Was the politics of compromise a politics of appeasement?
More than 150 years after the Civil War ended, Americans continue to debate the circumstances that led to the bloodiest conflict on US soil and whether that struggle could have been avoided. The controversy typically centers around the issue of whether sufficient effort was made to arrive at a compromise, thereby precluding the deaths of over 600,000 Americans at the hands of other Americans.
But the real question should be:
Was there too much compromise?
The conflict was, indeed, not based on any failure to compromise; rather, if there was failure, it was in not dealing early on with the contrasting socioeconomics of the northern and southern states. But, of course, at the time there was a perceived need to, at almost any cost, bind the fledgling nation together in the face of great disparity between two economic systems. And this felt need was driven by a fear of losing what the founders had just sacrificed so much to achieve and institute – an independent republic with a democratic form of governance.
F. Andrew Wolf explains.
President James Monroe, the president who signed the Missouri Compromise.
US Constitution - the “three-fifths” compromise
The compromises regarding the two vastly different forms of socioeconomics began with the inception of the United States, itself. America’s Constitution famously declared that the institution of slavery would enjoy the status of official recognition in order to secure agreement with the southern states for a binding document.
The socioeconomics between the North and South (land, capital, population, industry, agrarian vs urban interests, types of labor force) were so vastly different that neither was willing to trust the other without a well-delineated form of equitable representation in the Constitution. This was to ensure that the voice of each was fairly heard in the law-making body that dealt with taxation and the subsequent disposition of that revenue. The result was the “Three-Fifths Compromise” for apportionment of representatives regarding the bonded servants in the South. It was agreed that each bondsman (slave) would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation. Moreover, in rather euphemistic language, Congress was authorized to ban the international slave trade -- but not for another 20 years.
The immediate effect of this “formula” was to inflate the power of the Southern states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. These were the states in which the vast majority of enslaved persons lived.
The first Census, taken in 1790 after the Constitution’s ratification, is illustrative. 25.5% of North Carolina’s population was enslaved, as were 35.4% of Georgia’s, 39.1% of Virginia’s, and 43% of South Carolina’s. To offer context to the situation, the 1800 Census showed Pennsylvania's free population was 10% larger than Virginia’s but received 20% fewer electoral votes, because Virginia’s population was augmented by the Three-Fifths Compromise.
In fact, counting enslaved persons under the compromise added an additional 13 members from “slave states” to the House and eighteen additional electors to the “College.” Is it a coincidence that for 32 of the first 36 years after the Constitution’s ratification, a white slaveholder from Virginia held the presidency?
The situation was further compounded by the fact that the framers of America’s founding document failed to mention the issue of slavery as an institution even once. David Waldstreicher, professor emeritus in history at the City University of New York and author of Slavery’s Constitution, holds that this failure created ambiguity about the framers’ intentions as well as the constitutionality of both proslavery and antislavery legislation which was to follow.
It can be argued that the Civil War had its genesis in the incipient stages of the founding of America by the early compromises made in the Constitution over the issue of agrarian economics driven by the institution of slavery in the southern states.
This acquiescence to the perceived needs of the South -- to keep the nation bound together -- informed not only the evolution of slavery in America but gave rise to much of the dysfunction in national politics and issues of inequality, still with us today. It makes little sense to talk of a failure to compromise, except insofar as every war or political conflict is a failure to achieve agreement. The original compromises enshrined in 1787 would ultimately touch everything in America from that point on.
Nineteenth century compromises
Through the early to mid-nineteenth century, several agreements between the North and South were hammered out.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 permitted Missouri to join the Union as a slave state in exchange for Maine entering as a free state. There was the Compromise of 1850 which allowed California’s admission as a free state but also enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing for the kidnapping and re-enslavement of people in free states who had escaped slavery. And the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed western territories to decide for themselves if slavery was to be permitted.
The “Tariff of Abominations,” enacted in 1828 by representatives of the northern states, was a protective tariff aimed at supporting northern manufacturers by taxing imported goods, which worked against and angered southern states. This led to the Nullification Crisis, where South Carolina attempted, unsuccessfully arguing states’ rights, to nullify the tariff, further escalating tensions between the two regions.
Lincoln - the great compromiser
As slavery spread, so did the zeal of the antislavery cause. Abolitionists at the time were often depicted from various sources as suspicious, even dangerous fanatics. But in truth the antislavery movement comprised numerous efforts to compromise when it came to liberating those from the forced labor of involuntary servitude. One idea was that of colonization, which advocated resettling former slaves to South America or Africa (e.g., Liberia), derived from the jaundiced belief that they could never coexist with whites?
One of those advocates of colonization was Abraham Lincoln, offering support for the idea as late as 1862, as Daniel Biddle & Murray Dubin attest in a 2013 article in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
Even as a presidential candidate in the run-up to his election in 1860, Lincoln and his Republican Party colleagues were amenable to any number of compromises to keep the slaveholding South in the Union. One such proposal was the never-ratified Corwin amendment to the Constitution -- permitting the institution of slavery to continue (without federal interference) where it already existed -- but prohibit its establishment in new territories.
Yet, it was the slaveholding states of the South that refused to compromise on this offer, notes Manisha Sinha, historian at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.
There was really only one aspect of the slavery issue where Lincoln could likely have circumvented the war between the states. “Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War if he had agreed to compromise on the non-extension of slavery, but that was one thing Lincoln refused to compromise on…” Sinha asserts.
“When it comes to the Civil War,” she added, “we still can’t seem to understand that the politics of compromise was a politics of appeasement that at many times sacrificed black freedom and rights.”
A culture war
At the center of the disagreement between northern and southern states was also the issue of “class differences” among white-male property owners.
A culture war was brewing between North and South. The North viewed their neighbors as somewhat backwards with little education, little in the way of industry and an aging infrastructure. The South felt denigrated and besieged economically.
Both regions had different visions of what constituted a moral society; yet, both were denominated by Christians who believed in democracy, capitalism and shared a history dating from America’s inception. Where they parted ways was on economics – and that meant slavery.
President Lincoln's election of 1860 was the final blow to the South. Most of his support came from north of the Mason-Dixon line, which put in jeopardy the South's clout in the Union. Southern states viewed the situation as an existential threat to their socioeconomic lifestyle and reacted to preserve it.
This marked, for years to come, the beginning of the South’s decline in political power in Washington – a poignant footnote to the compromises embedded in the Constitution of the United States some 74 years earlier – ostensibly to keep the South in and the Union intact. But it would take a war between the states and the assassination of a president to finally achieve those ends.
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References
Nittle, N. (2020, October 30). The History of the Three-Fifths Compromise. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/three-fifths-compromise-4588466
National Park Service. The Constitutional Convention: A Day-by-Day Account for August 16 to 31, 1787. Independence National Historical Park. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-august25.htm
Census.gov. Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1790/number-of-persons.pdf
Amar, A. The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists. Time.com. https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Monroe, Dan. The Missouri Compromise. Bill of Rights Institute. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-missouri-compromise
Mark, H. (2025, June 9). Compromise of 1850. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Compromise_of_1850/
Garrison, Z. Kansas-Nebraska Act. Civil War on the Western Border. https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/kansas-nebraska-act
McNamara, R. (2019, July 19). The Tariff of Abominations of 1828. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/tariff-of-abominations-1773349
Longley, R. (2021, October 6). The Corwin Amendment, Enslavement, and Abraham Lincoln. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/corwin-amendment-slavery-and-lincoln-4160928
