***Prelude To The American Civil War-Kenneth Stampp’s America In 1857

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

America In 1857:A Nation On The Brink, Kenneth M. Stampp, Oxford University Press,  1990

As we commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War I have been poring through some books concerning the lead-up to that conflict trying to gather again a picture of what the political, social and economic landscape looked like that in a few short years would tear the American state apart and seriously jeopardize what Abraham Lincoln called this fragile experiment in democracy. The book under review, Kenneth Stampp’s America In 1857 is one such snapshot in time just prior to that war. And a good one.

The historian’s art is all about periodization, you know ages, eras, the times, zeitgeist, and things like that in order to set their arguments. Sometimes the choice is rather an arbitrary construct but here Professor Stampp has set out a pretty good argument for the year 1857 as decisive in the slide to civil war. Certainly the whole decade of the 1850s was filled with events that lead in that direction but 1857 with the inauguration of Democrat James Buchanan is not a bad place, especially over Kansas, to show where the “irrepressible conflict,” free labor or slave, would accelerate that rush to war.

Professor Stampp, who has written other books on antebellum slavery and post-war  reconstruction and so knows the period well, details how the forces that emerged from the presidential election of 1856 where Buchanan beat the upstart Republican Fremont played out in 1857 the first year of his administration. He runs through the important changing political party configurations, especially the final demise of the Whigs and the vanishing of the Know-Nothings and the rise of the anti-slavery Republican Party, the importance of the Dred Scott decision of that year which inflamed both sides on the slavery issue, and the almost infinite varieties of programs presented to find a political solution to the question of slavery expansion from popular sovereignty to filibusters. He also highlights and goes into great detail about the important of the struggle over the admission of Kansas into the Union as a defining issue that set both sides on edge. Many of the names like Douglas, Davis, Seward, Sumner, although not Lincoln’s, that will become familiar in the Civil War period are front and center in the Kansas struggles. Additionally, he factors in the Panic of 1857 and its aftermath in the political struggles of the times. Whether his thesis that 1857 was a decisive year holds up for future historians is uncertain but that he argues his position well and brings the period to life is not.