beardedwisdom

 

Gabor S. Boritt, in Why the Civil War Came, edited a lengthy collection of essays discussing the origin of the Civil War.  Boritt’s own contribution blamed Abraham Lincoln for the war, arguing that Lincoln’s personality and decision making led to the conflict.  He contends that Lincoln failed to foresee the coming war and turned a deaf ear to Southern demands, which, if handled differently, could have avoided military action.  This was Lincoln’s “cardinal sin” and made the President morally responsible for the Civil War, according to Boritt.

Expanding Boritt’s argument, William Gienapp blames the failings of politicians and political institutions in general for the Civil War.  The author includes elements of fundamentalism and revisionism in his essay; on the one hand, he acknowledges that there seemed to be an essential divide between North and South and that sectional differences were key to causing the war, but on the other hand, he argues that the poor (contingent) decisions of second-rate politicians drove the nation to war.  This is not unlike Rugemer’s deep contingency theory, although arguing different points.  But Gienapp adds democracy to the equation, saying that both sides went to war to preserve democracy.

In a somewhat unconvincing essay, Mark Wahlgren examines the role of northern opinion in agitating the Civil War, arguing that northerners used symbols of the United States (the Stars and Stripes, Eagle, and the like) and national pride to justify war with the South.  Wahlgren attempts to show that northerners were more “patriotic” and “conservative” than were their southern counterparts, placing more blame for the war to the North.  The author’s argument is loose, but intriguing nonetheless for its novelty.

William Freehling, author of The Road to Disunion, examines the differences between the Lower South and Upper South, contending that slavery in the border states of the South was in decline.  Fearing a disintegration of the South, pro-slavery leaders in the Lower South aggressively pushed their agenda in hopes of keeping the South unified, which was necessary to protecting slavery politically.  Freehling argues that this southern aggressiveness spurred the hostilities that eventually led to the Civil War.  This essay is directly opposed to Wahlgren’s essay that argues for northern aggression as the cause of the war; Freehling makes a much more convincing argument.

David Blight supplements Freehling’s argument by examining the role of free blacks and slaves in the 1850s in sparking slaveholders’ fears and insecurities and northern abolitionism.  Slave resistance and perceived free black agitation indirectly heightened the tensions between the North and South and helped drive the disunion.  This is essentially a sectarian argument, but one that is fueled by the individual decisions and actions of southern blacks, which means that Blight’s argument does not neatly fit into either fundamentalist or revisionist camps.

In another essay about indirect influence, Glenna Matthews examines the role of northern women in antislavery’s rise in northern politics.  The author argues that middle-class women in the public sphere were sensitized to the institution of slavery’s threat to religious and familial morality, which led women to indirectly engage antebellum electoral politics in favor of antislavery.  This helped enhance the growing tension between the North and South.

In the final essay of Why the Civil War Came, Charles Royster argues that there was a sense of relief following the start of the Civil War because it was the popular opinion in the North that uncontrollable forces were directing antebellum politics and only extreme measures could break the troubled, divided nation free from those forces.  If this was true, then the Civil War was inevitable because the overwhelming influences of slavery and sectional differences were in control of American politics, driving the United States down the path to war.  This essay clashes with some of the earlier essays in this volume, but it does help tie the collection together nevertheless.  As a whole, Why the Civil War Came seems to suggest that the Civil War could not be avoided, but that there were many forces at various levels of American society that contributed to the coming of the war.  This volume largely ignores international influences.

 

In The Origins of the American Civil War, Brian Holden Reid argues, like Gienapp, that the inherent weaknesses or failures of American democracy in part led to the Civil War; the instability of democracy allowed pro and antislavery interest groups to challenge the political and social fabric of the United States, leading to disunion.  Reid is fundamentalist in his treatment of sectional conflict or regional difference, but he includes a lengthy discussion of transnational forces at work in antebellum America, as well as the South’s inability to garner enough European (or Mexican) support for their cause.  The author spends a good deal of time discussing the international influences at work in the United States, much like Rugemer.  But Reid largely avoids the economic issues to which revisionists often point as the cause of the Civil War.

