan effort demonstrated that Republican and Democratic senators could work together to achieve common goals, although they rarely chose to do so.
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks provided an opportunity to unite the Senate in support of national security policies. Shortly after 9/11, Congress adopted the controversial USA Patriot Act, increasing federal law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering capabilities to the possible detriment of civil liberties. The October 2001 anthrax attack on the Hart Senate Office Building prompted senators and staffers to work together to eliminate vulnerabilities in the Capitol complex. But soon tensions escalated, as senators sparred over the ongoing war in Iraq.
Despite instances of acrimony throughout its history, the Senate has maintained a more cordial environment than the much larger House of Representatives. Institutional rules keep tempers in check, although lapses in demeanor occur. However strained, friendships “across the aisle” do exist and are helpful in forging compromises prior to important votes. In the years ahead, the Senate will continue to shape American society as long as thoughtful deliberation remains the institution’s most distinguishing feature.
See also House of Representatives; presidency; Supreme Court.
FURTHER READING. Richard A. Baker, 200 Notable Days: Senate Stories, 1787 to 2002, 2006, downloadable as “Historical Minute Essays” from http://www.senate.gov, Art & History page; Idem, The Senate of the United States: A Bicentennial History, 1988; Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, eds., First among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century, 1991; Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789–1989, 1988–1994; Lewis L. Gould, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, 2005; Fred R. Harris, Deadlock or Decision: The U.S. Senate and the Rise of National Politics, 1993; John R. Hibbing and John G. Peters, eds., The Changing World of the U.S. Senate, 1990; Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, 2004.
JANE ARMSTRONG HUDIBURG
Slavery was deeply entrenched in the early United States, and its overthrow is one of the epic stories of the nation’s history. It is tempting to believe that the problem of slavery was destined to haunt American politics from the very moment that the Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” including liberty, but those words might have remained dead on the page if both black and white Americans opposed to slavery had not struggled together to give them an antislavery meaning in the political arena. From the end of the American Revolution onward, the ebb and flow of the slavery controversy in politics can be roughly divided into four general periods: the republican era, leading up to the Missouri Compromise; the Jacksonian era, from the Missouri Compromise to the Mexican-American War; the years of sectional crisis, from the Mexican War to the secession of the southern states; and the final chapter, of Civil War and emancipation.
Many Northerners in the 1840s and 1850s thought that a “slave power” had come to dominate American politics. Although some historians have dismissed that idea as a paranoid fantasy, slaveholders actually did wield political power from the start to protect their controversial interest in human property. Accommodating slaveholders’ concerns, the framers of the U.S. Constitution included three clauses that offered thinly veiled protections to slaveholders: the Three-Fifths Clause mandated that the enslaved population count in a fractional ratio for purposes of determining representation in the U.S. House of Representatives; the Fugitive Slave Clause prevented “persons bound to labor” from acquiring their freedom by virtue of escaping to another state; and the Slave Trade Clause prevented the U.S. Congress from prohibiting the importation of foreign slaves until 1808.
The Three-Fifths and Slave Trade Clauses were not pure concessions to slaveholders. Southern delegates wanted slaves to count fully for purposes of representation, and while the slaveholders from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to protect slave importation, many in the Upper South would have preferred an immediate ban. Although American slaveholders united to defend their claims to human property (as in the Fugitive Slave Clause), they disagreed among themselves over an array of secondary issues relating to slavery (as in the debates over slave importation before 1810 and again in the 1850s). In the framing of the Constitution, they compromised for the sake of union.
The northern and southern states followed different paths in the republican era that followed the American Revolution. Slavery slowly disappeared in the North through judicial fiat, state legislation mandating gradual emancipation, private acts of manumission, and the sale of slaves to the South. Free black communities emerged in northern towns and cities from Boston to Philadelphia, where they endured legal discrimination and customary prejudice and, with few exceptions, were relegated to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Free black northerners banded together in “African” mutual aid societies and independent churches, which were the earliest stronghold of radical abolitionism in the United States.
But in the southern states, slavery weathered the republican storm. Manumission significantly increased the free black population in Maryland and Virginia before new legal restrictions made it more difficult for owners to free their slaves. As tobacco and rice growers regained their economic footing on the Atlantic seaboard, burgeoning demand for short-staple cotton in the industrial centers of British textile manufacturing gave a powerful boost to the use of slave labor in the southern interior from the Carolina upcountry to the lower Mississippi River valley. The number of slaves in the country doubled between 1790 and 1820, and several new slave states (Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi) joined the Union. Thirty years after the ratification of the Constitution, those who hoped that slavery would evaporate in the new United States were sorely disappointed.
During this early republican period, the two main points of contention over slavery at the national level were the regulation of U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the status of slavery in new territories. Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence had accused King George III of waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by protecting the slave trade; the Continental Congress cut the accusation out of the final version. Most of the states prohibited foreign slave importation after independence, although South Carolina’s temporary lifting of its state ban in 1804 allowed traders to import tens of thousands of African slaves before Congress exercised its constitutional power to end slave importation in 1808. Highly publicized cases of slave smuggling into the Gulf South after the War of 1812 prompted Congress to pass a series of reforms between 1818 and 1820 that authorized the U.S. Navy to suppress illegal slave trading on the African coast and defined such trading as piracy punishable by death. But not until the Civil War, with the execution of Nathaniel Gordon in 1862, was capital punishment used as a sentence in the United States for participation in the illegal slave trade. Congress also tried to stop U.S. citizens from participating in the slave trade between Africa and foreign countries beginning with an anti–slave trade law in 1794, but fragmentary evidence suggests that the legislative effort to stop such activity was ineffective. Despite British naval and diplomatic pressure, Atlantic slave trading persisted as a shadowy sector of the American economy well into the nineteenth century.
More controversial was the issue of slavery’s western expansion. The Continental Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787 but allowed it in the territory south of the Ohio River, implicitly drawing a line between free and slave territories in the trans-Appalachian West. In 1798 and in 1803, Congress debated the status of slavery in the Mississippi and Orleans territories, respectively, allowing slaveholding but not foreign slave importation in both places.
Three decades of simmering conflict over the geographic extension of slavery boiled over in 1819 when Missouri, a slave-owning territory, applied for statehood. For the first time, northern opponents of slavery blocked the introduction of a state rather than a territory, raising a new and explosive constitutional question. Thomas Jefferson called it “a firebell in the night.” Led by Congressman Rufus King of New York, northeastern representatives in the House tapped into a genuine wellspring of antislavery sentiment among their constituents, for whom slavery was now a potent metaphor for oppression rather than a day-to-day reality. They saw the prospect of slavery flourishing in the “empire of liberty” west of the Mississippi as a betrayal of American ideals. But unionism prevailed. The Missouri Compromise welcomed Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, thereby preserving sectional balance in the U.S. Senate, and drew a line between free and slave territories elsewhere in the Louisiana Purchase at 36° 30′ latitude. For a generation, this agreement bought sectional peace on the question of slavery’s expansion.
The Missouri crisis also revealed the danger of antagonistic sectional interests in national politics. One solution, as New York’s “little magician” Martin Van Buren recognized, was to forge a national political coalition around the shared interests of people in the northern and southern states. Rising to power with the election of the slave-owning planter and military hero Andrew Jackson in 1828, Van Buren’s Democratic Party pursued an anti-antislavery position consistent with its principles of limited government. The Democrats refused to continue federal support for the gradual emancipationist African Colonization Society, which had been granted a de facto subsidy through the 1819 slave trade law. The Democrats sustained a “gag rule” in the House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844 that prevented debate on petitions relating to slavery. As proponents of a strong national government and moral reform, the northern wing of the Whig Party was less ideologically hostile to antislavery than the Democrats. (Returning to Congress as a Massachusetts Whig, John Quincy Adams became the leading opponent of the gag rule in the House.) Yet for the Whigs, too, the task of winning national elections required the muffling of antislavery tendencies so as not to alienate its southern constituency. The Jacksonian two-party system thus repolarized national politics around issues other than slavery.
Yet the progress of antislavery ideas and organizations in northern civil society made it difficult for the two-party system to keep the lid on the slavery issue. The slave population continued to increase and, although the United States had legally withdrawn from the Atlantic slave trade, a new interstate slave trade carried enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South. The image of slave traders marching coffles of chained slaves through the District of Columbia became a staple of abolitionist propaganda. The American Colonization Society (ACS) and its program for gradual emancipation came under intense fire from both port and starboard. Free black Northerners and their radical white abolitionist allies assailed the ACS as a proslavery trick, while proslavery ideologues in the South regarded it as impractical at best and, at worst, a Trojan horse of state-sponsored abolition.
