Book Review: Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War
Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War. By Stephen G. Hyslop. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023. Hardcover, 319 pp. $32.95.
Reviewed by Patrick Kelly-Fischer
At its heart, Stephen G. Hyslop’s Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War is a whirlwind tour of American expansionism before the Civil War, as viewed through the lens of slavery. It provides an ambitious crash course in the first eighty or so years of United States history.
The traditional story of the Civil War usually starts in 1860 with Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession, or perhaps a few years earlier with “Bleeding Kansas.” It is typically premised on the idea that the nation was divided politically along North-South lines and split over the institution of slavery. Building a House Divided serves as a valuable prequel to that story, answering the question of how the nation expanded westward in a way that drew the lines and reinforced sectional divisions.
Throughout his study, Hyslop contends that, “Disunion stemmed from a critical fault in the nation’s foundation, and those who built on that foundation increased the stressful disparity between America’s fervent devotion to freedom and its shameful dependence on slavery until the house could no longer stand.”(12) Beginning as far back as the pre-Revolutionary era, Hyslop walks the reader chronologically through the country’s steady westward march. In doing so he covers the political debates at each step that weighed where to draw the line in regard to human bondage.
The book focuses largely on four key expansionists: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk, and perhaps most interestingly, Senator Stephen Douglas, who is rarely featured so prominently in the American story, other than as architect to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and as a rival to Abraham Lincoln. Hyslop says of these four men: “They feared disunion yet fostered it by maintaining part slave and part free a house subject to the same rule that applied to those who framed it in 1776: ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’”(5)
Readers can also look forward to heavy doses of Texas and its first president, Sam Houston; a detailed recounting of the Congressional debates around flashpoints with roots in the “peculiar institution” such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850; and offers prominent roles throughout, highlighting significant though lesser-known figures like Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton.
The historiography of antebellum politics and westward expansion, particularly in regards to slavery, is lengthy. Hyslop himself has written two other books about western expansion, one each focusing on California and New Mexico. What is different, if not necessarily unique, about Building a House Divided is the way in which it hones in on the deep roots and dual currents of expansionism and slavery, and how it explores the nuances that lie within the idea of various politicians’ “pro” or “anti” slavery stances.
Building a House Divided not only illuminates important issues key to understanding what brought about the country’s division and the American Civil War, it also encourages readers to consider thinking about the conflict in much longer context.
I enjoy any book that places the obsessively focused James Polk and the preeminent mid -century booster Steat the heart of the narrative. But the author seems to follow the fatal analytical flaw of defining what was then ( and tragically in places still is) a generally acceptable part of the world wide economic system in
terms more appropriate to 2024.. The northern mills profited from the cotton production of the Deep South and transported it overseas in Northern shipping. Northern banks provided capital for land and slave purchases. But there were contrary competing economic forces at work in the North, also expansionist, that revolved around the fears of white farmers being excluded from prime Western lands. Slavery to most of them wasn’t ” shameful”; but it’s growth was an obstacle to their own dreams.
“Steat” was supposed to be Stephan Douglas.
I was wondering who Steat was!
I am especially interested in the Houston parts. I’ve always wondered how much the Texas Revolution–adding more slave land–contributed to the flames that sparked the Blundering Generation.
Does Hyslop get around to mentioning that Lincoln openly proclaimed he “would not touch slavery” and, up until the Emancipation Proclamation, repeatedly stated that he would happily continue slavery if the South would return to the Union? And that the Proclamation guaranteed to any state or territory that was not rebelling against the government could retain its slaves? His statement “Disunion stemmed from a critical fault in the nation’s foundation, and those who built on that foundation increased the stressful disparity between America’s fervent devotion to freedom and its shameful dependence on slavery until the house could no longer stand” is balderdash. The American nation was born with slavery amidst it, and not one of the Founding Fathers ever declared in speech, writing or law, “We’ve got to found this nation on slavery!” This is a huge lie, built on deeply flawed 21st century liberal values. In fact, at the time in 1776, slavery played a minor role in America, and even though its importance to some parts of the economy increased after the invention of the cotton gin, it NEVER did the things ascribed to it: slaves and slavery did not build the nation, and slavery was not crucial to its economy. If that were true, then in the spring of 1865, when slavery ended in the south, and six months later, when it ended in the states that had remained in the North, the U.S. economy would have collapsed – especially after the Federal Government had just spent $1.5 billion in 1860 prosecuting the war to put down the rebellion. And yet…it didn’t. If slavery were crucial to the American economy, surely the collapse of it would have wrecked the economy. And as for a “fervent devotion to freedom,” in 1860 only 2% of Northerners identified as abolitionists, and only 0.5% joined abolitionist societies. If that’s “fervent” I’d hate to see “fanatical.”