Themes of the American Civil War

The War Between the States

Susan-Mary Grant, Brian Holden-Reid, Susan-Mary Grant, Brian Holden-Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415990868
• eBook ISBN: 9781135276584
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Themes of the American Civil War offers a timely and useful guide to this vast topic for a new generation of students. The volume provides a broad-ranging assessment of the causes, complexities, and consequences of America's most destructive conflict to date. The essays, written by top scholars in the field, and reworked for this new edition, explore how, and in what ways, differing interpretations of the war have arisen, and explains clearly why the American Civil War remains a subject of enduring interest. It includes chapters covering four broad areas, including The Political Front, The Military Front, The Race Front, and The Ideological Front.

Additions to the second edition include a new introduction – added to the current introduction by James McPherson – a chapter on gender, as well as information on the remembrance of the war (historical memory). The addition of several maps, a timeline, and an appendix listing further reading, battlefield statistics, and battle/regiment/general names focuses the book squarely at undergraduates in both the US and abroad.

PART I
One and Inseparable

CHAPTER 1
The State of the Union, 1776–1860

DONALD RATCLIFFE

Historians of the American Civil War are often tempted to exaggerate the weakness of the Union before 1860. If the ties holding the various states together were fragile, it is easier to explain why the Union broke apart in the secession winter of 1860–61. Accordingly, historians often argue that state loyalties had always been stronger than national loyalties, that long-established differences between the states made a powerful central authority inappropriate and impossible, and that therefore the federal government had always been weak and inactive in the antebellum years. The story can then emphasize how the success of federal forces in the Civil War finally established the principle that the Union was sacrosanct and perpetual, while the undoubted expansion of federal power during the conflict created central institutions such as the Union had never previously possessed. Thus an American nation, based on a true American nationalism, developed only after 1860, largely as a consequence of four years of bloody internecine strife between North and South. In this respect, at least, many modern Civil War historians would agree with the epic film maker D. W. Griffith: for them too, the events of the 1860s marked “The Birth of a Nation.”¹

This view is, however, fundamentally misleading. In the first place, it underestimates the strength of the Union between the 1770s and the 1820s. Powerful nationalizing forces in the late eighteenth century created the United States as a coherent—if highly variegated and decentralized—republic that was bound together by a widely felt sense of shared political identity. In this respect America was typical of the many European and European-settled nations that developed an exclusive self-awareness between 1765 and 1815 in response to either increasingly restrictive colonial rule or foreign conquest. Second, the system of federal government adopted in the United States in 1787–88 incorporated a central government with more real power than historians of the mid-nineteenth century often concede. Those powers were deliberately used in the decades following 1789, enabling the federal government to make a decisive contribution to the survival, development, and further integration of the United States. Thus a proper appreciation of the true strength of the antebellum Union, and the forces underlying it, requires careful consideration of the period before the Missouri crisis.

Even after that sudden revelation of deep sectional differences over slavery in 1819–20, the internal political dynamic of the Union served to mitigate the sense of state and regional distinctiveness. American political conflicts after 1828 operated within a national party system that had the effect of easing, and at times directly counteracting, sectional differences. Thus tendencies towards the creation of regional nationalisms were repeatedly overwhelmed by internal partisan divisions that led minorities to look for allies in other states and regions. The dominance of national parties devoted to maintaining a nationwide partisan consensus made possible the successful engineering of sectional compromises, which after 1828 increasingly meant reducing the scale of action of the federal government. In effect, the South’s growing concern for its own peculiar minority interests severely limited the exercise of federal power in the immediate antebellum decades, which explains why historians have sometimes exaggerated the inherent weakness of the Union before the Civil War. The strengthening of national power in the 1860s reflected, in part, the restoration of the political situation that had existed before the South began to impose its deadening hand on the Union in the thirty years before the war.