As the promise of gradual emancipation faded, some white Northerners sought a clean break with slavery. Inspired by perfectionist ideas emanating from the Second Great Awakening, a radical abolitionist movement sprang up in the 1830s under the banner of William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-based newspaper, the Liberator. The radical abolitionists regarded slavery as a terrible sin, advocated immediate emancipation, and rejected the colonization of freed people outside the United States. After Garrison and other leading abolitionists organized the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAAS) in 1833, state and local chapters proliferated in the northern states, much to the horror of southern slaveholders and their “doughface” northern allies.
The abolitionist movement launched two campaigns in the mid-1830s that tested the American political system’s tolerance for antislavery dissent. The first came in 1835, when the wealthy New York merchant Lewis Tappan orchestrated a scheme to use the national postal system to flood the southern states with AAAS propaganda, including a children’s gazette called The Slave’s Friend. Angry mobs seized the offending literature from many southern post offices and burned it on the pretext of protecting public safety, prompting abolitionists to protest against interference with the mail and the violation of free speech. Buoyed by the publicity garnered through the postal campaign, the AAAS launched a petition drive designed to demonstrate northern support for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. It was this petition drive that provoked the House of Representatives to initiate the gag rule.
The end of the decade witnessed a schism in the abolitionist movement, pitting those who wanted to press the slavery issue in the political arena against the Garrisonian faction, who wanted nothing to do with politics whatsoever. (Garrison would eventually denounce the U.S. Constitution as a “covenant with death.”) Supported by the splinter group American and Foreign Antislavery Society, the political wing of abolitionism launched the Liberty Party in 1840, running former ACS agent James Birney as a candidate for president. Although Birney won only 7,000 votes in 1840 and 62,000 votes in 1844, the Liberty Party did articulate an antislavery alternative to the Jacksonian party system.
Events beyond the nation’s borders bolstered Jacksonian-era antislavery. Abolitionists celebrated British West Indian emancipation in the 1830s, even though the British government paid £20 million to slaveholders. In 1839 northeastern abolitionists rallied to the defense of a group of Africans who had commandeered a Spanish slaver, the Amistad. The Africans were captured by a U.S. naval vessel off the coast of Long Island, New York, as they tried to sail back to Sierra Leone. Their case was litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled, in 1841, that they had been illegally enslaved in violation of Spanish law and treaty obligations. Later that year, a ship called the Creole carrying slaves from Richmond, Virginia, to New Orleans was also commandeered by its human cargo, who sailed the vessel to the Bahamas, where they were liberated. In a striking contrast to the Amistad case, the United States demanded that the slaves be returned to their owners. Joshua Giddings, an antislavery Whig representative from Ohio, introduced a resolution declaring the slaves’ revolt to be legal and the government’s effort to recover them dishonorable. He was censured by the House, resigned his seat, and was promptly reelected by his constituents.
As the British stepped up their campaign against the Atlantic slave trade, the United States steadfastly refused to allow the Royal Navy to search American vessels suspected of “blackbirding.” Instead, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 committed the United States to maintaining a naval patrol off the West African coast to “act in concert and cooperation” with the British navy in the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. The results were unimpressive, as American naval vessels in the West Africa Squadron captured only 36 slavers between 1843 and 1861.
Until the mid-1840s, Whigs and Democrats avoided the issue of slavery’s expansion. When Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836, Democratic leaders initially deflected pressure to annex the new republic. After Van Buren’s defeat in 1840, William Henry Harrison, a Whig, would undoubtedly have kept Texas at arm’s length, but his untimely death catapulted the idiosyncratic Virginian John Tyler to the presidency. After Tyler clashed with his own party, he seized on Texas annexation as a way to rally southern Democrats behind him. In 1844 Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, who openly feared British abolitionist influence in Texas, negotiated an annexation treaty that was defeated by an alliance of Whigs and northern Democrats in the Senate. The leading candidates for the presidency—Martin Van Buren for the Democrats and Henry Clay for the Whigs—came out against annexation. Southern Democrats retaliated against Van Buren by denying him the party’s nomination, which was extended to a relatively obscure former governor of Tennessee, James K. Polk, who supported the annexation of Texas as well as the acquisition of the Oregon Territory with a northern border of 54°40′ Polk edged out Clay in the general election, Texas entered the Union as a slave state the following year, and, shortly after, a boundary dispute with Mexico flamed into war.
Some historians suggest that the Liberty Party’s 15,000 votes in New York tipped the 1844 election to Polk, thus initiating a chain of events that returned slavery to the center of American politics—just not in the way that Liberty Party supporters had imagined. This great “what if?” supposes that Clay would have won those 15,000 votes in the absence of the Liberty Party, when it is at least plausible that those voters would have stayed home rather than cast a ballot for the slave-owning Kentuckian. Blaming the Liberty Party also overlooks other factors, from electoral fraud to the Democrats’ popularity among immigrants, that contributed to Clay’s defeat.
The Mexican-American War was both a partisan and a sectional issue. Whigs opposed the war; many Northerners regarded it as a land grab for the southern “Slave Power.” Three months into the war, David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, moved to deflect this criticism by proposing to prohibit slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. (It should be noted that Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, so Wilmot’s measure would simply have preserved the legal status quo.) The Wilmot Proviso, as it became known, passed the House with nearly unanimous support from northern congressmen in both parties, but it failed in the Senate, where southern power was stronger. Congress put the proviso through the same paces in 1847, and the war ended with no agreement on the status of slavery in the vast territory acquired in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which the Senate ratified early in 1848.
Committed to prohibiting slavery wherever constitutionally permissible, a coalition of Democratic “Barnburners,” Conscience Whigs, and holdovers from the Liberty Party organized the Free Soil Party, nominating Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice president. The Free Soil Party won more than 290,000 votes (14 percent of the popular vote in the North), with its strongest support coming in the ticket’s home states of New York and Massachusetts. The party did not win any electoral votes, and its effect on the outcome of the election was murky, but it did contribute to a crucial shift in the emphasis of antislavery politics toward concern for the rights of free white Northerners rather than the wrongs done to southern slaves.
Thirty years after the Missouri crisis, another storm gathered around the issue of slavery. To slaveholders’ chagrin, the Whig president Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder, supported the admission of gold-mad California as a free state. The status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican cession remained in dispute. Antislavery Northerners wanted to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, while pro-slavery Southerners wanted more rigorous enforcement of the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause. Some radical southern politicians went so far as to threaten disunion if the North did not accede to their demands. After Congress rejected an “omnibus” bill designed by Clay to resolve all these issues at once, the torch passed to Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, who broke up the various elements of Clay’s bill and navigated each one separately through Congress.
The so-called Compromise of 1850 passed, even though only a small band of compromisers supported the whole package. They allied with a sectional bloc to form a slim majority on each measure. The territorial issue was solved by admitting California as a free state while effectively adopting the principle of “popular sovereignty” elsewhere in the New Mexico and Utah territories. This solution blunted the appeal of the Free Soil Party. Most Barnburners returned to the Democratic Party, and the Free Soil vote dropped by almost 50 percent from 1848 to 1852. Congress also banned the slave trade but not slave owning in the District of Columbia; the district’s slave traders moved their pens outside the city and carried on business as usual.
The most controversial piece of legislation was the new Fugitive Slave Act. It was designed to counteract northern states’ “personal liberty laws,” which gave free black Northerners due process protections and, in many cases, prohibited state officials from participating in the recovery of fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act created a new cadre of federal “commissioners” with the authority to arrest runaway slaves and return them to their owners. The commissioners had a financial incentive to determine that seized persons belonged to those who claimed them. Northerners could be deputized by the commissioners to help enforce the law and were subject to fines and punishment if they refused.
These terms inflamed antislavery public opinion in the North. Abolitionists pledged civil disobedience and resistance, and many black Northerners fled to Canada. Dozens of alleged fugitives were captured in the year following the passage of the law, and, in a few celebrated incidents, vigilance committees tried to rescue them. The most famous case occurred in Boston in 1854, when the administration of President Franklin Pierce deployed federal troops to safeguard the return of a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns to Virginia. The “Slave Power” had camped in the North. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written as a protest against the law, was serialized in Gamaliel Bailey’s antislavery newspaper The National Era in 1851–52 and became a worldwide bestseller. Southern slaveholders were taken aback. They viewed the return of fugitive slaves as a solemn constitutional obligation, and they were aghast at northern antislavery appeals to a “higher law than the Constitution,” in the explosive words of New York’s Whig senator William Seward.
