With Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, author and former editor of The American Conservative Robert W. Merry picks up where he left off in his popular biography of James K. Polk to chronicle the deleterious path of the United States from the contentious 1849 House speakership race to the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.
In his acknowledgements, Merry shares that the book’s provenance was a quote from British popular historian Paul Johnson, who wrote in 1997, “Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
In nearly 440 pages, Merry expands and clarifies Johnson’s dictum, presenting Massachusetts and South Carolina, their internal debates, and their respective radicalisms’ influence on the national stage as a narrative lens for understanding the growing sectional hatreds of the 1850s and their bloody result.
That begins with the states’ colonial origins, with Merry wisely giving credit to David Hackett Fischer’s thesis that much of the regional diversity of culture in the United States originates with the people who settled these areas from the contrasting parts of Britain.
“Of all the New World colonies established in the seventeenth century, no two were as disparate in outlook, religion, moral precepts, or cultural sensibility as Massachusetts and South Carolina,” Merry writes. “Puritanism was fervent, moralistic, universalist, exhortatory; so was the secular humanitarianism of eighteenth-century Massachusetts.” The Christianity of South Carolina lacked that ardent piety, instead promoting a religious pluralism that coincided with a cavalier attitude towards wealth.
Fast-forward to the beginning of the 1850s, and slavery had been extinguished in the north and replaced by growing industry, whereas the practice had become integral to both the south’s economy and its stratified social order. The introduction of more than 500,000 square miles acquired from the Mexican–American War—territory where slavery had been illegal—ruptured the party system, as both sections hotly contested which would be allowed to grow and which would be stunted.
This great debate coincided with a generational changing of the guard. The three men who for over thirty years had personified their regions, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts were not long for this world.
These were leaders who could command—or at least find consensus among—their constituents. When no singular men could fill any of their respective shoes, what instead filled the political vacuum in their home states were disputes and power struggles.