Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War

Joel H. Silbey. Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xx + 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $28.00.

Anyone teaching or writing about the origins of the disunion crisis deals with "the sequence." The sequence is the well-known series of events that escalated sectional tensions finally resulting in seven southern states leaving the Union after the presidential election of 1860. In abbreviated form, the sequence consists of Texas annexation, the Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso, the California Gold Rush, the Compromise of 1850, fugitive slave captures, filibusterers, the Ostend Manifesto, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the political realignment of the 1850s (the birth of the Republican and Know Nothing parties and the death of the Whigs), Bleeding Kansas, the election of 1856, the Dred Scott decision, the Lecompton Constitution controversy, the Douglas-Buchanan split, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, the speakership fight of 1860, the break-up of the Democratic party in Charleston, the campaign of 1860, the election of Lincoln in November 1860, and finally the secession of South Carolina in December 1860. Scholars have added various events to this list and they have particularly stressed long-term economic and social processes behind it, but any historian of the Civil War period has to absorb the sequence into his or her narrative.

In a well-researched and well-argued treatise, Joel Silbey argues that the controversy over annexation of Texas deserves center stage in commencing the process of sectionalization of politics, thereby pushing the nation onto the path of disunion. Silbey, now retired, has enjoyed a long and illustrious career in nineteenth-century political history, and this current work contains many interpretations he has championed over the years, so his version of the sequence will not surprise experts in the field. Silbey asserts that prior to 1844 sectionalism was a minor element in American life—it existed but was largely impotent—because it had been contained by the Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats; party affiliation, not sectional residence, determined people's attitudes toward domestic policy. Texas annexation injected a sectional fervor into national politics that had been absent and began the erosion of party identification as the crucial element in politics. Out of Texas annexation came southerners' belief that their position in the Union—their security, prosperity, and equality—was under attack by free soil advocates, whereas northerners—especially the Van Buren northern Democrats—began reading southern actions in terms of a Slave Power that wanted dominion over all the nation. Silbey then makes a case that the path of history after 1846 was largely an amplification of these fears first given national attention by the Texas question; sectional hostility escalated afterwards because of ill-informed choices that national politicians made.

Silbey's work is national history, and thus its broad outlines are well-known.¹ The author, however, presents some interesting observations. The Texas issue lay dormant in the 1830s because domestic political battles deflected attention away from foreign affairs and because Van Buren—in this book portrayed as something of a conservative, cautious individual—feared northern antislavery reaction to the absorption of Texas. Concern over Texas rose to the forefront because Great Britain sought diplomatic inroads into Texas. Silbey believes that Great Britain wanted to circumscribe the expansionist tendencies of the United States and was indeed a danger to its continental aspirations. Americans reacted to this threat. In short, foreign affairs were crucial to sparking the push for Texas annexation.

Second, Silbey implies that the author of all the nation's ills was John C. Calhoun. John Tyler as president had no reservations about slavery but he did not see Texas annexation in terms of the peculiar institution; rather, he saw Texas as a part of the general westward movement...