Despite the furor over the Fugitive Slave Act, it was the revival of the territorial issue that killed off the Second Party System. In 1854, hoping to win support for his preferred transcontinental railroad route, Douglas introduced legislation to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories and allow the people of each to decide the status of slavery for themselves. Although the Utah and New Mexico territories had been organized on the principle of popular sovereignty four years earlier, Douglas’s extension of the principle to Kansas and Nebraska proved explosive because it meant overturning the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska bill divided both major parties along sectional lines, but with enough support from pro-Douglas northern Democrats it passed. If the Democrats split over Kansas and Nebraska, the Whigs fell apart. Southern Whigs had been trounced by the Democrats in the 1852 and 1853 elections, and the Kansas-Nebraska debates finally convinced them to cut loose from the northern wing of their party. Riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the Know-Nothing Party enjoyed some popularity in local and state elections in 1855 and 1856 as an alternative to the Whigs, but it crashed on the politics of slavery just as the Whigs had done.
Antislavery backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska legislation coalesced in the Republican Party, which emerged in the 1856 elections as the leading rival to the Democrats in the North. Running on a platform that condemned “the twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery,” John Frémont, the Republican presidential candidate, won 11 northern states and almost 40 percent of the electoral vote.
Radical southern politicians, often known as “fire-eaters,” advocated an aggressively proslavery agenda through the 1850s. Some fire-eaters hoped to force the Democratic Party to give in to proslavery interests; others hoped to create a new southern party and ultimately sever the slave states from the Union. Their platform included rigid enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal slave code to protect slaveholders’ special property rights, the extension of slavery into the western territories, the annexation of Cuba, support for filibusters in Central America, and the reopening of the African slave trade to the United States. They promoted southern nationalism with calls for railroads, colleges, and a literature unique to the South. Proslavery ideologues painted the abolitionists as fanatics and slavery as humane. Asserting that southern slaves were treated well, they taunted northern and British abolitionists for ignoring the dire plight of wage workers. Some pointed to the emerging utopian socialist movement as proof of the failure of free society.
The sectional crisis deepened in the late 1850s. First, popular sovereignty in the Kansas territory led to a debacle. Violence erupted between proslavery and antislavery factions, punctuated in May 1856 by the murder of five men at Pottawatomie Creek by John Brown and his sons. The violence spilled onto the floor of the Senate, where Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, caned Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner for insulting his cousin, South Carolina senator Andrew Butler, during a speech on the atrocities in Kansas. When pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas submitted rival state constitutions to Congress in 1858, President James Buchanan supported the proslavery version, but Douglas saw it as fraudulent and opposed it. An alliance of Douglas Democrats and Republicans in the House defeated the proslavery constitution, outraging southern Democrats. The Supreme Court added fuel to the fire early in 1857, ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford that the due process clause of the Constitution prevented Congress from prohibiting slavery in the territories. The decision undermined Douglas’s preferred solution of popular sovereignty; Abraham Lincoln and many other Republicans thought that it paved the way for the nationalization of slavery.
Then, in the fall of 1859, John Brown attempted to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and incite a slave insurrection. Federal troops under Robert E. Lee quashed the revolt. Brown was captured, tried, and executed for treason. Widespread northern admiration for Brown after his hanging convinced many white Southerners that the Union was an empty shell.
Slavery dominated the election of 1860. Nominating the relatively obscure Lincoln as its presidential candidate, the Republican Party opposed any expansion of slavery into the western territories. In a bid to expand support in the Lower North, the Republicans also broadened their economic agenda to include a protective tariff, a homestead act, and federal aid for internal improvements. The Democrats fractured, with Douglas at the head of a northern ticket pledged to support popular sovereignty and Kentucky’s John Breckenridge at the head of a southern ticket determined to protect slavery in federal territory. Conservative former Whigs organized the Constitutional Union Party with the bold platform of upholding the Constitution and enforcing the law. They nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett from Massachusetts for vice president in a last-ditch effort to hold the country together by ignoring the divisions over slavery.
Lincoln won a majority of the popular vote in the North and the electoral votes of every northern state except New Jersey, which he split with Douglas. Breckenridge won the Lower South, plus Delaware and Maryland. Bell won Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, while Douglas won only Missouri. The upshot was that Lincoln won the presidency without a single electoral vote from the slave states; a northern party had risen to national power on an antislavery platform. Despite Lincoln’s assurances that the Republicans would not seek to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed, many white Southerners believed that Lincoln’s election portended the death of slavery in the Union one way or another.
Secession was intended to protect slavery, but it had the opposite effect. By leaving the Union and daring the North to stop them, southern secessionists invited a terrible war that led, by its own logic, to emancipation. “They have sowed the wind and must reap the whirlwind,” reflected William Tecumseh Sherman in the middle of the Civil War. Seven states in the Lower South seceded between late December 1860 and early February 1861, and another four joined the Confederacy in the two months after Fort Sumter. The decision to secede was fiercely contested within the South. Opposition tended to come either from ultraconservative planters who valued prudence above all, or from the spokesmen for regions that had little stake in slavery, such as western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. Four border slave states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) remained in the Union, providing some counterweight to abolitionist pressures during the war. But with the slaveholders’ power greatly diminished and the Democrats in a minority, Lincoln and the Republican Congress implemented an antislavery agenda: admitting Kansas as a free state, recognizing Haiti, prosecuting illegal Atlantic slave traders, and abolishing slavery (and compensating slaveholders) in the District of Columbia.
At the beginning of the war, however, Lincoln was careful to honor his promise not to challenge slavery in the states where it existed. He did not think that secession abrogated the Constitution’s protections for slavery in the states. Moreover, keeping the loyalty of northern Democrats and white men in the border slave states required political caution. So when General David Hunter took it upon himself in May 1862 to declare all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida free, Lincoln revoked the order, earning the wrath of northern abolitionists.
Union policy nevertheless moved toward emancipation. It was spurred on by enslaved people themselves, who risked life and limb to make their way to the Union Army. General Benjamin Butler was the first to turn slaves’ status as property against their owners, declaring fugitives to be “contraband of war” in May 1861 and putting them to work at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Invoking military necessity, the Union continued to counterpunch against slavery, passing a Confiscation Act in August 1861 that freed slaves who were employed in the service of the Confederacy, then passing a Second Confiscation Act in July 1862 that freed the slaves of persons actively engaged in the rebellion. The Emancipation Proclamation continued this trajectory, freeing slaves in all territories still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Although it is true that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single person at the moment it was promulgated, it did have the momentous effect of transforming the Union Army into an instrument of emancipation as the war dragged on. Moreover, the Proclamation authorized the employment of black men in the army and navy, even if black soldiers would still have to wrestle their own government for equal pay with white soldiers and the opportunity to see combat. Lincoln’s resounding victory over McLellan and the Republican landslide in Congress in the election of 1864 confirmed the war’s abolitionist turn. Slavery crumbled in the Union as well as in the Confederacy. Unionist governments in Arkansas and Louisiana abolished slavery in 1864, as did Maryland; Missouri and Tennessee followed suit early in 1865. In January of that year, the House approved a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, but it was not until December that the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.
The end of slavery raised crucial questions about the status of the country’s 4 million freed people: Would they be citizens? What rights would they have? What did society and government owe to them? Emancipation did not end the labor problem that gave rise to slavery in the first place, nor did it wipe away the stain of racism that slavery left behind. As in other postemancipation societies in the Atlantic world, former slaveholders replaced slavery with an array of coercive labor practices ranging from debt peonage to convict labor. Freed people faced a ferocious campaign of racist terror and violence waged by former Confederates embittered by military defeat and the upheaval of social and political Reconstruction. The reaction against emancipation practically eviscerated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments until the black freedom movement after World War II ended Jim Crow. Unmoored from the struggle against chattel slavery, antislavery rhetoric has drifted through American politics like a ghost ship, reappearing out of the fog in struggles over prostitution, unions, women’s rights, communism, and the reserve clause in baseball.
It is impossible to tally the whole cost of slavery and its vicious legacies to the United States, but the reckoning continues. In July 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution apologizing for “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow.” As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Today the United States and the world community confront new manifestations of slavery in its modern guises of “human trafficking” and severe forms of sex and labor exploitation.
See also abolitionism; civil rights; Civil War and Reconstruction; sectional conflict and secession, 1845–65; segregation and Jim Crow.
FURTHER READING. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s, 1992; John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 1995; Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War, 1992; William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856, 1978; W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, 2007; Jonathan Halperin Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854, 2004; Don Edward Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, 1978; Idem, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, 2001; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 1995; Idem, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, 1st ed., 1988; Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America, 2007; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 1990; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War, 1999; Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 2006; David Morris Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976; Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860, 2000; Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862, 2005; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, revised ed., 1996; Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society, 2001; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 2005.