 

Also focusing on the South’s responsibility for the war, Charles B. Dew, in Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, argues that it was indeed the institution of slavery that led to the Civil War.  He uses accounts of southerners who traveled throughout the South in order to garner support for secession and southern unity in order to make this claim.  These “secession commissioners” used the defense of slavery as their primary rhetoric for secession, proving that slavery was at the heart of the cause of conflict, according to Dew.  They argued in speeches and personal conversations that the election of Abraham Lincoln would gravely threaten the traditional southern way of life and social structure.  From this, Dew contends that it was ultimately slavery that led to the Civil War, placing him squarely in the fundamentalist camp.  Although he acknowledges that his argument is simplistic, he still asserts that without slavery the Civil War would not have happened, a claim that has merit.  But there was slavery in antebellum America, and the situation was much more complicated than Dew portrays it.

 

In James L. Huston’s work, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (2002), the author argues that the cause of the Civil War rests in the different conceptions of property in the North and South.  Southerners contended that slaves were sacred property not unlike land, a home, or a horse, but this idea about the sacred right to own human being clashed with the free labor system that was critical to the northern economy.  Huston focuses on the political and social ideology surrounding property ownership in antebellum America; in the South, he examines the defensive rhetoric southerners used to combat challenges to the legality of slave ownership, and he highlights the development of the wage labor system and abolitionism in the North.  The author then looks at the debate concerning the spread of slavery into the West, slavery’s constitutionality, and the resulting political realignment in the 1850s.  The fate of four million slaves, the social and economic relations of eight million whites, and the “twenty-eight hundred millions of dollars” were “all the variables necessary to explain southern secession and the coming of the Civil War.” (p. 24)  At its most basic level, Huston’s argument concerning the cause of the Civil War is economic, placing him more in the revisionist camp.  But it is more complicated than that, however, because it was economic ideas about property (and how that affected the domestic relations in the South) that drove the country to division and war.  The author nuances the argument of revisionists to focus on the role of property and its effect on the Southern way of life.  The importance he gives property is a compelling argument; he contends that the Reconstruction amendments to the United States Constitution prove that property was at the heart of the conflict between the North and South.  However, he largely ignores outside influences that helped spark the Civil War and places the cause almost exclusively within the United States.  As is evident from Rugemer’s work, British abolitionism and agitation, as well as the Haitian Revolution and other Atlantic factors, played an influential role in the coming of the Civil War.  Taken in conjunction, Huston’s work offers a view of property ownership and ideology that Rugemer does not examine, giving a good background for The Problem of Emancipation.

 

Joel H. Silbey, in his book Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2006) examines the role of westward expansion, controversies surrounding the annexation of Texas, and the institution of slavery’s growth in the 1850s in the coming of the Civil War.  The author argues that the annexation of Texas, and the process that led to annexation, was the starting point for the events and political conflicts that led to the war.  Like Kornblith before him, Silbey argues that the Mexican-American War was crucial for America’s preparation for the Civil War, both militarily and psychologically, and he links the war with Mexico directly to the annexation of Texas.  This somewhat roundabout argument for the annexation leading to the Civil War is just one facet of Silbey’s argument.  He also contends, along more familiar lines, that Texas pushed many northern politicians over the edge on the slavery debate; whereas some northern politicians had previously tolerated slavery in order to preserve the Union, Texas’ entrance as a slave state tipped to balance too far in the South’s favor and convinced many northerners to now oppose slavery.  After 1845, some white southerners were more confident in their efforts to expand slavery at the same time that antislavery sentiment was gaining strength in the North, which set the United States on the path to conflict, according to Silbey.  The author includes the individual element into his thesis as well; the overarching tensions between the North and South (and the West as well) that were heightened by the Texas issue forced many from each region to consider their own personal views on the issue of slavery and make political decisions accordingly.  Further, he focuses on the internal tensions within the Democratic Party and the importance of Martin Van Buren in setting up the U.S. Government for the annexation of Texas (although he does not fully explain this point).  Sibley seems “fundamentalist” in his stressing the place of slavery and sectional tensions in the coming of the Civil War, but he argues that Texas was the lynchpin that caused the United States to go down the path to war.  In this sense, the Civil War could have been avoided by just one election outcome, or a political decision to not annex Texas might have delayed or prevented hostilities.  This is where Silbey diverges from fundamentalists who stress the inevitability of the Civil War.  Like Huston, Silbey also does not discuss the role of outside agitation or international influences regarding the Texas question.  As Haynes makes clear in Unfinished Revolution, Anglophobia played an important role in the annexation of Texas (and subsequently the Civil War), an element of the story that Silbey does not explore.  Huston and Silbey, when taken together, support Rugemer’s contention for a “deep contingency” theory for the cause of the Civil War because they both offer different—though valid—views for the war.  They help bring out the complexities of the path to war.

