In the decades leading up to the war, the United States underwent a profound communications revolution that altered how Americans connected with one another. It was a historical development that bears uncanny resemblance to our current moment. The Twitterfication of public life and other broader changes to the mediascape are again fostering strange and dangerous political shifts. Although Internet 2.0 differs in countless ways from its antebellum media ancestors, it illustrates how media that were once novel—newspapers, lithographs, sheet music, and other kinds of mass print—could upend traditional politics and create space for the new configurations that make violent ruptures possible, maybe inevitable. In other words, a generation into the internet age, we’re well placed to see key patterns of political disordering in a another period.
How did new print media upend politics? Mainly in two ways, both of which seem also to be happening today. First, they curtailed political leaders’ control over what got talked about in public. That is, they sapped politicians’ power to set the agenda. Second, new media scrambled the existing channels of information flow, forcing politicians to recalibrate how they pitched themselves to different constituencies. The result was a breakdown of the system of party coalitions that had underwritten, for thirty agonizing years, slavery’s expansion across the Deep South.
The roots of the antebellum party system lay with an even earlier political crisis that shattered the so-called “Era of Good Feelings.” In 1819, Congress was considering legislation to enable the territory of Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. But the New York congressman, James Tallmadge, objected. He introduced an amendment to the bill that would have gradually ended slavery in Missouri. This move touched off a political blaze that burned for two years, as southern and northern members of Congress furiously debated the merits of slavery. Thomas Jefferson famously compared the crisis to a “fire bell in the night,” a moment that filled him “with terror” because it tolled the death “knell of the Union.”
The thing that made the dispute so incendiary was that some northern and southern politicians began to marshal their constituents at home, potentially transforming a dispute among the elite into a division of the American people. Nearly all the basic talking points for and against slavery that appeared during the runup to the Civil War, forty years later, were already being aired at this time. But Congress ultimately compromised. The deal that was struck enshrined the principle of parity for slaveholders in the Senate and drew a line across the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase separating future free states from future slave states.