ADAM ROTHMAN
Social Security refers to the program of old-age insurance, subsequently broadened to include survivors (1939) and disability insurance (1956), that President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated on August 14, 1935, by signing the Social Security Act. Old-age insurance began as a federally administered program in which the government collected equal contributions of 1 percent of the first 3,000 of an employee’s wages from employers and employees, and paid pensions to the employees on their retirement. Since 1951 the program has experienced enormous growth, and in 2005 some 48,445,900 Americans, more than the combined populations of California and New Jersey, received benefits from the Social Security program. That year the program collected more than 700 billion from payroll taxes—about as much revenue as the gross domestic product of the Netherlands—and spent a little more than 500 billion on benefits.
In June 1934, President Roosevelt asked Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to chair a cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security that, together with a staff headed by two Wisconsin state government officials, made the crucial decision to recommend a federal social insurance program for old age, financed through payroll taxes. The president contrasted this contributory approach favorably with other currently popular plans, such as Francis Townsend’s proposals to pay everyone over age 60 a pension of 200 dollars a month. When the president’s plan was introduced to Congress in January 1935, the old-age insurance portions of the legislation (the proposed legislation contained many features, including federal aid to the states for public assistance and a state-run unemployment compensation program) received an indifferent reception. Congressmen objected to the fact that the program would not pay regular benefits until 1942 and would exclude those already past retirement age. Members from predominantly agricultural districts realized that old-age insurance meant almost nothing to their constituents who, because the program was limited to industrial and commercial workers, would not be eligible to participate. The president, bolstered by the favorable results of the 1934 elections, resisted congressional attempts to abandon social insurance in favor of noncontributory welfare grants to the elderly and to permit those with liberal private pension plans to withdraw from Social Security.
Social Security surfaced as a campaign issue in 1936, when Republican candidate Alfred Landon criticized the program as “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted, and wastefully financed.” In response to his criticism, President Roosevelt agreed to a plan, passed by Congress in 1939, to reduce the amount of money held in reserve to finance benefits, to initiate benefits earlier than planned, and to include special benefits for workers’ wives and for the dependents of workers who died before retirement age. The 1939 amendments contained the implicit assumption that men participated in the labor force and women did not. Dependent wives but not dependent husbands received spousal benefits, and a benefit went to widows of covered workers but not to widowers. Widows received only three-quarters of a basic benefit. Not until 1983 were these gender distinctions lifted from the law.
Despite the 1939 amendments, Social Security did not gain great popularity. Instead, it remained a relatively neglected program. In 1940, for example, even before the nation’s entrance into World War II, the United States spent more on veterans’ payments and workers’ compensation than it did on old-age and survivors’ insurance. Even in the area of old-age security, social insurance—a federal program—played a distinctly secondary role to welfare—a state and local program. The average monthly welfare benefit was 42 in 1949, although with considerable variance from state to state, compared with an average Social Security benefit of 25. As late as 1950, more than twice as many people were on state welfare rolls receiving old-age assistance as were receiving retirement benefits from the federal government under Social Security. Throughout the 1940s, Congress felt little pressure to expand the program and, as a consequence, repeatedly refused to raise payroll taxes, increase benefit levels, or expand coverage.
The situation changed with the 1950 amendments, which expanded coverage and raised benefits. The amendments were the result of a report by an advisory committee in 1948 that argued that the nation could either rely on welfare, which the council portrayed as demeaning since it required recipients to prove they were poor and induced a state of dependency, or on social insurance, which, according to the council, reinforced “the interest of the individual in helping himself.”
On August 28, 1950, after lengthy congressional hearings, the recommendations of the advisory council became law. The 1950 amendments raised average benefits by 77 percent and broke the impasse over Social Security taxes. Congress agreed to raise the tax level to 3 percent and to increase the taxable wage base (the amount of earnings on which taxes were paid) from 3,000 to 3,600. In addition, the amendments brought new groups, such as self-employed businessmen, into the Social Security system. The ranks of Social Security supporters included labor unions and liberal Democrats, whose standing was boosted in 1948 with President Truman’s surprising reelection, the revival of Democratic control of Congress, and the election of Social Security supporters such as Paul Douglas of Illinois. These factors helped change the congressional mood from indifference to a willingness to expand the system.
Stalled in the 1940s, Social Security became a popular program in the 1950s. Expanded coverage encouraged more congressmen to take an interest. Prosperity enabled the program to collect more money than Depression-era planners had predicted. As a result, increased benefits were legislated in 1952, 1954, 1956, and 1958. Social Security surpassed welfare in popularity and in the generosity of its benefits. The only real test the program faced came with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. He expressed an interest in looking at alternatives to Social Security, and he was encouraged by the Chamber of Commerce, representatives from the insurance industry, and some Republican congressmen. By 1954, however, Eisenhower had decided to reject the advice to change the system to a flat benefit paid out to everyone. In September 1954, the president proposed and secured passage of a law preserving the existing system, raising benefit levels, and extending Social Security coverage to farmers.
During Eisenhower’s first term, the creation of disability benefits became the major issue in Social Security politics. Liberals wanted to expand the system to pay benefits to people who had dropped out of the labor force before the normal retirement age because of a functional limitation or impairment. Conservatives worried that disability was a vague concept whose adoption would lead to a precipitous rise in expenditure and discourage the more constructive alternative of rehabilitation. On this matter, the Democrats defeated the Republicans by a one-vote margin in the Senate in July 1956. Social Security expanded to encompass benefits for disabled workers 50 years or older. Four years later Congress removed the age restriction.
By 1958 the cutting edge issue had shifted from disability to health insurance. Proponents of expansion wanted to use the Social Security system as a means of funding insurance to cover the costs of hospital care for Social Security beneficiaries. They argued that retirement benefits could never be raised high enough to cover the catastrophic costs of illness. President Eisenhower, emphasizing health insurance coverage that relied on private insurance companies, opposed this expansion, as did the influential Democratic congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas and Senator Robert Kerr, Democrat from Oklahoma. Despite President John F. Kennedy’s advocacy of what became known as Medicare, the legislation stalled in Congress and interrupted the pattern of regular Social Security benefit increases. It took the masterful efforts of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 to break the impasse. Only after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 did Social Security politics resume its normal course.
A major development in 1972—automatic indexing of Social Security benefit increases to the cost of living—once again changed the course of Social Security politics. The idea of indexing benefits, rather than leaving them to Congress, came from President Richard M. Nixon. The president saw Social Security as an issue where the majority Democrats could always outbid the minority Republicans and take credit for benefit increases. Nixon argued that it would be better to establish a rational structure that related benefit increases to changes in the cost of living and reduced congressional temptation to raise benefits above what the nation could afford. Not surprisingly, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills resisted the idea, effectively blocking it in 1969 and 1970. As members of Congress became more sympathetic to the indexing idea, Mills acquiesced to a plan that permitted automatic cost-of-living adjustments, but only if Congress failed to raise benefits in a discretionary manner. Because of disagreements between the House and the Senate, largely over the matter of welfare reform, the process took until the summer of 1972 to resolve. In the end, Congress agreed to cost-of-living adjustments on Mills’s terms. The Democratic Congress outbid the Republicans on the level of Social Security benefits. Where Nixon hoped for a 5 percent increase, Mills and his colleagues legislated one of 20 percent.
This change made the program vulnerable to the unfavorable economic conditions of the 1970s. High unemployment cut down on tax collections and induced more people to retire; inflation drove up benefit levels. In June 1974, the trustees who oversaw Social Security announced that the program was “underfinanced in the long range.” A slower rate of population growth meant a higher future percentage of aged people in the population and a heavier future burden for Social Security. Support for Social Security remained high, but the system faced a new vulnerability
Social Security survived its vulnerable period between 1975 and 1983 because of the many beneficiaries invested in its survival but also because it contained built-in legislative protection. As a result of the 1972 amendments, benefit levels were protected against inflation, without Congress having to do anything.
President Jimmy Carter’s advisors convinced him to take action to ensure that Social Security met its obligations. Congress ignored most of the president’s recommendations (such as raising the level of employer taxes) and instead raised the level of wages on which workers and their employers paid Social Security taxes, and increased tax rates. Passage of a modified version of Carter’s bill showed that Congress was willing to go to great lengths to preserve the basic Social Security system. Carter’s advisors assured him that the 1977 amendments had “fixed” Social Security in both the short and long runs.
The economic recession of the late 1970s soon undid the projections of program planners and once again pointed the way to a crisis. As the actuaries duly reported, there was the possibility that Social Security would not be able to meet its obligations and pay full benefits in 1983.
