ABSTRACT
Abraham Lincoln wrote to future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in December 1860, ‘You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.’1 Historian William Gienapp has written that ‘without slavery it is impossible to imagine a war between the North and the South’.2 Undoubtedly, slavery was a key factor in the growing sectionalism of nineteenth-century America which eventually led to war. An understanding of the conflict, however, requires something more than a fundamentalist elucidation. Simple reductionist explanations of the Civil War which cite monocausal factors for the conflict still dominate popular perceptions of the origins of the conflict. These factors range from tariffs to modernisation to abolitionists to states’ rights ideology. None of these explanations are wrong but overly simplistic interpretations of the conflict can lead to views of the past which cement a collective usable identity rather than to a history based on reality. ‘Honest history answers our questions only by asking something of us in return.’3 This chapter aims to answer the question of why the Civil War came. I ask the reader to consider how traditional and revisionist explanations can be synthesised to paint a comprehensive picture of Civil War causation. The historiography of the causes of the conflict evolved during the
twentieth century to eventually produce two broad schools of interpretation. In the 1920s Charles and Mary Beard produced an analysis of the sectional struggle driven by the economic difference between the North and the South. This approach was essentially restated in different terms in the 1970s with the concept of modernisation and the impact this process had on sectional tensions.4 In 1940 James Randall moved away from the Beards’ economic approach and argued that a ‘blundering generation’ of politicians allowed a conflict to emerge because of their short-sighted policies and party struggle,
without which the war could have been avoided.5 Randall provides an example of the school of historians that Kenneth Stampp argues see the conflict as essentially ‘repressible’.6 This interpretation of events minimises the central differences between the North and the South. From the 1960s onwards there has been an increasing trend towards
seeing slavery at the heart of the causes of the war. The Civil Rights Movement encouraged historians to re-examine the role of the peculiar institution and place black servitude in a prominent position as the key to sectional conflict.7 Indeed Stampp’s own reading of events places slavery front and centre. For him, ‘the interplay of these proslavery and anti-slavery forces’ was the key to the coming of the war rather than political blunders and economic differences.8 Nevertheless, led by Joel Silbey, ‘new political historians’ have questioned an approach to the causes of the Civil War which relies on looking at the growing sectional divide solely from the view of the slavery issue and places overemphasis on the extent of sectionalism. This school of thought focuses on political changes and the importance of non-slavery issues like nativism.9 We can perhaps summarise the current situation by referring to ‘revisionists’ and ‘fundamentalists’. The former school of thought points to political developments, the consequences of elections and the failed compromises of the 1850s when explaining the causes of the conflict, whilst the latter argues that the war emerged from a struggle between slavery and freedom.10 The exploration of causation below attempts to bring these two strands of explanation together. The issue of slavery asked searching questions of the American
polity from the moment the nation was born in 1776. The famous words of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ stood in direct contradiction to the reality of slavery. When delegates met at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a number of compromises were required to reconcile northern and southern concerns about the issue of slavery. Constitutional provisions dealing with taxation and representation of slave-holding states, fugitive slave legislation and decisions on the slave trade were all necessary to ease the fears of southern states. The extent to which the Constitution explicitly and implicitly protected slavery was reflected in abolitionist William Garrison’s famous condemnation of the document as a ‘covenant with death’. In the late eighteenth century three Massachusetts anti-federalists, whilst not able to prophesy the extent to which slavery would test the rigidity of the Union, did know that ‘this lust for slavery [was] portentous of much evil in America’.11 Washington urged his countrymen to subordinate regional differences to the national cause and recognised the potential of slavery to exacerbate
those regional differences.12 His fellow founding father James Madison believed that if the slave population was diffused across an expanding western frontier then it would more speedily decline. He feared that restriction of slavery to a concentrated geographical region would entail the possible rupture of the Union.13