 

Other works that might be worth looking at are Michael Perman The Coming of the Civil War (1993), Gabor S. Borrit, ed., Why the Civil War Came (1996), which is a collection of essay on Civil War causation, and, less likely to be important yet more recent, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B. Dew.

 

In his foundational 1978 work, The Political Crisis of the 1850s, Michael Holt argues that the Civil War was the result of a breakdown of the two-party system in the 1850s, a direct consequence of the structure of American political mechanisms.  The breakdown occurred because of a loss of faith in politicians and the political process due in part to corruption; this loss of faith in politics dissolved the glue that held the states together and secession was the result.  According to the author, slavery and sectionalism were not instrumental in this breakdown, which means that the Civil War was not primarily about the institution of slavery or a distinct divide between the North and South.  Holt is by no means a fundamentalist because he dismisses slavery as the cause of the Civil War, but he does not perfectly align with the revisionist camp either.  Rather he offers politics as the most important factor leading to the Civil War, a mono-causal explanation with which Rugemer would not agree.[1] Scholars have criticized Holt for placing too much emphasis on politics and ignoring other factors such as economics, abolitionism, and the like.  In a more recent work from 2004, however, Holt reaffirms this argument in The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War that the cause of the Civil War rests in the political sphere, not elsewhere.[2] He is careful to give agency to politicians and strip other potential actors of their agency.  The same criticism applies to this more recent work as much as it does to Holt’s earlier work.

 

Brian Schoen, in a work similar to The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, examines the Lower South’s deep connection to the Atlantic world through its cotton-based economy, its sale of such in the global market, and its involvement in the slave labor system that enabled that industry.  All these factors created “a complicated political situation at home and abroad, one that weakened and eventually destroyed the fabric of union.”[3] This is not unlike Rugemer’s argument for the coming of the Civil War, stressing the “deep contingency” of the war and the international elements agitating a domestic conflict.  For Schoen, however, almost everything hinges on cotton.  It was cotton’s importance in the global market that strengthened the institution of slavery in the South.  It was the South’s dependence on cotton that helped create a pronounced economic divide with the North.  Schoen does break down the coming of the Civil War to issues of slavery and economic concerns, but he does so by looking behind these things to examine their root causes.  Hence, international influences in the Atlantic world were just as responsible for the Civil War as were the domestic issues they exacerbated, according to the author.  Schoen occupies the ground directly in between the fundamentalist and revisionist camps, sharing essential elements with Rugemer’s argument; Schoen argues for the importance of cotton, slavery, and the deep division between the North and the South, but for very complex economic, political, and international reasons.  The Civil War was not inevitable for this author, but it was extremely likely to occur given the international pressures and domestic issues affecting the antebellum United States.

 

In Volume I of his two-volume work, The Road to Disunion, William W. Freehling examines the complex sectional issues at play in American politics just after the Declaration of Independence to 1854.[4] Freehling is primarily concerned with how sectional extremists succeeded in bringing about secession in a political and social atmosphere in the South that was far from extreme.  The author argues that divisions within the South itself helped extremists push for the secession that later led to the Civil War.  Whereas Volume I highlights sectionalism, extremism, slavery’s victories in national politics and the overall strengthening of that institution, Volume II examines the political issues surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s election and the secession of the southern states shortly thereafter.[5] Interestingly, Freehling places a good portion of the blame for the Civil War on disunity in the South because it helped enable secession to take place.  As strange as it may initially sound, a unified South would have been less likely to secede, and the nation could have avoided the Civil War.  Freehling’s work is not unlike Holt’s work in its emphasis on politics and the centrality of divisions of various sorts in the coming of the Civil War.  Freehling most closely aligns with revisionists; one gets the sense from reading his work that the Civil War was far from inevitable and could have been avoided given just a few different circumstances.

