Flake opened his speech saying he wished to speak that day on the state of disunion. Websteresqst daniel ue at first. He said that democratic norms and ideals were undergoing a daily thundering. The healerne, lincoln, the lincoln who appealed to the better angels of our nature. That same lincoln had taken, at that time, a firm stance against slavery and was making plans against fort sumter. He was not compromising. Weve come here today and tomorrow to figure out compromises. Or not. Loyalty tohether state is more important to loyalty to country or not. Reporters ny these last few months have been the gift that give that keeps on giving to historians whether we wanted it or not. Asked, what would you say to general kelly if you talked to him . Have you ever been to gettysburg, have you ever read the gettysburg address . Just pointing that out. War, ande of the civil , theresr secession commentary ample from so many people. Jefferson davis gave a speech in late april to the Confederate Congress as confederate president , using the term property in slaves about seven times a speech, explaining to the Confederate Congress and the world why they had to secede from the union, to protect the special interest of property in slaves. It doesnt matter how many times you quote this, but millions and millions of americans grow up believing it mustve been Something Else. Who, in 1858 we forget seward now. s famous iron law speech or irrepressible conflict speech, seward said the same things lincoln said about a house divided. Said later that fall that a house divided cannot stand. When in doubt, i always quote Frederick Douglass. Douglas had this to say. In his final autobiography late in life as he was remembering the secession crisis, remembering the 18591861 historical moment, and he goes on at some length as he always has before saying, finally, the cause of the slaves and the cause of the nation has been wrapped in the same bundle. Then, he said, in every way possible, the columns of my paper and on the platform by letters to friends at home and abroad, i did all that i could to impress this conviction upon the country, but nations seldom listened to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories then by facts and events. Taught by events. One of the things i want to do it this conference is to assess those major events, major turning points, major problems by which we have charted, at least in retrospect, the road to disunity. Oakesing to introduce jim in just a moment, but just a couple other thoughts. This is a conference that asks, how is the present embedded in the past and how is the past embedded in the present . Theres so many cliches about all this. This is what we do every day. For howlways searching we can use the past to or how we the present use the present to understand the past. We are sometimes reticent about doing it because historians are careful people usually. We like to do our research. We like to spend years in an archive before we make our judgment, and we should. Something happened. Historians have never been asked so many times as in the last 8, 9, 10 months, whats going on, where are we, is this 1859,edented, is this 1857, 1898 . Where are we . Iof you in this room want to ask for a show of hands. You have been the aj was keeping it the aha was keeping a list after charlottesville of all the interviews in octets from historians interviews and opeds from historians. Graduate students are doing up eds in theng op washington post. Good for them. Go for it. But, where are we . Are americans on the verge of some sort of social disintegration . Do we know . Are we having a longterm political breakup or a collective nervous breakdown . As a writer recently asked, are we having 1860 all over again . Analogies are risky, they always are. Are we having another crisis of fear as Stephen Channing was called the secession crisis . War of words in the comment sections on the internet . Yeah, what else are they for . On talkshow television. Are we a society engaged in a kind of war of words . Are we having a cold civil war as other writers have suggested . Are we seeking catharsis out of troubles . We dont know. Collectiveave a sense of fear about the nature of american democracy and where it fits at this stage. I want to challenge you in this conference weve established weve assembled some amazing historical, legal, political minds. Some of the people weve invited are not shy and they will not be shy. A. Re spending time for q and we welcome your sustained ctmments your succin comments and questions. You who volunteer , i want you to make lists of what parallels do, if there are parallels. Parallels ast of they do,. What is a parallel . Nativism,t integration, conspiracy theories . In the 1850s, those conspiracy theories. Is it about the idea of this union. Of disunion . Isnt about constitutionalism . Is it about race and slavery . Ive invited a keynote speaker who i think is perfect for this occasion. He told me last night he was a little nervous, but thats good. In new yorkew up city. Cunynt to college in the system. He did his phd at berkeley, went west for graduate school. His books are many. theote the ruling race history of american slaveholders. He has written of slavery, union , disunion. Then came an enormously teachable book that i used to teach all the time, slavery and freedom, and interpretation of the old south. Then came the radical in the republican, a comparative study of their political ideologies, the best of that little shop of comparative lincoln and Frederick Douglass books. Magnum, Freedom National the destruction of states,n the united which may be forceful argument that the Republican Party and the antislavery persuasion of the 1850s were ready to be emancipators more than i think most of us quite acknowledge. The scorpion, sting, which was a condensed argument in Freedom National. Also in enormously teachable book. Thats the metaphor that republicans use so much about how they would cordon off slavery and it would kill itself. It didnt exactly happen that way but thats the language they used. I just want to