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.