 

Currently I am in the process of examining James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (2002); and Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2006) to see if they are important additions to the debate concerning the causation of the Civil War.

 

Returning to the work of Edward Rugemer, I looked at a review essay that Rugemer wrote concerning a two volume work that discusses the causation of the Civil War, which is John Ashworth’s Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume I, Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume 2, The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).  Ashworth’s work is an exhaustive examination of the political ideologies present in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Rugemer notes that this examination has great explanatory power for the origins of the Civil War.  Volume 1 starts with the writings of Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Caroline and ends with the Compromise of 1850.  Volume 2 picks up where the first volume ends and extends the discussion to secession in 1861.  Rugemer praises Ashworth for the scale and scope of his work, saying that Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic is one of the most comprehensive studies of Civil War causation ever produced because it looks at both events in the North and South, and it discusses political developments with great detail.  “The structure of the book embodies Ashworth’s central argument: the coming of the Civil War is best understood as the clash of two antagonistic ideologies, proslavery and antislavery, that had been generated by the opposed labor systems that developed South and North of Mason and Dixon’s line, namely, slavery and wage-labor. Proslavery and antislavery were the ideologies of the ascendant political parties of the late 1850s, the Democrats with their base of support increasingly limited to the South, and the Republicans of the North.”[1] In this sense, Ashworth agrees with fundamentalists who argue that the issue of slavery and the essential differences between the North and South led to the conflict.  There was no avoiding the Civil War. “Ashworth consistently develops the position that impersonal forces are far more important than individual action in explaining historical change. Even in a period for which the archival record is rich with the details of individuals’ thoughts, lives, and even personalities, Ashworth believes that such archival evidence is not relevant to an explanation of political change. Political decisions, he argues, are ‘structurally generated’ (II, pp. 7, 637).”[2] (By “structurally generated,” Ashworth simply means the decisions influenced by political, social, and economic forces that structured American society during the period in question.)  For Ashworth, removing the human element eliminates the possibility that the outcome could have been much different with a different set of political decisions or human actions.

 

There is a major flaw, however, in the two volumes.  According to Rugemer, Ashworth’s treatment of antislavery sentiment in the two volumes is wrong, and hence Ashworth’s explanation for the coming of the Civil War is not entirely accurate.  Ashworth claims that abolitionism and the spread of antislavery opinion in the North were responses to the expansion of the wage labor system, essentially claiming that the maturation of capitalism created the antislavery movement.  But as Rugemer notes, the chronology of the expansion of the wage labor system does not align with that of the antislavery movement.  Ashworth dismissed external, international agitation that stirred up abolitionists in the United States apart from any notion of wage labor as well, further weakening his claim.  The author also completely ignores religion’s role in the antislavery movement, which is an egregious oversight according to Rugemer.  Despite this major flaw in the treatment of antislavery, and subsequently the antislavery movement’s role in bringing about the war, Rugemer believes that Ashworth’s work is still valuable in its explication of the origins of the Civil War; no other work tackles the subject with such breadth and detail.  Historians must be careful, however, with works that stress the mono-causal nature of the coming of the Civil War because events of such magnitude can rarely, if ever, be reduced to a single explanation.

 

From Ashworth’s and Rugemer’s work, I have found that I should look at these works: Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (1999); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (2007); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (2002); and Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2006); as well as Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (1980); Nelson Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (2007); and Will Kaufman, The Civil War in American Culture (2006).

 

As per the previous post, Gary Kornblith is engaging the ideas of Charles A. and Mary Beard concerning the causation of the Civil War.  Beard, in his work The Rise of American Civilization, argues that the Civil War was a “Second American Revolution,” taking what he saw as the principles of the Founding Fathers and applying them nearly a century later.[1] He argued, with his historian wife, Mary, that the Northern capitalists were merely agitating Southern planters for economic gain; the Beards saw King Cotton in the South as akin to the British monarch George III, and they believed that the North was simply trying to overthrow the dominant power that was interfering with American liberty.  The industrialists to the north and farmers to the west overthrew King Cotton, much like the American patriots overthrew their British oppressor during the American Revolution.  For the Beards, this war between the agricultural South and industrial North continued beyond the Civil War, finally ending with the North spreading industrialization (gradually) in the South, lessening the economic divide between the two regions.  The authors said that the antebellum United States was in an “Agricultural Age,” whereas post-war America was in an “Industrial Age.”