say a couple of other things about jim. One of my favorite stories for a lot of reasons. He invited me to do a keynote at his conference about four years ago. I didnt want to do it. I thought he should have been his own keynoter on that conference. I stupidly said yes and i wrote a keynote that he didnt particularly like. I dont even know what i said now. I think i was just trying to shower a little humility about the boldness of some of his arguments. Afterward, we became in some ways even better friends because of the arguments. Thats what this business is out. Theres no one who i respect more for his research and the boldness of his writing. If you want to find that, look at some of his essays, some of the pieces hes written in journals like jacobin, with titles like the war on the war of northern aggression. Jim saying, there were northerners out to destroy slavery. A piece called slavery is theft. He wrote one of the best essays on all the scholarly literature on capitalism. His heroes are other historians. To talk with jim is to talk about the great historians. Who is it, who is not in the pantheon . Dontfun, as long as you have too many old friends in there. The old book the balance of freedom, that endeared me to jim. We all learn every time we have when jimese debates stimulates it. For this conference, if we are going to face this issue of disunion, what really happened, what was the crisis of the 1850s . I could not think of a better person than jim oakes. Welcome, jim. It is all yours for 50 minutes. Thank you. I like your talk, david. I dont know what you are talking about. Thank you all for coming. Thanks, david, for allowing us to set this up. The title of my talk is im trying to say it is a mistake to reduce the crisis of the 1850s to a struggle over the expansion of slavery into the western territories. To do that, im going to be talking a lot about fugitive slaves. Some with implications for the present what not as much as you might like. A second. Between the mexicanamerican war and the civil war, there occurred a familiar series of events. Each event feeding on its predecessor and feeding the way for the next. All of them taken together constituting the socalled crisis of the 1850s. Every american historian can recite these events. The wilmotper visa, proviso, the armistice of the 1850s comedy kansasnebraskas of the 1850s, the kansasnebraska slave act, the dred scott decision meeting kansas, the breakup of the Democratic Party, and finally the election in 1860 of the first president ever committed to putting slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. That, in brief, is the sequence was a events that fullblown sectional crisis which destroyed one major party, ripped another in half, and sent a nation reeling into civil war. Not for nothing to classical accounts of the civil war begin the sequence of events set in motion by the mexicanamerican. The mexicanamerican war. It was the beginning of one process but the end of another. Oflmination of a slow a struggle over slavery whose origins can be traced at least to the american revolution. If we need to go back to 1846 to explain the secession crisis, we need to go back to 1776 to explain the crisis of the 1850s. That is why historians have begun have begun constructing some explore the discontinuities between the first and second waves of the movement, some highlight free blacks and the struggles for politics so the beginning in the revolution, and some of the long shadow of because to Show Convention of 1787 of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Revealing the convergence of radical in mainstream politics without denying the differences between them. We dont all agree about the particulars, but we are all committed to restore a sizing icizing the struggles so that emancipation doesnt seem like the accidental byproduct of a series of events. Contingencies, there certainly were, but there affects were not random. David potter asked years ago why was it that each event in the sequence seemed to exacerbate the problem of slavery . To answer that problem, i think ehealth helps to think of the crisis of the 1850s as the outcome of a larger project larger process that might be called the expansion of the north. The norths gradual emancipation did not begin and end with the emancipation of slavery itself. It refers to a broader differentiation, economic, political, legal, between the north and south, a process that, while never complete, goes a long way to explaining the confluence of the 1850s. A dynamic relationship between town country across the north undermined patterns of rural life is attracted workers to factories. The locus of commerce in northern ports shifted away from the caribbean with a eastwest pattern of commerce. The products of former of Northern Farms and factories with the purchasing power of northern consumers. Over time, the northern economy became more independent of the slave economy. Planters purchased most of their shoes from northern markets but the Southern Market accounted for only about 15 of the shoes that northern factories produced. It was a sense of growing frustration among southern nationalists that, by the 1850s, the slave economy was far more dependent on the north than the north was on the south. The fear of growing northern political independence led proslavery southerners to make increasing demands for better protection of slaves in the territories, fugitives in the north, slaves in washington dc, on the high seas. Southern leaders did not make the mistake of assuming that states were more important than the federal government. Contrary, it was proslavery claims on federal power that created irreconcilable fishers in the issures in the whigs and the democrats. The collapse of the whig party, the Democratic Party split into hostile factions, and the emergence of a Republican Party that was completely independent of the south. While Northern Farms and businesses work emancipating themselves from slavery, northern politicians were doing the same. These developments strain the formal ties that had legally bound the northern