Once again, Congress—which included a House under Democratic control—and the Reagan administration joined forces to “save” the program and preserve its basic structure. The Reagan administration began with an aggressive stance on Social Security, seeking among other things to reduce the size of early retirement benefits (legislated in 1956 for women and 1961 for men). Democrats tended to favor tax increases, Republicans benefit cuts. Interested in sharing the blame, each side hesitated to take action without the tacit approval of the other.
President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill decided to remove the issue from public scrutiny, at least until after the 1982 elections. In December 1981, Reagan appointed a bipartisan commission, the National Commission on Social Security Reform, to propose solutions to the system’s problems. The commission held a number of ceremonial meetings, waiting to see how the 1982 elections turned out. The election results gave the commission no easy outs, since neither party gained a victory decisive enough to provide a comfortable working majority to deal with the issue.
After the election, President Reagan and House Speaker O’Neill of Massachusetts used their surrogates on the commission to negotiate a deal. Each side kept a running score sheet that listed the potential savings from each item, all the time hoping roughly to balance tax increases and benefit costs. In the spirit of reaching a deal, the Democrats accepted a permanent six-month delay in the annual cost-of-living adjustment—in effect a 2 percent reduction in benefits. The Republicans acquiesced to small increases in Social Security taxes achieved by initiating already legislated payroll tax increases earlier than scheduled. The Congress in 1983 honored the terms of the compromise. Politicians on both sides of the aisle celebrated the rescue of Social Security, and Ronald Reagan signed the 1983 Social Security Amendments with pomp and circumstance.
Conservatives believed that the crisis leading to the 1983 amendments illustrated the vulnerability of the system and the unwillingness of Congress to take steps to put a permanent end to the problems. Liberals pointed to the apparently robust shape of the Social Security trust funds as proof that the amendments had, in effect, resolved the issue. Advocates in conservative think tanks like Cato and the Heritage Foundation tried to make people aware of Social Security’s long-term liabilities and its inability to provide windfall gains to later entrants into the system (such as the baby boom generation and its echo). They also touted governmental sanctioned alternatives that relied on individual and private-sector administration, such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401(k)s—a parallel private universe for Social Security, equivalent to the private health insurance on which most Americans relied.
When Social Security reform returned to the political agenda in the 1990s, the result of changed actuarial assumptions about real wage growth and the future of the economy, conservatives were able to offer more fundamental alternatives than simply tinkering with the present system. Evidence that the latest crisis in Social Security would be handled differently from previous ones came when an advisory council met in 1994 through 1996. This officially sanctioned group, one of the sort that usually reinforced the conventional bureaucratic wisdom, could not agree on a single recommendation and instead gave official sanction to privatization as one of three solutions to the Social Security financing problem.
When George W. Bush came into office, he expected to solve the long-term financing problem and point the way to a fundamental reform of Social Security. In 2000, as a candidate, Bush said he wanted to give younger workers the chance to put part of their payroll taxes into what he called “sound, responsible investments.” Interspersed with the political rhythms of the post-9/11 era, the president continued his initiative. In his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush said, “We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people.”
After the 2004 election, the president brought the Social Security campaign to center stage, announcing that it would be a priority of his administration. If nothing were done, Bush argued, the system would run out of money. That set the stage for a call to action in the 2005 State of the Union address. According to the president, Social Security was a great moral success of the past century but something different was required for the new millennium. The president followed up with a full-scale publicity campaign.
Despite his unprecedented effort, Bush gained no political traction as he faced serious technical and political obstacles. One problem, broadly stated, was how to move from one system to another. Benefits for people already receiving Social Security needed to be preserved while simultaneously moving to a private system—a difficult and costly transition. Meanwhile, the shortfall in the program’s long-range financing provided continuing pressure on all parties to find some common ground.
See also welfare.
FURTHER READING. Nancy J. Altman, The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble, 2005; Daniel Beland, Social Security: History and Politics from the New Deal to the Privatization Debate, 2005; Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security, 1979.
EDWARD D. BERKOWITZ
Socialist attempts to redirect the political culture of the United States proved to be a difficult task—one that, while never succeeding, did on occasion achieve a certain success even in failure. The fertile earth of the New World produced a variety of political fruits, but none was as potent as the idea that this American earth itself was, as Irving Howe once said, “humanity’s second chance.” In this rendering, it was the American Revolution that secured for the nation its exceptional status, and, in the process, dismissed the socialist premise of a required second revolution as misguided or malicious. Understandings of nineteenth-century socialism varied: preindustrial agricultural communes coexisted with urban industrial workers contesting employers in the factory. They shared, however, a concern to democratize decision making in the society and the workplace and to share more equitably the profits from those enterprises. Whatever the specific expression, the socialist experience in America would prove to be, at its best, a bittersweet experience.
The first phase of socialist experimentation in America was primarily communitarian. Reflecting impulses that motivated many of the continent’s initial European settlers, these self-defined socialists separated from the developing capitalist society to form communities that would serve, in their reengineered social and personal relations, as beacon lights to the majority of their countrymen they considered lost souls in a materialist diaspora. Influenced by certain European utopian socialists (Charles Fourier and Count Henri de Saint-Simon, especially), by the deep religious currents already evident in American life, and by incipient social reformers such as Robert Owen and Edward Bellamy, these communities proliferated throughout the United States. Most prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this tradition revived again in the 1960s in the communes organized by so-called hippies seeking personal authenticity in collective life apart from an overly commercialized culture.
Whatever the benefits for individual participants, the majority of these utopian communities were short-lived. John Humphrey Noyes (1811–86), who led the Oneida Community near Utica, New York, explained in his 1870 history of the movement that those communities organized along secular utopian lines failed more quickly than those created from a shared religious belief. Noyes hoped that the latter efforts possessed greater prospects of introducing socialism through “churches . . . quickened by the Pentecostal Spirit.” Although the evangelical spirit would influence American socialism, it would not be the singular element in organizing the socialist movement that Noyes imagined.
From an international perspective, 1848 marks a turning point in both the idea and practice of socialism. The European revolutions fought that year against the continent’s monarchial regimes ignited a variety of dissenting movements; The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, published that year, offered an interpretative analysis of the turmoil that emphasized the oppressive class distinctions imposed by the inner logic of the capitalist economic system. A decidedly antiutopian “scientific” socialism emerged from this European cauldron. In Marx’s view, working people—the oppressed class created by capitalism—would be the collective agent that would overthrow industrial capitalism. These socialists rejected liberal reform efforts and declared, as a scientific fact, the coming transformation to socialism and, following that, to communism—the state of full human freedom and equality. Not surprisingly, their attempted revolutions and their repression by European authorities led to large-scale migrations by activists and sympathizers to other European countries and to America.
From the start of their American experience, the expectations of European socialist immigrants encountered a difficult reception. In sharp contrast with their European past, America’s “universal” suffrage (for white men) was a fundamental aspect of citizenship. As the ballot was preeminently an individual right, its possession validated a core belief in individualism, in the expectation of social mobility, and in the superiority of American democratic governance. While not all Americans held these beliefs with equal intensity, these principles were, as Alexis de Tocqueville and many others noted, a fundamental component of American political consciousness.
As newly arrived socialists entered the workforce and sought to join the nascent trade union movement in the three decades after 1848, many despaired of the “backwardness” of the American working people. The individualistic aspirations of these workers led most to ignore appeals to a collective class consciousness as they avidly engaged in mainstream political activity, often closely aligned with employers. Most confusingly, American working people seemed to embrace the promise of American life. Friedrick Sorge, Marx’s representative in America, harshly dismissed these interrelated strands of the political culture as a “delusion [that] transforms itself into a sort of creed.” Yet, after almost two decades working in the American wilderness, Sorge reported to Marx in 1871 that, despite the enormous industrial growth that Marx held was the precondition for class consciousness, American “workingmen in general . . . are quite unconscious of their own position toward capital” and thus “slow to show battle against their oppressors. . . .”
But if American working people did not endorse an orthodox Marxist analysis, neither did they simply acquiesce to the demands of employers. In the three decades after Sorge’s report, an intense series of strikes occurred nationwide. Strikers protested the transformation of work inherent in the change from an artisan to an industrial system of production, with the consequent loss of control by local communities of their daily lives, and the dramatically widening income gap between workers and employers. State and federal troops were deployed to break these strikes in iron mining and steel production, in coal mining, in railroad operations, and in other industries. Working people sought new approaches to gain their demands. Politically independent labor parties sprouted up across the nation, and the labor movement, while still small, began to solidify. The socialist movement also changed, softening Sorge’s rigid view, and became more inclusive of America’s particular political attitudes. Not insignificantly, its most prominent leader was deeply attuned to the possibilities of American democratic ideals.
