beardedwisdom

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.