states to southern slaveholders. In the aftermath of 1787, northern states had passed a series of laws allowing slaveholders to so jordan with ojourn with their slaves in northern states. Slaveholders could bring their slaves with them to states where it was being abolished. By the 1850s, it was legally dangerous for southern slaveholders to travel with their slaves through most northern states. To greatest legal obstacle the gradual emancipation of the north was the fugitive slave clause of the constitution, and obstacle that proved, in the second only to the territorial expansion of slavery. We will return to the slave issue later on but, for now, i want to emphasize that the events we call the crisis of the 1850s needs to be viewed against a background of the north and south, the growth of the cotton kingdom we are familiar with the growth of the north, a less familiar part of the story. We are not here only to consider new approaches to the crisis of the 1850s. We are also supposed to be looking back in the hopes that there are lessons for today to be discerned in the extreme polarization of politics in the 1850s, the realignment of parties, lessons that might help us navigate or better understand the two majoren parties are internally divided and the politics of race has once again become central to polarization. I confess that this second charge, to discern some contemporary relevance in the 1850s, has been nothing less than daunting. I spent much of the last summer struggling with how to approach the relevance dilemma and i thought it might be helpful to take you on a detour, reconstructing my thought process thanks to a slideshow. What i wasit thinking about on my summer vacation. We flew to budapest on the evening of august 11. When we landed the next morning, i turned on my ipad to read the news and found out this happened. Those folks were there to venerate the statue of that honorable man, confederate general robert e lee, a statue that, like many other federal confederate memorials, was targeted for removal. It was interesting to be in budapest when the struggle over statues and monuments reached its peak in the u. S. Turns out moving statues is something the hungarians know all about. When the soviet union collapsed in 1989, all of the soviet era statues around budapest were taken down. But they were not destroyed. They were all moved here to a place called statue park on the outskirts of town. Could go and me see all of the statues, a whos who of the global communist menace. They are statues of karl marx, friedrich engels, various hungarian monuments to be working class, the defeat of the nazis, etc. Heres comrade lenin. He looks like a carnival barker and a sideshow. Heres a simple obvious lesson for today. To take down sensitive statues and monuments , whetherrasing history it is the history the statues overtly claim to represent or the history they represent to the people of hungary. A week later, we were in prague. While there, we walked several times through Wenceslaus Square, where tens of thousands of czechs took to the streets in what is known as the velvet revolution. It is overlooking the square t vaclav hobble announced vaclav havel announced the end of the regime. When we were in prague, back in the United States, this happened. People went, 15,000 into the streets of boston in a counter protest that effectively shut down another march by White Supremacists less than a week after charlottesville. Im seeing these pictures of crowds of protesters in boston on my ipad while i am sitting in Wenceslaus Square looking at a guidebook of earlier protesters in prague. One more thing struck me. The place known as the land and wall. For those of you who dont know, wall is a joke. In the 1980s, they painted over it with pictures of john leonard. John lennon. The protest was known as lennoni sm. Heres a picture from the 1980s. You can see the picture of john lennon up there. All you need is love, give peace a chance. Loser for some reason. The wall is still there. It remains the site of cultural protest where pictures of john lines are beatles interspersed with graffiti. Heres a picture i took. [laughter] cspan is probably the two images that stuck in my head or of charlottesville in boston, and i started to think about the historical significance of crowds in the streets. When historians look at this picture of the crowd in charlottesville, we recognize those people. We read histories of white attitudes toward the black image, ranges of whiteness. The ku klux klan, lynching, jim crow, redlining, and we know what these White Supremacists represent. Thats why, when the controversy over the confederate monuments erupted, so many were ready and willing to jump into the public discussion and explain that those are not monuments to some benign cultural heritage, that they were erected at the height of the jim crow era, that, for instance, there are no monuments to reconstruction or to generals who joined the Republican Party after the war. Historians knew that because we knew who these people are and where they came from. What about these people . Do we know where they came from . These thousands of protesters. Ave a history i think they do. Here is one piece of it. In the spring of 1854, in the same week that Congress Passed act, anasnebraska estimated 50,000 protesters took to the streets to protest the rendition of a fugitive slave ns. Ed anthony burr Anthony Burns. That is probably more accurate. The crowd is more orderly. You can see the amount of troops it took to return a single slave and the faces of thousands upon thousands of protesters lining the streets. Where did those protesters come from . How did a single runaway slave named Anthony Burns promote such a reaction. Onlyyou, burns was not the one. Theres a history here of fugitive slaves and abolitionists and antislavery politics that has to be recovered if we are to arrive at a more complete understanding of 1850s. Is of the in that active recovery, we might discern some contemporary significance. Neither of these was an isolated incident. Both have to be understood in the