The Socialist Party of America (SPA) was founded in 1901, but it had been in formation for some years before. Itself a coalition of beliefs and opinions, the SPA sought to define socialism in a manner consistent with the promise of democracy in both economic relations and politics. It ran candidates for political office, supported striking workers as well as the vote for women, and sought civic benefits such as the extension of sewer pipes and electricity to working people’s neighborhoods. The party also held that socialism would ultimately come to America through electoral means. This emphasis on vying for votes within the dominant political structure rather than advocating an openly revolutionary program generated a split within the SPA, one that would become most evident during World War I.
Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) led this movement from its inception until his death. Although many socialist intellectuals considered his appreciation of Marx’s theory deficient, he was the single national SPA leader who could appeal to its varied constituencies: new immigrants, native-born workers, intellectuals, and reformers. Debs, a native of Terre Haute, Indiana, ran for the presidency on the SPA ticket five times between 1900 and 1920 (he was ill in 1916). In 1912 Debs received 6 percent of the national vote, the highest percentage ever recorded by a socialist candidate. Eight years later, imprisoned in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his opposition to American involvement in World War I, Debs nonetheless received almost 1 million votes. The core of Debs’s analysis, and the source of his appeal, was his understanding of socialism as the fulfillment of American democratic ideals in an era of industrial capitalism. It was the corporation, he argued—with its enormous financial and political power that could influence decisions in communities across the nation—that systematically violated the “truths” the Declaration of Independence held to be “self-evident.” To democratize industrial capitalism, to share with its workforce decision making as well as the benefits and profits of its work, was a central aim of Debs’s agitation.
Two issues particularly generated tension within the ranks of the SPA prior to World War I. Many male socialists dismissed agitation for woman suffrage because, they held, it detracted from the party’s focus on economic issues; many also objected to any enhancement of a more visible role for women within the party. Undaunted by this resistance, a group of activist women within the SPA, many with ties to either the trade unions and/or progressive reformers, worked to include a woman’s right to vote within the socialist agenda; in the process they created a network of activist socialist women. In major strikes in New York City (1909); Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912); and Patterson, New Jersey (1913), as editors and writers, trade union activists, and advocates for birth control, socialist women found a public voice and organized many. Their male comrades, however, changed slowly—when they changed at all. The values of nineteenth-century American culture that objected to a female presence in the presumed male public sphere permeated the ranks of its socialist critics as well.
Racial tension also divided the party. Victor Berger (1860–1929), the Milwaukee socialist leader and one of two socialists elected to the U.S. Congress, symbolized one position. Berger dismissed attempts to organize African Americans and publicly embraced the most racist stereotypes of African American men as a threat to white “civilization.” Debs, on the other hand, although not without his own racial prejudices, refused to speak to segregated audiences of socialists and publicly joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1916 to condemn D. W. Griffith’s hate-filled film about post–Civil War Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation. Relatively few black Americans joined the SPA, but one who did made a major impact on the movement and the nation in the decades to come.
Asa Philip Randolph (1889–1979) came to New York in 1911, studied economics and politics at the City College of New York, and soon joined the SPA. He led an organizing drive among elevator operators in New York, founded and edited the Messenger, a socialist magazine aimed at the black community, and spoke out unceasingly for labor rights, racial equality, and opposition to American involvement in the war. In 1925 he became the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of African American men who staffed the nation’s railway sleeping cars. Randolph led a difficult fight against two opponents simultaneously: to gain recognition for the union from employers and to win admittance into the American Federation of Labor, the nation’s major union grouping in the 1920s. In the process, the Brotherhood became the black community’s national “telegraph” system. As porters crisscrossed the nation as they worked, they created an effective communications system that spread news of atrocities, of protest and organization, and of cultural developments to African Americans in diverse and dispersed communities. In the decades to come, Randolph’s vision, one that integrated civil rights, trade union recognition, and civil liberties for all Americans, would play a major role in the civil rights movement and other social justice causes.
The postwar years took a toll on the SPA. It suffered a major split in 1919 when those influenced by the 1917 Russian Revolution split to form two revolutionary Communist parties; it was further weakened by the imprisonment of many of its activists, victims of the wartime resurgence of a narrowed patriotism that legitimized the repression of dissent. Debs, too, was not the same. Physically weakened after prison, he found that neither his oratory nor the substance of his message carried the force they once possessed. Americans, including many working people, accepted the permanence of the corporate structure, sought benefits from it where they could, and carefully chose when they might directly challenge their employers.
The decades after 1920 were difficult for the SPA. The party’s new leader, Norman Thomas (1884–1968), an ordained Presbyterian minister, was a committed socialist and pacifist who lacked the broad popular appeal Debs had possessed. Thomas ran six times for the presidency between 1928 and 1948, and never surpassed Debs’s 1920 total.
But the problem was not simply one of personality. Factional fighting repeatedly split the SPA from within, as the impact of the Great Depression, the momentarily powerful appeal of communism, and diminishing membership (especially among working people) sharply weakened the party. Even more devastating to the SPA’s expectations was the revival of liberalism in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) and the New Deal program he instigated. Thomas would soon claim that the New Deal almost completely absorbed the SPA platform, and the majority of its working-class voters. This was largely true because neither Thomas nor the SPA were able to convince working people that the pragmatic thrust of New Deal liberalism embodied reforms that represented no serious challenge to industrial capitalism. Thomas and his colleagues were persistent advocates of civil liberties, civil rights, and trade unions, but increasingly found themselves hard pressed to effectively distinguish their approach from liberalism. Thomas’s 1939 opposition to America’s involvement in the emerging war—a position consistent with his long-held pacificism—created additional difficulties in appealing to liberal voters.
By 1945, the socialist movement in America was a shadow of its former self. Its strongest institutional base was a handful of unions with headquarters in New York City who were already transferring their allegiance to the New Deal and the Democratic Party. Beyond that, the movement possessed isolated outposts of strength in communities across the country but, with the exception of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, there were few areas of institutional strength. What complicated the situation further for socialists was the reality that a majority of a generation’s politically progressive young people had, since the 1930s, gravitated toward liberalism and the legacy of the New Deal—and not to their party.
Not all followed that path, however. During the 1950s, Michael Harrington (1928–89), a Midwestern Catholic trained by the Jesuits at the College of the Holy Cross, emerged as one of the most promising socialists of the postwar generation. Grounded in a Catholic social justice tradition, including close ties with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Harrington evolved into a creative Marxist thinker. His approach to socialism reflected a sensibility similar to Debs’s, while his intellectual engagement far surpassed most in the American socialist tradition. His first book, The Other America (1962), startled the nation and helped convince President John F. Kennedy to create a poverty program. In his later books, Harrington provided an intelligent, radical analysis of American political culture, the economic crisis of “stagflation” in the 1970s, and of the potential that yet resided in a democratic socialist approach.
From the vantage point of Norman Thomas’s generation, Harrington represented a new generation of socialists; but to the emerging New Left protestors of the 1960s, he was decidedly old guard. Harrington himself, along with others in the SPA, cemented this perception with an early dismissive critique of the New Left’s philosophy, strategy, and culture. In the 1970s, however, following the New Left’s experiment with violent direct action, Harrington led a revived movement ultimately known as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Struggling to maintain a socialist perspective, the DSA worked closely with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, as events well beyond its control further diminished the prospects for socialism itself. The rise of modern conservatism enabled the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, a campaign in which the candidate won the enthusiastic support of many of the white working people who had once formed the foundation of both the SPA and the Democratic Party. That this occurred at a time when membership in American trade unions began its precipitous decline (nearly 30 percent of the nonagricultural workforce in 1980 to just over 12 percent in 2008) made the socialist predicament all the more painful.
Nor did the strategy of joining with progressive liberals bear immediate fruit. In the face of the conservative ascendancy, liberalism itself changed, becoming more centrist and supportive of an increasingly global corporate economy. Reagan’s famous 1987 challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” (while speaking in front of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the divisions of the cold war) was perhaps a public ringing of socialism’s death knell. Two years later, on November 9, 1989, the wall itself came down. In America, socialism’s appeal, always a minor note in the nation’s politics, all but disappeared as an institutional presence.
The reasons for socialism’s failure in the United States are numerous, and many are noted above. But to focus solely on them is to miss the contributions to American democratic thought that even this failed movement achieved. Debs and the early SPA’s emphasis on democracy in the workplace broadened the nation’s understanding of its democratic ideals and asserted the dignity and respect due working people if the country was to maintain its democratic ethos. It defended as well American civil liberties in time of war and fear and, with the actions and sacrifices by Debs and many others, kept alive the tradition of protest so central to maintaining a democracy. In the era of Thomas, that emphasis on preserving civil liberties remained strong, and broadened to include civil rights activity as well. The problem of effectively defining socialism apart from liberalism in the public arena was not solved in these years, nor would it be in the Harrington era. But Harrington brought to public debate an incisive intellectual analysis and a deep moral perspective that spoke more to core democratic values than to any orthodox version of Marxist thought. Like Debs before him, if with greater intellectual command and less oratorical power, Harrington framed potential solutions to America’s deeper problems within its democratic traditions in ways that challenged conservatives and liberals alike. In short, the historical experience of socialism in America was to serve as a persistent reminder (and an occasionally successful advocate) of the potential that yet lies in the American tradition of democratic citizenship.
