Booknotes: Building a House Divided

New Arrival:

• Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War by Stephen G. Hyslop (OU Press, 2023).

Everyone recognizes that increased sectional tensions over slavery during the 1840s and 1850s went hand in hand with the nation's westward expansion. The Civil War literature typically picks up the matter with the the sudden acquisition of vast territories in the American Southwest upon conclusion of the war with Mexico, but the goal of Stephen Hyslop's Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War is to take readers much further back in time to the very beginning. His main thesis is that "(t)he origins and evolution of the coming conflict between North and South can in fact be traced back to the early years of the American Republic," and his resulting study consists of "an exploration of how the incipient fissure between the Union’s initial slave states and free states—or those where slaves were gradually being emancipated—lengthened and deepened as the nation advanced westward."

Hyslop frames his narrative around the words and actions of a subset of the period's most important political giants. Both "collectively and individually," the book "focuses on four prominent slaveholding expansionists who were intent on preserving the Union but nonetheless helped build what Lincoln called a house divided: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois..." Others with supporting roles enter into the discussion. "Along with these major figures, in all their conflicts and contradictions, he considers other American expansionists who engaged in and helped extend slavery—among them William Clark, Stephen Austin, and President John Tyler..." The other side of the expansionist equation also comes into play, as the book also examines "examples of principled opposition to the extension of slavery by northerners such as John Quincy Adams and southerners like Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton, who held slaves but placed preserving the Union above extending slavery across the continent."

By taking readers on a long ride "through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras," Hyslop's Building a House Divided adopts a "long view of the path to the Civil War," one that begins with "the critical fault in the nation’s foundation."