Articulating the Crisis: Population Politics and the Onset of the US Civil War

Abstract Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of “articulation,” in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party’s expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power.