See also communism; democracy; labor movement and politics; liberalism; New Left.
FURTHER READING. Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920, 1981; Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America, 1991; Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962; William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–1937, 1991; Irving Howe, Socialism and America, 1985; Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, 2000; John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 1870, reprint, 1966; Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, 1990; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, 1982; Friedrick Sorge, “To the General Council . . .” in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. IX: Labor Movement, 1860–1880, edited by John R. Commons et al., 1910; W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist, 1976.
NICK SALVATORE
For nearly a century following the Civil War, the South was the most economically backward and politically repressive region of the United States. One-crop agriculture reigned throughout much of the region. The levels of southern poverty had few parallels inside American borders. And a system of racial segregation gave rise to a political system that was democratic in name only. It was only in the 1960s that the region began to lose its distinctiveness. Economic transformations brought income levels closer to the national average, the civil rights movement remade the region politically and culturally, and the conservatism of white Southerners converged in unexpected ways with that of other white Americans.
The antebellum period and the Civil War set the stage for the political distinctiveness of the late-nineteenth-century South. Secession and the formation of the Confederacy covered over countless political divisions in the South before the war. A notable split that survived the conflict was between the political priorities of the lowland plantation belt and upland areas dominated by yeoman farmers. This political rivalry would ebb over time, yet remained relevant well into the twentieth century.
The Civil War transformed the South most obviously by ending slavery, yet its impact could be seen in countless other ways. One out of ten white adult males in the South died during the war, and one out of every three white families lost a male relative. The economic consequences were equally dramatic. During the 1860s, the South’s share of the nation’s wealth fell from 30 to 12 percent. The region’s largest and most important cities lay in ruins. Nine thousand miles of railroad lines were rendered useless; two-thirds of southern shipping capacity was destroyed. The most devastating economic impact of the war was also its greatest moral achievement: with emancipation, southern slave owners who dominated the region’s politics and economy lost over 3 billion that they had invested in human chattel.
Such death and devastation created monumental challenges for postwar reconstruction. In some areas of the South, it was hard to say when the war actually ended, so intense was the political terrorism carried out against white and black Republicans. Reconstruction governments faced a daunting set of tasks. They rebuilt destroyed infrastructure, promoted railroad development, established the region’s first public school system, and created a network of basic public institutions to deal with the sick and suffering. The higher taxes and public debts that ensued only further enflamed political resentment among former Confederates, fueling biased charges of incompetence and greed and setting the stage for conservative white Southerners to return to power. Tragically, this southern nationalist view of the alleged failures of biracial Republican-controlled governments came to dominate the memory of the postwar period for most white Americans, Southerners and Northerners alike.
The presidential election of 1876 marked the end of efforts to remake the South after the Civil War and the beginning of the region’s rough century of political, economic, and cultural peculiarity. The Democratic nominee that year, Samuel Tilden of New York, won 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. Republicans disputed the count in three southern states: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Rival canvassing boards sent in conflicting returns; in South Carolina and Louisiana, competing state governments appeared. Congress established a special Electoral Commission to investigate the disputed elections and report its findings. The panel split along party lines in favor of the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. The House voted to accept the report in March 1877, but only after southern Democrats brokered a deal with Republicans that included promises for help with southern railroads, levee construction along the Mississippi, and a southern Democratic cabinet appointment. Few of the pledges were kept save for the most significant one: the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from the South. One month into his presidency, Hayes recalled military units from the state houses in Louisiana and South Carolina. Republican governments there abruptly collapsed.
The Compromise of 1877 doomed two-party politics in the region. Democrats ruled the Solid South until the 1960s. For much of that period, white Southerners dominated the Democratic Party. Until 1936, when the Democrats dispensed with the two-thirds rule for presidential nominees, no candidate could win the Democratic nomination without southern backing. The South’s dominance placed Democrats in a subordinate position nationally. From 1860 to 1932, Democrats elected only two presidents, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. Neither candidate ever won a majority of the national popular vote.
By the 1890s, what threat there was to Democratic dominance in the South came not from Republicans but from Populists. The People’s Party drew on widespread unrest among farmers in the South and West that could be traced to the Panic of 1873. Its antecedent was the Farmers’ Alliance, an economic movement that began in 1876 in central Texas. In an era of economic consolidation, the alliance represented small-scale producers and derided the brokers, merchants, railroad executives, and bankers who profited from the crops that farmers grew. The late 1880s were a boom time for the alliance, which by 1890 counted 852,000 members in southern states alone. Half of all eligible people joined the alliance in the states of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia.
The Farmers’ Alliance’s frustration with the two major parties boiled over in the early 1890s. The failure of the Democrats to address what they felt were systemic economic problems, such as low agricultural prices and the availability and high cost of credit, led to the formation of the People’s Party in 1892. It supported a range of policies that included the expansion of the currency, government ownership of the railroads, and a graduated income tax. Southerners played prominent roles in the effort. Leonidas Polk of North Carolina, who had served as president of the National Farmers’ Alliance since 1889, was thought to be the leading candidate for the Populist presidential nomination. Polk died unexpectedly, however, in the summer of 1892. The eventual nominee, James B. Weaver, was a former Union general who did little to inspire Southerners.
Populists were a phantom presence in some parts of the South, but in others their challenge to the Democrats was fierce. Thomas Watson of Georgia, who had been elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1890, ran as a Populist two years later. Watson’s candidacy was notable for his efforts to win black votes. He condemned lynching at a time when Georgia led the nation in the malevolent practice. When an African American Populist received a lynching threat, Watson called out over 2,000 armed whites to defend him. Watson lost narrowly, however, as he would again in 1894 amid widespread charges of election fraud. In 1896 the Democrats successfully co-opted the party’s most politically tame but symbolically important issue, the free, or unlimited, coinage of silver. After the Democrats nominated the 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan, the Populists followed suit. Bryan proved to be enormously popular in the South. With the Democrats seeming to have regained their footing and the economic crisis of the 1890s on the wane, the South was solid once again.
One consequence of the Populist threat was that southern Democrats took steps to deter future challengers. New voting laws denied suffrage rights to many poor whites and almost all African Americans. This disfranchisement campaign began before the Populist threat—Mississippi kicked off the effort in 1890 with its new state constitution—but agrarian radicalism gave it fresh impetus. The dramatic impact of the new southern constitutions could be seen in Louisiana. As late as 1897, Louisiana counted 294,432 registered voters, 130,344 of whom were African American. Three years later, after the adoption of a new constitution, total registration numbered 130,757, with only 5,320 black voters.
The Supreme Court removed any barriers to the process in 1898 in the case of Williams v. Mississippi. The Court held that Mississippi’s voting provisions themselves were not discriminatory. Experience soon showed, however, that they could be used by officials to exclude black voters. The new laws troubled few whites outside of the region. Some actually envied the efforts as the kind of thing needed to deter machine politics in northern cities. Others viewed southern disfranchisement in light of American involvement in the Philippines, as essential to preserving “white civilization” in the midst of darker races.
The disfranchisement campaign coincided with a turn toward radical racism that could be seen throughout the region. Southern states passed a wave of Jim Crow legislation that certified in law what often had been the custom of racial segregation. The new laws asserted white supremacy in new public spaces where racial etiquette was not inscribed. Not surprisingly, some of the first Jim Crow laws involved segregation on railroad cars—one of the most important and ubiquitous of public spaces in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the Supreme Court decision in 1896 that provided federal sanction of Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, involved a law segregating rail cars in Louisiana. The most vicious side of the Jim Crow system could be seen in a surge in racial violence. In the 1880s and 1890s, lynching was transformed from a frontier offense committed in areas with little established police authority to a racialized crime perpetrated largely by southern whites to terrorize the black community. In the 1890s, 82 percent of the nation’s lynchings took place in 14 southern states.
