Rethinking the Civil War Era

Directions for Research

Paul D. Escott

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813175379
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia della guerra civile americana

Arguably, no event since the American Revolution has had a greater impact on US history than the Civil War. This devastating and formative conflict occupies a permanent place in the nation's psyche and continues to shape race relations, economic development, and regional politics. Naturally, an event of such significance has attracted much attention from historians, and tens of thousands of books have been published on the subject. Despite this breadth of study, new perspectives and tools are opening up fresh avenues of inquiry into this seminal era.

In this timely and thoughtful book, Paul D. Escott surveys the current state of Civil War studies and explores the latest developments in research and interpretation. He focuses on specific issues where promising work is yet to be done, highlighting subjects such as the deep roots of the war, the role of African Americans, and environmental history, among others. He also identifies digital tools which have only recently become available and which allow researchers to take advantage of information in ways that were never before possible.

Rethinking the Civil War Era is poised to guide young historians in much the way that James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr.'s Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand did for a previous generation. Escott eloquently charts new ways forward for scholars, offering ideas, questions, and challenges. His work will not only illuminate emerging research but will also provide inspiration for future research in a field that continues to adapt and change.

1

Understanding the Roots of War

A fundamental part of Civil War studies has always been analysis of the causes of the war. Except for books about Lincoln and military history, which have included the work of many nonacademic historians, probably no other topic has attracted as much attention. And perhaps in no other area have change and progress been so great. The overall way that we try to understand the roots of the war is very different now from the way it was understood in the 1960s or 1970s.

When I began graduate school, many important studies focused their attention on the events of the sectional conflict, the friction points that eventually led to civil war. Through careful research, historians tried to understand the sequence of North–South conflicts, how each collision affected the Union, and how these successive clashes aggravated the tensions that brought about secession. Some interpretations had a pro-Southern slant, whereas others showed more appreciation for abolitionists or Northern antislavery sentiment. If many scholars were moving away from James G. Randall’s earlier argument that a “blundering generation” of politicians caused a needless war, the focus of their attention had not changed. Their priority remained to elucidate the debates and crises that produced growing tension.

The efforts of this period produced some outstanding research and trenchant analysis. If Roy Nichols previously had identified the way battles over the right to petition broadened into fear of a Slave Power, others such as Joel Silbey and Michael Holt offered important new insights about party realignment. To understand the actions of political leaders, we continue today to turn to studies of the Compromise of 1850 as well as of Henry Clay or Stephen Douglas or John C. Calhoun or others, and valuable studies of such prominent leaders continue to appear. One of the most enduring of all the political histories is David M. Potter’s book The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861.¹ Through extensive archival research, Potter was able to show what key leaders were thinking as their goals and measures collided, and his insightful analysis clarified the dynamics and dimensions of their disagreements.

We can note that much of this work was history written from the inside out rather than from the outside in. That is, such studies moved from the particular to the general; they scrutinized certain events and selected individuals in order to move toward an overall interpretation, an understanding of the larger dynamic. Their careful research placed us in the minds of sectional leaders and positioned us with them in the arena of their conflicts so that we could better grasp the decline of consensus and the march toward conflict. From individual events, historians would assemble a larger picture; from details and the analysis of them, they would construct a broader interpretation.

Additional evidence that this approach could be very fruitful came from the work of Bertram Wyatt-Brown. In his writings about the culture of honor, Wyatt-Brown demonstrated how the thinking and values of elite Southerners were different from those of our era. His description of their emotional patterns could be revelatory because those patterns have faded from modern society. Explaining and putting himself into the angry reactions of Southern leaders, Wyatt-Brown offered explanations for the coming of the war that were grounded in emotional states. He concluded, for example, that “the lower South separated from the Union out of a sense of almost uncontrollable outrage…. Southern whites increasingly felt deeply insulted to the point of disunion and war…. Anger and frustration were the root emotions that drove Southerners to secede, a visceral response to a collective sense of degradation and disgrace.” It would be difficult to imagine a clearer example of analysis that moved from the inside, or personal dimension, to the outside and its larger picture.²

Essentially different was history written from the outside in—that is, history that offered an interpretation of the big picture in order to explain and illuminate the smaller elements that played their role in successive events. Noting the difference, Paul Quigley has recently argued (in praise of a book by Michael Wood) that emotions “ought to be seen not as the fundamental cause of the war, but rather as a means by which Americans converted underlying socioeconomic differences into highly charged northern and southern sectional identities.”³ Such socioeconomic differences have been a focus of important and expanding research. In a previous era, Charles and Mary Beard had presented an overarching argument about the dynamic and meaning of the Civil War that inspired various studies to test the validity of their argument about industrial versus agrarian forces. In the early phases of my career, the most influential example of this approach to understanding the war’s causes was the interpretive work of Eugene G. Genovese.

For all that Genovese knew about Southern agriculture or about individual leaders, their writings, or particular crises—and he knew a great deal—his analysis was outside in. It began with and grew out of a Gramscian and Marxist conceptual framework that determined the big picture. The Slave South, insisted Genovese, was not a capitalist society like that of the North. Rather, it was at an earlier, precapitalist stage of Marxist development, and its social relations derived from the hegemony and societal prestige of the planters, whose values had a dominant influence. Those values were seigneurial and patriarchal rather than crassly profit oriented. Slavery was the foundation of their prestige and the central pillar of their social dominance. Because the world these slaveholders made had to expand, the territorial conflict with the North was unavoidable.

