beardedwisdom

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).