 

As far as the Beards were concerned, the Civil War was the culmination of a socio-economic process that began just before the turn of the nineteenth century, with the period from the inauguration of Andrew Jackson to the election of Abraham Lincoln of particular interest because of the increasing economic, or industrial, disparity between North and South.  Interestingly, the Beards fall within both the “fundamentalist” and “revisionist” camps.  They stress the basic differences between the two regions (one holding slaves and the other not, and one agricultural and the other industrial), much like the fundamentalists’ argue.  However, the authors also share similarities with the revisionists, for they both stress the various economic factors leading to the Civil War, rather than just attributing the war to slavery and the deep divide created over that institution.  The Beards do seem to think that the Civil War was inevitable, or at least extremely likely to occur, because of industrialization in the North.  This would place them closer to the fundamentalist camp.  This makes the Beards’ work a curious choice for Kornblith’s foundation of his counterfactual scenario for a different outcome for the Civil War.  Kornblith attempts to show that one different presidential election outcome could have prevented the Civil War, an idea very different from that of a fundamentalist.  For Kornblith, the Civil War was very preventable, given just a few different circumstances and chain of events in antebellum American politics.  As Kornblith recognizes, however, The Rise of American Civilization is perhaps the seminal work from which all other debates about the causation of the Civil War should begin.

 

Gary J. Kornblith, also engaging the debate concerning the origins of the Civil War, notes that there are parallels between the origins of the American Revolution and the Civil War.  “Although the ultimate results of the military conflicts differed greatly, the patterns of events leading to war seem remarkably similar.”  “Faced with armed insurrection, the central government raised a huge military force to suppress the rebels, and a long and brutal war ensued.”[1] The author lays out the differences (and agreements) between “fundamentalists” and “revisionists” in Civil War historiography.  Fundamentalists stress the inherent differences between the North and the South, claiming that the institution of slavery caused a deep rift that could only be solved through war.  Revisionists argue that the Civil War was not inevitable but rather caused by a series of events that were influenced by a variety of factors, making the war somewhat of an accident.  Kornblith, on the other hand, argues that historians should revisit the causation of the Civil War with the model of the American Revolution in mind.

 

To do this, Kornblith offers a counterfactual scenario for the years leading up to the Civil War, beginning with the close presidential election of 1844.  The author has Henry Clay defeating James K. Polk for the presidency, an event that would have caused Texas to remain an independent state and preventing the Mexican-American War.  The Mexican-American War is important because it helped prepare the United States for military conflict, as well as placing the idea of war firmly in the American mind in the years leading up to the Civil War.  In addition, “by avoiding war with Mexico, Henry Clay would have freed himself to focus on the economic policies dearest to his vision of an American system: maintaining a protective tariff, promoting internal improvements, and reestablishing a national bank.”[2] Kornblith contends that this would have pushed the issue of slavery to the background, for Congress would be deadlocked over economic issues instead.  Under a Clay administration in Washington, a sectional system would have survived much longer (even with the division over slavery), according to the author.  Further, he argues that slavery could have been abolished through non-violent means under his counterfactual scenario; he gives the eradication of slavery in Brazil as an example of peaceful national emancipation.  Kornblith acknowledges that the abolition of slavery in the South without force would likely have taken many decades and perhaps persisted well into the twentieth century.

 

From his counterfactual scenario, Kornblith concludes that the Mexican-American War was “a necessary, in not sufficient, cause of the Civil War that broke out in 1861, and that the Civil War was a necessary, if not sufficient cause of American abolition in the nineteenth century.”[3] Here he brings the comparison of the American Revolution back into the discussion, claiming that the period between the French and Indian War and American Revolution in the British Empire was very similar to the period between the Mexican-American War and Civil War in the American “Empire.”  Perceived heavy-handedness from distant ruling elites over local economies, politics, and social systems (London to the American colonies and Washington to the American South) drove the oppressed to revolt or secede, according to Kornblith.  It is an interesting, but loose, comparison, claiming that the Civil War was something of a second American Revolution.