Jim Crow voting laws suppressed voter participation among whites and blacks alike. This fact, combined with one-party rule, gave rise to one of the more curious figures in American political history—the southern demagogue. In the one-party South, intraparty factions developed around dominant personalities or well-established cliques rather than around political platforms. Candidates distinguished themselves more by the force of their personality than by the distinctiveness of their ideas. With little of the population participating in elections, few issues of substance or controversy came up in southern politics, certainly no issues that threatened white supremacy. Rural forces dominated southern politics; county fairs, courthouse steps, and country barbecues were grand theaters for the demagogues’ histrionic speechifying. Among the more notorious were “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and Cole Blease of South Carolina, James K. Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge in Georgia, and Jeff Davis of Arkansas. None was more charismatic than Huey Long of Louisiana, who went further than most in making good on the populist rhetoric and activist pledges to working people that typified demagogic appeals.
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, citizens moved by the Progressive Era’s spirit of pragmatic reform and public activism found plenty of problems to work on in the South. Progressives combated issues such as underfunded public schools, child labor, the convict lease system, and public health problems born of the region’s intense poverty, like pellagra and hookworm. White Southerners took pride in the election of the southern-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Wilson showed his fidelity to southern racial mores by instituting segregation in federal offices in the nation’s capital. Despite the reforms of the Progressive Era, the South remained for most Americans a uniquely backward region. H. L. Mencken’s description of the South as the “Sahara of the Bozarts” sufficed for most. No incident sealed this image more completely than the Scopes trial in 1925, which pitted William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow in a dispute over a Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution in public schools. National reporters flocked to the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee, to report on fundamentalist Southerners at war with the modern world. The image of an intensely rural and religiously backward region lived on through much of the twentieth century.
The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 transformed southern life and politics. Roosevelt had a special relationship with the region, born of the considerable time he spent at a treatment center for polio victims that he founded in Warm Springs, Georgia. The new president had seen southern poverty firsthand. In the 1930s, the region’s over-reliance on agriculture and its handful of low-wage, low-skill industries created levels of neglect shocking even for Depression-era Americans. In 1938 Roosevelt famously declared the South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” A major goal of his presidency was to integrate the South more fully into the nation’s economy.
The central problem for New Deal reformers was how to turn poor rural people into modern middle-class consumers. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an unprecedented public works project, was one solution. The federal government built an elaborate series of dams along the lower Tennessee River. Auxiliary programs repaired eroded landscapes and resettled rural families from depleted homesteads to modern, model farms. Most importantly, the TVA provided inexpensive electrical power that dramatically improved the quality of life for thousands of rural Southerners and attracted new industries to the region.
The New Deal also addressed economic problems more broadly. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), one of Roosevelt’s first reforms, revolutionized southern farming. In an attempt to stem overproduction, the federal government paid farmers to take fields and livestock out of production. The subsidies spelled the end of sharecropping, the unique system of labor organization that had developed after emancipation as a compromise between former masters and slaves. It also began a decades-long shift toward agricultural mechanization and the flight of agricultural workers, white and black alike, from the region. Few southern laborers benefited more directly from the New Deal than the region’s industrial workers. The Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) created a national minimum wage. A mere 25 cents an hour at initial passage, the standard actually doubled the wages of African American tobacco laborers. With increases built in for subsequent years, the legislation boosted incomes in numerous southern industries and created incentives for factory owners to modernize their plants.
Yet the New Deal’s benefits were political as well as material. With Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1932 came a Democratic majority that dominated Congress for the next half century. This put conservative southern Democrats in positions of unprecedented power. In 1933 Southerners headed seven out of the nine most influential Senate committees. It also allowed them to check some of the New Deal’s more liberal impulses. For example, Roosevelt refused to back federal antilynching legislation, much to the chagrin of his progressive supporters. He knew that doing so would alienate powerful Southerners, jeopardizing their support for other New Deal priorities.
Southern representatives were indeed among the most passionate supporters of the New Deal, yet as early as Roosevelt’s second term, the forces that would eventually drive conservative Southerners out of the Democratic Party were already at work. Some white Southerners were suspicious of what they felt was Roosevelt’s penchant for centralized power, made explicit in his court-packing plan. Others complained that too many New Deal dollars were going toward northern cities. In 1937 North Carolina senator Josiah Bailey was the driving force behind the Conservative Manifesto, a list of grievances against Roosevelt’s alleged drift toward collectivism. Roosevelt himself deepened the rift with conservative Southerners when he intervened in the 1938 midterm elections. He used one of his regular trips to Warm Springs as an opportunity to campaign against two of the regions most powerful conservatives, Walter George of Georgia and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina.
The most significant wedge between the white South and the New Deal was race. In the 1930s, Roosevelt’s gestures to African Americans were small and largely symbolic. The tiniest of nods, however, was enough to convulse some white Southerners. Cotton Ed Smith walked out of the 1936 Democratic National Convention after an invocation delivered by a black minister. In 1941 Roosevelt’s support for black civil rights moved beyond mere symbols when he signed an executive order creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). The order came only after intense lobbying by African Americans who threatened to march on Washington if Roosevelt did not act, and the committee’s powers were relatively feeble. Still, the decision was a monumental victory for African Americans, a historic break of white Southerners’ veto power over national civil rights policy. The FEPC instantly became the bete noire of white Southerners; legislative efforts after the war to make it permanent elicited charges of statism and racial coddling run amuck.
World War II marked a turning point in southern racial politics. The fight against Nazism cast Jim Crow racial practices in a harsh light and gave new impetus for movements toward equality. In the 1940s, NAACP membership increased by a factor of ten. A Supreme Court decision during the war opened new paths to the polls for some African Americans. In 1944 the Court struck down the “white primary,” a discriminatory voting scheme that barred black voters from participating in Democratic Party elections, which in most southern states was the only election that mattered. This decision, along with the abolition of the poll tax in several southern states, cleared the way for the registration of thousands of black voters in the peripheral and Upper South, along with some urban areas in the lower South. In Atlanta, for example, a federal court decision allowed for the registration of 21,244 black voters in 1946. These new voters instantly constituted over a quarter of Atlanta’s registered voters and transformed the city’s political dynamics. Newly enfranchised black voters helped elect moderate, business-oriented white leaders, who, in turn, quietly brokered the token desegregation of neighborhoods and public spaces.
In the 1940s, black Southerners were not just leaving the South to go to war; many left for urban areas in the North and the West. This was not the first time that African Americans had left the region—a small migration had taken place during Reconstruction, and roughly half a million blacks left during World War I. But the migration that followed World War II was unprecedented. Of the 6.5 million African Americans that left the South between 1910 and 1970, 5 million exited after 1940. This migration coincided with the collapse of plantation agriculture, and it transformed racial politics nationally. Southern migrants filled African American urban neighborhoods and elected some of the first black representatives to Congress since Reconstruction. These black voters also became important swing voters in large, highly contested industrial states in the Northeast and Midwest.
Many of the African American soldiers who returned to the South after the war were determined to secure the freedoms at home for which they had fought abroad. One such serviceman was Medgar Evers of Mississippi, who had served in France. When he and other African American veterans attempted to vote in the 1946 Democratic primary in Decatur, Mississippi, an armed white mob turned them away. Deterred only temporarily, Evers went on to become the field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, working tirelessly to organize African American protest in his home state until June 1963, when he was shot and killed by a racist fanatic.
The armed deterrence in Mississippi was not uncommon. Emboldened African American soldiers heightened racial anxieties among whites during and in the immediate aftermath of the war. This unrest was not specific to the South. Race riots broke out in several northern and southern cities in 1943; the largest was in Detroit, where 25 African Americans and 9 whites were killed. But in some rural areas of the South, racial tensions took an old familiar form. In July 1946 a lynch mob in Monroe, Georgia, killed 4 young African Americans, 2 men and 2 women. The spike in racial violence led President Harry Truman to form a commission to study racial problems. Its 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, became a blueprint for federal civil reforms that would come over the next two decades.
The following year, Truman went further, setting the stage for a historic presidential election. In February 1948 he announced his support for ending racial discrimination in the armed services. Clark Clifford, Truman’s campaign advisor, urged him to take a strong civil rights stand because the support of southern states was a given; the key to the election, Clifford argued, was northern industrial areas where urban African American voters could help swing the election for the Democrats. Clifford’s strategy succeeded, but only by the narrowest of margins. At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that summer, the Alabama and Mississippi delegations walked out over the party’s civil rights stand. Individual delegates from other southern states joined them to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party.
Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, accepted the presidential nomination of the “Dixiecrats,” the nickname given to the splinter group by a waggish reporter. Thurmond himself never used the term, insisting that his campaign was not a regional but a national effort that drew on long-standing conservative Democratic principles. In truth, the campaign’s support came mainly from white voters in the Black Belt, Deep South counties with the largest African American population and the most racially polarized politics. With little money and an inexperienced campaign staff, Thurmond ended up winning only four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Yet in the larger sweep of southern history, the States’ Rights Democrats represented a turning point in the region’s politics by initiating the slow drain of white Southerners from the Democratic Party.