Southern fear of majority rule helped trigger the Civil War.

Evidence

Roy Nichols tells us that in the 1850s “Thirty-one of these state parties, plus some more or less fluid groups in the territories, acknowledged the name Democrat, and in national conventions styled themselves the ‘American Democracy.’” These were, in spite of their informal pretensions, minority parties, representing specific interests and particular regions. The strains of sectional disputes over the organization of new territories tore through this fabric of compromise in the 1850s. … “The opponents of the Democrats were beginning to make this appeal. Pleas were heard for the acceptance of the democratic principle as the means of substituting fair play for the fractious negativism of minorities; there was no more equitable rule than the will of the majority. Such sporting words, however, did not make southerners forget the warning of the census. If the voice of the majority became the will of the Republic, they might well be at the mercy of their free state neighbors. They feared the tyranny of numbers. Plainly the effort by northern spokesmen to make democracy a cohesive formula would have only slightly more chance of success than the labor of their southern antagonists to secure the acceptance of regionalism and the recognition of the right of minority veto.” It appears that slight as it was, this “chance” was too large a risk for the southern ruling class. It became one factor that led to the Civil War. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1715

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s arc: the internal contradictions of American democracy that the Black radical tradition grew up against. — connects to: The black worker was the underlying cause of America’s civil war; Racism steered American industrial workers toward counterrevolution in the Civil War
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1715

Broader Connections

• Racism steered American industrial workers toward counterrevolution in the Civil War #expands (0.45)