 

The author’s counterfactual exercise is problematic for its many inferences about the potential course of American history, but he recognizes the limitations of his own method.  Instead, Kornblith hoped to illuminate both the disagreements and agreements of fundamentalists and revisionists in an attempt to show that the outbreak of the Civil War could have happened much later than 1861, or not at all.

 

On page 8 of The Problem of Emancipation, Rugemer references Edward Ayers, the historian who advanced the idea that the origin of the Civil War could be described as a “deep contingency.”  In his book, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History, Ayers lays out in a series of essays what he means by deep contingency.  After an initial autobiographical essay about his own upbringing in the South, Ayers illuminates the uniqueness of the region and the deep complexity of Southern history, including slavery.  The complexity of the region meant that there was not any great, universal enthusiasm for secession, and there was little rhetoric for war that directly cited the threat of ending of slavery.  According to Ayers, one of the dominant beliefs among historians for the cause of the Civil War was the South’s fear over the economy and growing industrialism.  This belief was in opposition to the traditional narrative that the Confederacy went to war over the issue of slavery primarily, the former making the Civil War avoidable and the latter inevitable.  PBS specials and works of popular history have portrayed the Civil War as unavoidable yet ultimately good for the nation.  Ayers argues that the views of both sides swing too far to the extremes, and that historians should adopt a new theory based on each side.  From this, Ayers calls for deep contingency, claiming that the Civil War was very likely to happen but for numerous reasons.  The question of whether or not the Civil War was inevitable is not as important as the reasons that led to the war.

 

Rugemer uses the idea of deep contingency throughout The Problem of Emancipation, for there were a number of influences that led to a very likely war.  He expands the work of Ayers, however, to shift the focus to largely Caribbean and Atlantic ideas and influences, rather than domestic ones.  A key element of the “deep” part of contingency must lie abroad, according to Rugemer.  Breaking down those foreign reasons, the first part of Rugemer’s book examines rebellions in the West Indies and their portrayal in the American media.  Slaveholding Americans believed that abolitionist activity directly led to slave revolts, as evidenced in the Caribbean.  The second part of the book focuses on the effect of British abolition on the issue of slavery in America.  The emancipation of the British Caribbean greatly influenced both American abolitionists and slaveholders, each using the British example for their own cause.  Abolitionists pointed to the relative social and political stability in the West Indies as proof that the eradication of slavery was a good and safe thing to do.  Slaveholders argued that emancipation would aid a supposed British conspiracy to split the United States, a view that Southern intellectuals articulated after West Indian emancipation.

 

The complex international influences and ideas circulating in the antebellum United States serve to reinforce the deep contingency theory by adding the Atlantic element.  “This book explores this notion of ‘deep contingency’ by focusing not only on the long-term development of American ideas about emancipation in the Caribbean but also on how those ideas intersected with some of the key events in the coming of the Civil War.” (p.8)  On this point, Rugemer does well.

Edward B. Rugemer, in The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War, argues that the American Civil War is an Atlantic story, not simply a North American one.  Using a transnational approach, the author shows that ideas and movements from abroad easily influenced the young United States, including examples of abolitionism from Haiti and Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act.  Rugemer engages earlier scholarship that linked the Caribbean experience to that of pre-Civil War America: Alfred Hunt’s work, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America (1988), connects the Haitian Revolution and abolitionism to the same in the young American republic.  Rugemer’s account is much more detailed, taking Hunt’s previous work and broadening its scope.

As presented in the title, the “problem of emancipation” for Rugemer was the competing economic interests of American slaveholders with the liberal ideas of equality as expressed in the republic’s founding.  Britain’s rhetoric of emancipation in the 1830s is of particular importance for Rugemer, for it is here that he places the beginning of disunion in the United States over the issue of slavery.  The idea that the origin of the split of antebellum America began largely with the importation of British anti-slavery ideology is a major break from previous scholarship that places disunion much later in the nineteenth century.  Further, situating the discussion in the larger Atlantic framework (to include abolitionism in the Caribbean) helps solidify his claims.  Rugemer wants to build upon other historical works that chronicle the transmission of ideology across the Atlantic world, such as Richard Blackett’s Building an Anti-slavery Wall (1983).  Where Rugemer differs from this work is his use of transnational anti-slavery movements as an analytical framework for understanding the build up to the Civil War (but he does not go into a detailed examination of the Civil War itself).  Interestingly, Rugemer is somewhat ideologically deterministic, for he places great power in ideas; the Civil War seems inevitable, given the ideas about slavery that were spreading.  “For twenty-seven years American abolitionists had advocated the peaceful path, but the rest of the country had not listened, and now the war had come.” (p. 290)  The polemic nature of anti-slavery ideology served to deepened the rift between the North and South.

