beardedwisdom

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.