Foundations of the Union

The American Union, and the spirit of American nationality that underlay it, was the creation of the eighteenth century. Originally, of course, each of the Thirteen Colonies was a separate foundation, and developed its own character, peculiarities, and special interests; each colony had a direct relationship with the Crown and, officially, none with its neighbors. Yet colonial historians have detected a slowly growing sense of common American identity in the decades before 1740, though only afterwards did the various colonies begin to share common experiences. Elites, religious and political, cooperated on a continental basis, and often came together in dealing with their associates in Britain. Practical realities like intercolonial trade and the postal service were reinforced by religious excitements such as the Great Awakening and, above all, by the pressures of war against the French and Indians.² Yet these developments did not mean that the colonies were growing away from Britain; on the contrary, if anything, they shared in the growing sense of Britishness that Linda Colley has discerned in Britain in the eighteenth century, and they took pride in their place in the triumphant British Empire. The menace of Indians and the presence of African slaves encouraged even non-British settlers to identify with their English-speaking neighbors, and racial and cultural affinity provided a common bond for all white Protestant colonists.³

This shared political outlook was fully revealed after 1763 as the colonies came into conflict with the British government. Though each colony had its own grievances, the underlying rationale was the same and the common ideology gained clear expression in the resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765: Americans in all the colonies that possessed provincial legislatures found themselves struggling to preserve what they saw as basic protections of their rights and liberties as British citizens. The continuing argument quickly transposed this sense of a common British citizenship into an exclusive American self-identification, as the colonists concluded by 1774 that the failure of people in Britain to prevent the repeated threats to colonial liberties meant that the people there were corrupt and no longer capable of defending liberty. Thus the degeneration of the home country made America “God’s last best hope” for the preservation of civil freedoms. In these circumstances, colonial newspapers, notably in the South, increasingly used the word “American” as the common descriptor of the colonies and by 1773 were expressing a clear sense of continental identity. Even before fighting began, recent historians have detected the existence of “a distinct American political community.”⁴

The very character of the Revolution assisted the social construction of this national feeling. The transfer of power to the former colonies was justified on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, but that principle was necessarily based on the assumption—clearly expressed in the Declaration of Independence of 1776—that Americans constituted a single, coherent “people.” Aware of the need for outward expressions of this identity, Americans everywhere adapted traditional British street celebrations into rituals that legitimized the new order; the toasts—initially always thirteen in number—offered at public festivals expressed national rather than provincial pride. Most important, the reports of the scattered events of the Revolution and of local celebrations then circulated through the press, giving them a national import and helping to create what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined political community.” Indeed, we might argue that the sense of American nationality gained deep roots so quickly because the binding thread of a common “print-language,” so essential for creating an awareness of sharing a communal identity, was not restricted to an upper class, since literacy was already widespread and newspapers were extraordinarily numerous. Hence the evidence of recent cultural historians increasingly suggests, in David Waldstreicher’s words, that “Americans practiced nationalism before they had a fully developed national state.”⁵

In practice, a Union government was established even before the separate states had a legal existence. Faced by British military and naval power, the colonies had no choice (as Franklin said) but to hang together. The Continental Congress, called in 1774, swiftly began to act in the collective interest of the colonies, authorizing a Continental Association to embargo trade with Britain, raising a Continental army, issuing a Continental currency, and negotiating with foreign powers, long before its constitutional powers were defined. The Association of October, 1774, in particular was an act of revolutionary nationalism, with Congress bypassing provincial governments and directly ordering the creation of extralegal local authorities, which was accepted with “an amazing agreement through the continent.” As the crisis deepened in 1776 the Virginia House of Burgesses recognized that it was inappropriate for a single colony to declare its independence and so pressed its representatives in Philadelphia to persuade Congress to take the critical step on behalf of the whole American people. It may have been difficult—in John Adams’s famous phrase—to make thirteen clocks strike as one, but the United States took its stand as an integral political entity on the world scene long before any state asserted its sovereignty. When foreign powers recognized Congress as the legitimate and authoritative exponent of the Union’s will, in both the French alliance of 1778 and the peace treaty of 1783, they in effect recognized the priority of the sovereignty of the United States.⁶

Popular commitment to the new republic gained deep emotional roots as a result of the War for Independence. Just as the French and Indian wars had a unifying effect on sentiment before 1763, so Americans sanctified their cause by the spilling of blood together in resisting the British effort to conquer them. Some historians have argued that the fighting between 1775 and 1781 had probably a greater impact on proportionately more of the American population than the Civil War fourscore and ten years later, as ordinary people all over the country bullied neighbors, fought skirmishes, had property impounded, and suffered harassment, injury, and tragic loss. In the South, the last eighteen months of the struggle degenerated into a guerrilla, even terrorist, war between Patriot and Loyalist neighbors. The memory of the war subsequently became the touchstone of national feeling, just as the Civil War did for the late nineteenth century. Strikingly, the Congress agreed in the early 1780s that, since the war had been a common effort, those states such as South Carolina that had paid out proportionately more than average for the war effort should be recompensed by the states that had paid less. A congressional settlement commission promptly began to audit state accounts in order to apportion the cost of the war among the states on a per capita basis, though this commitment to back patriotic sentiment with hard cash remained unfulfilled in the 1780s because of postwar financial difficulties and Congress’s lack of authority.⁷