The Problem of Emancipation fits into many different historiographies—the American South, Caribbean slavery, Atlantic abolitionism, etc.—and its transnational approach gives it greater versatility.  Historians of all parts of the Atlantic world will find this work useful and informative.

In Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World, Sam W. Haynes argues that the young United States showed signs of much apprehension and unease about its nationhood, despite having a grand rhetoric of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.  To show this, the author examines the United States from its inception to 1850, and in particular, American concerns about Great Britain’s power and imagination of British culture.  Many Americans in the young republic were still Anglophiles, looking to Great Britain for culture, taste, and refinement.  On the other hand, those that did not admire British society saw the Crown as the gravest threat to the United States; the War of 1812 solidified this view in American minds for years following the war.  Regardless of who in the early republic admired or hated the British, Americans as a whole were very sensitive to the perception of their nation abroad.  Americans were constantly asking foreigners this question: “What do you think of our country?”  Often the answer to that question made Americans even more self-conscious of how they were perceived. “I do not like them.  I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions,” was Frances Trollope’s (who was British) well-known reply. (p. 34)  The seeming lack of manners and cultural sophistication compared to Great Britain gave Americans an inferiority complex that spread to many areas of American life.  Ironically, Haynes shows that the young American nation sought somewhat desperately for validation and acceptance from the imperial power that used to rule them.

In the first two chapters, the author examines the pull of Britishness in American literature and the backlash against that pull.  “Who reads an American book?”  In the early republic, very few did, which led Ralph Waldo Emerson to issue a proclamation calling for original American literary works that were not based on books or writers from abroad.  He advocated the development of “literary nationalism,” a uniquely American body of work that would help create a distinct American culture. (p. 51-76)  The author then moves the discussion to politics and international relations.  In government, both the Democratic Party and Whig Party tried to fuel suspicion and fear of all things British to further distance the early republic from its colonial master.  Territorial disputes created further unease because of perceived British hostility in the disputes.  Americans feared that the British were meddling with the efforts to admit Maine, Florida, and Texas into the United States, as well as the status of the Oregon Territory, but that proved to not be the case. (p. 230-250)  Nevertheless, it generated great anxiety over the strength of the young nation even as the United States was manifestly marching to the Pacific.  The Anglophobia in America waned once the United States reached the West Coast, which dispelled the fear of Europeans encircling the United States in the west.  Haynes does an excellent job of illuminating Britain’s role in shaping early American society, by both acting as a disinterested role model and as an international agitator that spurred the development of a distinct American culture.  He shows that Great Britain’s influence lasted well beyond the last military engagement between the United States and the Crown in the War of 1812.[1]

Unfinished Revolution actually fits well with Jack P. Greene’s article, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” for Haynes’ narrative provides evidence for some of Greene’s claims.[2] For example, Greene notes that English settler colonies in particular were deeply attached to the metropole, and those settlers often reproduced the policies, social structures, and culture of the imperial power, reproductions that lasted beyond direct British control of the settler colonies.  Haynes shows this to be the case in his discussion of American literature and political system as being British-inflected.  Further, Greene argues that the development of the early American republic was characterized by state, local, and community action, and that scholarship should emphasize this; the overall narrative of Unfinished Revolution focuses on the formation of local communities as he suggests, not the development or role of the federal government.  The chapter on Texas is constructed as to show a process of colonization, both in the initial settlements of whites and later annexation of the region, which supports Greene’s claim that colonization didn’t end with the expulsion of the British.  Rather, it continued on into the west as territories were annexed and Native Americans expelled or subjugated.  (Adam Rothman’s critique of Greene’s emphasis on the primacy of state over federal history is interesting, for Rothman points out the federal government’s critical role in the annexation of states, which is something that Greene and Haynes neglect.)[3] Haynes’ work is valuable in that it partly does what Greene suggests: Unfinished Revolution interweaves colonialism, colonizer-colony relations (including post-independence relations), and nation building into a continuous narrative without trying to separate these processes.  It also provides excellent insights into the early American imagination, an imagination dominated by Great Britain and Anglo culture.

