beardedwisdom

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.