The weakness of Congress after the war reflects the reality that the new republic was made up of thirteen very different and widely separated states, each proudly asserting the provincial autonomy that it believed Britain had threatened. Moreover, the ideology of the Revolution emphasized the principle of self-determination and insisted that the states came together in voluntary association. As a consequence, the Articles of Confederation (drafted in 1776–77 but not ratified until 1781) expressed the conviction of the states that Congress must not become an overly powerful central government that might threaten the plural and decentralized nature of the Union. But, faced after 1783 by the republic’s ineffectiveness in dealing with hostile foreign powers and imperial neighbors, and experiencing the disruptive social and political consequences of the postwar financial and economic crisis, politically aware Americans faced up to the need for constitutional revision remarkably quickly. The new Constitution of 1787 was produced by a nationally conscious political elite that welded together an overwhelming coalition of merchants and urban artisans, young men and old patriots, slaveholders and capitalists, major ports and financially overstrained states, exposed frontier areas and metropolitan interests. The eleven state conventions that approved the Constitution before 1789 did so, overall, by a two-to-one margin among their members.⁸

This decision has often been seen—like the initial Act of Union in 1776—as a forced response to the critical situation in which the newly independent states found themselves. Thus, it is argued, continental institutions were necessarily created before a true sense of nationhood existed. Since, according to John Murrin, “American national identity was…an unexpected, impromptu, artificial, and therefore extremely fragile creation of the Revolution,” the Founding Fathers were apparently doomed to erect over their heads a national roof that was not supported by the walls of popular nationalism.⁹ Of course, American national identity was ill defined and the process of defining its meanings would take many decades, lasting long beyond the Civil War, but many indications confirmed that a basic sense of American political community did already exist. For example, when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote a series of newspapers articles in 1788 to help secure the ratification of the Constitution in New York—the famous Federalist Papers—they necessarily emphasized the pragmatic utility of the Union and the merits of the new constitutional scheme, but their argument constantly assumed, and without any disagreement from their opponents, that a single “American people” existed that rightly belonged together in some sort of political relationship.¹⁰

Indeed, the decision to create a “more perfect Union” in 1787–88 cannot be satisfactorily explained without the prior existence of some sense of nationality. After all, those who opposed ratification of the Constitution—the “Antifederalists”—controlled at least six of the ratifying conventions when they first met, but proved unwilling to vote the new scheme down. In the New Hampshire convention, a number of Antifederalists who had been instructed to vote against the Constitution voted for an adjournment instead; and the four-month interim was then successfully used to persuade their constituents that their fears of the proposed system were groundless. The truth was that the Antifederalists were not hostile to the Union: they wanted to preserve the existing “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” (my italics), but with a few necessary amendments that experience had already shown could not pass the amendment process laid down in the Articles, which required the agreement of all the states. Lacking a viable alternative of their own, enough Antifederalists were persuaded by the merits of the proposed scheme—and encouraged by the promise of a Bill of Rights—to produce the necessary majorities; and by the time of the first federal elections in the fall of 1788 even the most recalcitrant of their fellows had accepted the new framework and promptly worked within it. Their ideas persisted, but in future the former Antifederalists of 1787–88 would argue over the meaning of the Constitution, not its legitimacy.¹¹

The coming together of the states in 1787–88 may, within limits, be thought of as comparable to an international diplomatic negotiation. Certainly the Founders feared that internecine wars would follow a breakup of the Union, but they also had the advantage of the ideological, cultural, emotional, and practical bonds that meant they negotiated as something more than potential partners. Certainly the Constitution provided a significant model of how relationships between international powers might be civilized in future through the creation of international law, but it also created so much more than a “peace pact,” so much more than “a league of states.” It transformed the Thirteen Colonies, with their varying constitutions and im...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Part I One and Inseparable
• Part II And the War Came …
• Part III Emancipation: Race and Gender in the Civil War
• Part IV Legacy
• Timeline
• Guide to Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors