Martin Meenagh blog

  The Missouri compromise was a legal and political construction of the US Congress. It was built into the accession of the Missouri Territory to Statehood in 1820, and held that a line on a map could be used to differentiate southern slave territory and northern free territory across that part of the North American continent controlled by the USA. It was drawn from the division of Virginia and Carolina in 1665 and then reinforced by the use of 36 degrees and 30 minutes by surveyors as a way to delineate the borders of Tennessee and Kentucky, and allowed for the future introduction of ‘slave’ and ‘free’ states into the American Union. The Compromise must be seen in the context of other acts of expansion. During the time when it was mooted, the United States in the form of the Monroe Administration was seeking the conclusion of a treaty with Spain that would incorporate the Territory of West Florida into the Union, but also settle the boundary line of the USA in regard to what was...

The Constitution, which was composed in the summer of 1787 at the Philadelphia Convention does not mention slavery directly. It refers obliquely to the external slave trade in Section 9 of Article I only to emphasise that it would be taxed until 1808 and then banned. However, it does allow for representation in Congress to be based in part upon slaves and native Americans in the infamous ‘three fifths’ formulation (Article I Section 2). This allowed for the over-representation of slave-holding states in the House of Representatives, and by extension the electoral college, although of course women and non-voters were virtually represented everywhere without actually having the franchise. Both section 5, which allows for the houses of Congress to set quorum rules, and the Article V rules on amendment which require 2/3 majorities in each house and ¾ majorities in the states allow for the South to have a least a blocking number on both day-to-day and constitutional business. The Congres...

‘Kansas-Nebraska’ refers to the attempt to organise territory in the west so as to place transcontinental railroads across the continent. These would then allow for western expansion, the integration of California and the west coast with the North, and in the future, the development of the Pacific market. The USA had participated in a supportive and financial way in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and there is evidence that Stephen Douglas, the Westerner and ‘Little Giant’ of Illinois who introduced the ‘K-N Bill’ was in part motivated by the potential of this early ‘globalisation’. The Kansas-Nebraska controversy also stood between two eras of the slavery question in the USA. It ended the debate over the Free Soil, Calhoun, and popular sovereignty doctrines, and broke up the second-party system. At the same time, it set the Union up for division and for the emergence of ‘Bleeding Kansas’ as well as the growth of the Republican Party and the secession of the majority of the slavehold...

There are several candidates for the status of ‘turning point battle’ in the US Civil War. The Battle of Antietam, for example, was famously enough of a victory to push back the South and enough of a defeat not to make the Emancipation Proclamation look desperate. Cold Harbor, at which Grant displayed a determination finally to use the North’s overwhelming power regardless of losses might similarly qualify. The outcome of the Battle of Atlanta sealed Lincoln’s victory, which sealed the War, and the Anaconda Plan—itself a strung-out series of naval skirmishes—suffocated Southern trade. Gettysburg was certainly one of the most bloody of the Civil War battles. It did not inaugurate the era of modern war, and was not the moment when informed Americans realised that they were in a war so bad as to be comparable to the Crimean campaign of a decade before. What Gettysburg did do was show that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia could be defeated, and it also represented the last serious Sou...

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis are examples of what might be called the fallacy of contemporary popularity in History. Lincoln was, for most of his presidency, widely derided as unfit for the job, ‘a tycoon’ or an ‘ape’. He was almost abandoned by his own party in 1864, and for most of that year expected to lose the presidential election. His Gettysburg Address of 1863, for which he has been memorialised, was treated as a prematurely concluded and unsatisfactory accompaniment to the oration of Edward Everett, and his Secretary of State, who came to admire him, believed that Lincoln’s administration had to be saved from the President until at least 1862. In 1860, had his northern and Southern Democrat opponents united, Lincoln may well have been remembered as an ‘also-ran’. Yet to most historians, he now ranks as amongst the top, if not the greatest, of the Presidents of the United States. By contrast, Jefferson Davis seemed to have, according to contemporaries, lived his life...