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.
The post Book Review: <i>Building a House Divided: Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War</i> appeared first on Emerging Civil War.