Crisis of compromise: generations and the coming of the American Civil War

Thesis

Crisis of Compromise examines how generations shaped United States politics and political culture in the two decades preceding the Civil War. Often this period is analysed through the lens of sectional division or party politics, where focus remains with the broader structural forces, or specific individuals and events, that shaped the United States’ path toward conflict. This dissertation, by contrast, places generations at the heart of that story. The defining issues of the Antebellum Era - territorial expansion, immigration, slavery, sectionalism, and European revolution - were all conceptualised, contested, and ultimately clarified in generational terms.

Through the 1840s, competing generational identities, shaped by diverse formative experiences, promoted divergent attitudes to the extraordinary expansion of the nation’s borders. These generational tensions subsequently mapped onto attitudes towards compromise, both as a foundational constitutional practice, and more specifically as a solution to tensions attendant to debates over slavery’s place in the new territories. While compromise prevailed in 1850, divisions between generations remained, and became crucial in destabilising the two main political parties through the first half of the decade. Capitalising upon this instability, the Republican Party displaced the Whigs as the second party in US politics. It came to self-consciously identify as a party of young men, leveraging generational dynamics which inspired antislavery and antiorthodox politics; when Lincoln was elected in 1860, he relied upon the overwhelming support of a younger generation of Northern voters.

Building upon existing scholarship, Crisis of Compromise combines analysis of the generational concept as a rhetorical device, a sociological phenomenon, and as a prominent aspect of antebellum political thought. This tripartite analytical framework provides for the broadest possible examination of the concept’s impact upon pre-war politics. After all, this dissertation will assert that generations remain an underexamined, yet vital ancillary to the sectional and partisan foci of traditional Civil War causation narratives. Generationally defined attitudes to slavery and compromise, were crucial in creating the conditions for conflict in 1861.

Authors: Fawcett, T

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aq2vbxprn
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: generational history; political history; antebellum politics; compromise; generations; US Civil War; generational consciousness
• Subjects: US Civil War; Generational History; Antebellum Politics