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[1] Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

[2] Jack P. Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (April 2007).

[3] Adam Rothman, “Beware the Weak State,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (April 2007).

At the heart of Eugene Genovese’s work, Roll Jordan, Roll, is the author’s interpretation of paternalism and hegemony in American slavery.  For Genovese, paternalism was a two-way street between master and slave, an arrangement of responsibilities and mutual obligations not unlike a medieval feudal system.  Slave masters expected work, productivity, and gratitude from their slaves in exchange for their protection, guidance, and patronage.  On the other hand, slaves expected some sort of reciprocity from their masters for their work, according to Genovese.  For example, slaves expected some level of autonomy to create communities and preserve their culture, as well as a reasonable standard of living (for a slave, at least).  Enslaved blacks did manage to preserve some measure of privacy in their social interactions and family relations.  Oddly, the author posits that black slaves negotiated paternalism on their own terms rather than on their masters’ terms; hence, slaves did not actually think that they should feel grateful for their masters’ patronage.  Genovese suggests that enslaved blacks in essence rejected their status as slaves because slaves do not have any inherent rights or ability to control their own futures.  Christianity played a role in this for it helped give slaves an expression of their dignity and humanity that whites could understand.

The author supports these interesting assertions with very detailed accounts of the interaction between masters and slaves, using both white accounts and slave testimonies and WPA narratives extensively.  He notes that the quality of life for slaves on smaller plantations was very similar to that of their counterparts on large plantations; further, Genovese argues that slavery in the Deep South was not any more brutal than was slavery in the rest of the South.  Most importantly, however, slaves, regardless of location or occupation, supposedly had the same consciousness and black identity as free blacks.  This commonality is key because it supports Genovese’s argument that slave culture laid the groundwork for, or at least did not prevent the development of, a common black identity that would develop later.  The author does not differentiate between those slaves who actively resisted and those who accommodated slavery, saying that resistance and accommodation were merely two sides of the survival process.  One of Genovese’s aims in Roll, Jordan, Roll was to radically alter traditional views of master-slave relations and slave communities, giving slaves greater control over their own communities and affairs.[1]

Situating Denmark Vesey into Genovese’s account of slave life is an intriguing exercise at this point, particularly since the account of Vesey and his conspiracy have been under debate.  Michael Johnson notes that Vesey’s conspiracy might not have actually been a conspiracy at all, for “rather than revealing a portrait of thwarted insurrection, witnesses’ testimony discloses glimpses of ways that reading and rumors transmuted white orthodoxies into black heresies.”[2] The emphasis of the narrative of Vesey’s conspiracy should be on the white reaction to the conspiracy, not on the failed revolt itself.  (This is not unlike the account of slave conspiracy in Adams County, Mississippi, that Winthrop Jordan presents in Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, which shares some similarities.)  Johnson argues that the previous historiography of Vesey, such as works by Egerton, Robertson, and Pearson, misread the court documents and paint an erroneous picture of Vesey.  A rereading of Vesey’s story, however, would not substantially change the application of Genovese’s arguments in Roll, Jordan, Roll to Vesey’s conspiracy.  Vesey, once a slave and then a free black, exhibits the black consciousness or identity that Genovese presents in his work, as well as some measure of autonomy and agency.  As regards agency in Roll, Jordan, Roll, Walter Johnson says “there are a lot of things to say about the failings of Roll, Jordan, Roll, but the commonplace that it is a book which ignores the ‘agency’ of enslaved people…is not one of them.”[3] He argues, however, that Genovese’s notion of agency is more limited, because it makes a clear distinction between individual and collective agency.  Regardless, Genovese appears to be correct in his assessment of enslaved agency, at least to a degree.

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[1] Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976)

[2] Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 58, no. 4 (2001), 916.

[3] Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 117.