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.