William H. Seward, taken on an unknown date between 1860 and 1865, while Seward was Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln. Source: Library of Congress
In this speech, Seward outlined a view point that had slowly entered the mainstream over the previous decade: that no country could maintain itself while half slave and half free. In this, he echoed Abraham Lincoln's earlier "House Divided" speech, but the better known Seward's words spread farther, and branded him more certainly, than had Lincoln's speech (which would nonetheless return to haunt him, as well.)
Seward described slavery as the employment of a people who are "necessarily unintellectual, groveling and base," and that its existence implies that "the white laboring man, whether native or foreigner, is not enslaved only because he can not as yet be reduced to bondage." He declared such a system the province of "hated" foreign nations - the Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, and Turkish. He contrasted this barbarity with the free-labor system, the creation (according to him) of the Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and British, and declared, "we justly ascribe to its influences the strength, wealth, greatness, intelligence and freedom which the whole American people now enjoy."
In comparing the two systems, he went even further in making his point about how freedman are debased by the existence of a system of slavery in the same nation: "the slave system is not only intolerable, unjust, and inhuman toward the laborer...but is scarcely less severe upon the freeman, to whom, only because he is a laborer from necessity, it denies facilities for employment and whom it expels from the community because it can not enslave and convert him into merchandise."
In these statements, Seward paints pictures of the differences between the North and the South: the North, a land of freedom, intelligence, wealth, and greatness, where the virtuous Northern European models are followed and where men are treated as men whose labor has value; in contrast to the unjust, inhuman Southern system, where - like the Spanish, the Eastern Europeans, and the Mohammedans of Turkey - a freeman can have no sense of self-worth, for his labor is treated as valueless because he is not property.
After outlining in broad strokes the history of slavery in Europe, and then in the young United States, Seward succinctly explains why, in his view, this conflict has come bubbling to the surface now, while it lay dormant in the past. "Increase of population...together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate" had brought the Northern and Southern states in to such frequent interaction with each other that both were now in continual contact with the alien, threatening "other." "Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results." He spurned the idea that this collision was caused by only by recent, foolish agitators or that it would soon pass. "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation." He proceeded to paint what must have been a sickening image to his Upstate New York supporters - that of a New York where once again, as in the past, the wheat fields of the state would be worked by slave labor, and that "New York [City] [would] become once more [a] market for trade in the bodies and souls of men."
There was a time, earlier in the Union, when many men believed that the slavery issue would end gradually and largely without incident. In the early 19th century, as state after state in the North voted for gradual emancipation, and as the luminaries of the Revolutionary era such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson made clear their hope that there would come a time when all states would relinquish the need for involuntary labor, even such true-blue Southern states as Virginia discussed the possibility of the emancipation of their slave populations. Yet, through the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, the issues grew more and more polarized, the nation become more and more divided, and passions burned brighter and brighter. In the North, men like John Brown dreamed of freeing all the slaves through bloody insurrection; in the south, men like William Yancey longer for a Southern republic where they could be free of all meddling in their peculiar institution. For the passionate fire-eaters in the South, slavery had gone from being perceived as a necessary evil to being embraced as positive good; to the abolitionists in the North, slavery had gone from being perceived as a necessary evil to being reviled as the worst crime ever committed by a free people on their fellow man.
Cartoon from Currier and Ives, c. 1860, describing the bitterness common among New York Republicans when Seward failed to receive the party nomination for the presidency. For a larger, more legible version of the cartoon, visit the original entry for this item at the Library of Congress.
Yet, so often in educating modern generations, these issues are white-washed. Many now graduate from schools thinking that the Civil War began as a result of conflicts over State's Rights. Others do not understand how events went from a relative stability to a place of fratricidal warfare. Even among the highly educated, many of the roots of this conflict have been forgotten, neglected, ignored.
Who am I? My name is Claire Houck. I graduated from Binghamton University in 2004 with a BA in History, though my later studies took me in a different direction, and in 2007 I earned a Masters degree in Library Science. I have loved history my entire life, and have been a Civil War buff for about as long as I can remember. Starting in 2002, I started to work as an evaluator for Federally-funded grant programs in New York City. The primary program with which I work is the Teaching American History program, which funds professional development opportunities for US History teachers of students grades K - 12. Through this work, I have come in contact with a wide range of historians, history educators, museum and historical society staff, and hundreds of teachers, and I have learned a great deal, not just about history, but about how history is taught, communicated, shared, and remembered. I have long yearned to use this knowledge to disseminate what I know about the area of history that I am passionate about - 19th century US History - and through creating this blog, I am taking the first step towards doing so. I hope to take many more steps in the future!
In starting this blog, I seek only to share that which I love: the history of the United States, and in particular, how increasingly vociferous debate over the nature of the role of the Federal Government in regulating and moderating the spread of slavery resulted in the bloodiest conflict in US History. I intend to include three types of content:
1. Primarily, I will be examining and breaking down historical speeches from the time period (1814 - 1865), because these speeches are so rich in content and yet so largely forgotten - or so long and daunting as to render them inaccessible to most readers. I will skirt around the best known speeches - this is not the place to come to learn about the Gettysburg Address, for as fabulous a speech as it is, it has been canvassed over so many times before, and by far better historians than I, that I see little of value that I can add to the discussion. Instead, I will focus on the great speech makers of the time period: Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and many others, in a way that brings to life the great debates that eventually led to bloody rebellion. In each instance, over a series of posts, I will begin by writing an essay which places the speech in it's historical context. Then, after providing the full-text of the speech, I will break down the main points made by the speaker. Next, I will provide necessary background information on the references and allusions drawn in the speech. Finally, I will provide vocabulary support, text extracts, at least one classroom lesson, and other materials that will facilitate using the speech as a teaching tool, including audio recordings of both the entire speech and specific sections that I deem most relevant to a K - 12 teaching environment.
2. There are numerous important events from this time period, many of which have been largely forgotten. I'm routinely shocked by how few people I speak to even in the field have even heard of the Gag Rule controversy. While this will not be a "this day in history" blog, I will from time to time highlight controversies, important events, and other such things when the timing seems appropriate.
3. Lastly, I will share book reviews. I frequently read books from the time period, and find many to be of impressively high-quality. The world of books about the Civil War and the Antebellum years can be daunting to those who are not initiated into the scholarship, and so I will discuss the works I'm reading and highlight their strengths and weaknesses for people seeking different information about the past.
I will begin this process with the Seward speech I've already begun to discuss in this post. You can read the full-text of that speech here.
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