As a powerful thinker and prolific writer, Genovese stimulated many studies that sought to examine, test, or modify his interpretation. It is not necessary here to specify in detail what parts of his work have been most supported or rejected. What is striking, however, is that his effort to identify the largest, most systemic causes of the conflict has become a dominant direction in impressive new work. A great deal of the influential research in recent decades has focused on the big picture rather than on the particular events. That is, the approach taken by many fine historians has been from the outside in, and as a result we have a much fuller, more compelling sense of the forces behind the sectional conflict. Our attention rests now on large systems, economic movements, and trans-Atlantic and global patterns that reveal the roots of the Civil War.

For me, a striking illustration of the usefulness of a big-picture approach came in an article published by Chandra Miller [Manning] in 2000. She documented the close friendship and mutual respect that existed between John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun when both were members of James Monroe’s cabinet. At that time, Adams regarded Calhoun as being “above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of the Union, with whom I have ever acted”! When the Missouri crisis arose, however, they discovered the gulf that lay between them. To Adams, slavery threatened both republicanism and the Union, and he assumed that its end in some way was ultimately necessary. For Calhoun, in contrast, the protection of slaveholders’ interests—or rights, as he saw them—was essential to liberty and the Union, and he made clear that he would choose disunion whenever necessary to protect slavery. The unexpected scope of disagreement between these two friends showed how ineffective compromises would be in removing a clash that was fundamental. Large forces that had not previously been visible to these close friends immediately overrode their personal relationship.⁴

In the early days of the Union, Adams and Calhoun had been able to overlook the deep differences that related to slavery. So had many of their contemporaries, who saw evidence of nationalism and then an “era of good feelings” following the War of 1812. But early clashes over slavery had been common, though contained, as John Craig Hammond, Brian Schoen, and others have documented. The fact that early disagreements did not create a sense of crisis before 1820 was due more to Congress’s weakness than to any shared consensus between North and South. That crisis was coming, and it would reoccur.⁵

The message that powerful economic forces and financial interests were behind the growing crisis emerges unmistakably from recent important work that has sharpened and immensely broadened our frame of reference. James Huston argues that “property rights in slaves generated the sectional conflict, that the concentration of valuable [slave] property in one region thwarted any attempt at compromise and undermined the genius of the democratic process.” Using congressional debates and other speeches, Huston has marshalled many quotations from Southern leaders who emphasized exactly that point, decrying that property worth $2 billion “was in peril” in 1850 or that Lincoln’s election in 1860 rendered “insecure a property valued at $3,000,000,000.” Moreover, he documents how vast the South’s $3 billion worth of slave property was in the world of the nineteenth century. The value of slave property at that time was far greater than all US investment in railroads and manufacturing combined. Planters, who owned somewhat more than half of all slaves, by themselves had almost as much wealth as all northern railroads and manufacturing combined. Those large slaveholders made up only 3 percent of Southern society, yet they made up 70 percent of the richest persons in the nation. Because Northerners thought of wealth in terms of land and buildings rather than in terms of slaves, it was easy for them to think of the South as less wealthy, “even though … they were peons compared with southerners.”⁶

Determined to protect their wealth, Southern leaders worried that governments defined what property rights were and were not, and so they demanded absolute security for their “property” in slaves. The struggles over the territories were not about state rights, argues Huston, but about property rights, and Southerners “used a property rights argument … unabatedly until the moment of secession.” Protection of their rights had to be national in scope, even though the Constitution gave Congress power over the territories. Therefore, they insistently sought protection for slavery in the territories. Their demand for an absolute guarantee of their property rights in slaves collided, however, with Northern interests because “property rights in slaves created an unfair labor market that ruined the opportunities for free northern village labor.” Northerners could not let the South define property rights “because it meant the possible extension of slavery into the North and the ruination of their society.” One valuable aspect of Huston’s work is that he attempts to identify changes in the political system that caused conflict to become especially sharp in the 1850s. More could be done, especially at the level of popular culture, to explain the timing of this clash. After all, many Americans had accepted Henry Clay’s argument that the differing economies and labor systems of North and South were complementary and mutually supportive.⁷

Huston makes his economic case for slavery’s massive importance by concentrating on the South and the United States, and Edward Baptist documents in impressive fashion how important slavery was to the entire American economy. Others have powerfully enlarged that argument by taking an Atlantic or global perspective. Their work has located slavery and the cotton economy firmly within the currents of Atlantic events and thought and even more within the global rise of the cotton-textile industry. Earlier studies of abolitionism, of course, had devoted much attention to the cross-fertilization of British antislavery and American abolitionism and to the influence of emancipation in the Caribbean. Edward Rugemer has more recently made those Atlantic connections even more tangible by showing how they affected many ordinary citizens. For example, in various cities near the Atlantic coast in the North, local groups celebrated the First of August—the day when emancipation arrived in the British West Indies. These celebrations grew in number through the years and became part of local traditions. By the 1850s, they had spread beyond the Atlantic coast into more western states.⁸

That phenomenon showed that events in the Atlantic were inspiring some Northerners to address questions relating to slavery at home. Events in Europe also affected attitudes in America, particularly the nature of nationalist feelings on this continent. The democratically inspired revolutions in Europe in 1848 had a strong impact on nationalist feelings in the United States. The preexisting pride in the Union, as an example to the world of rule by the people, gained additional strength. Many American politicians and editors praised European patriots’ efforts to bring a more democratic government to their lands. They lauded and feted men such as Louis Kossuth in Hungary, who toured the United States and gave inspiring speeches about democratic ideals. The “Young America” movement gained strength and had Southern as well as Northern advocates. In the 1850s, it was even a subset of the Democratic Party. The failure or defeat of the revolutions of 1848 initially convinced nationalists here that America was exceptional. Within a few years, however, nationalist feelings in the United States diverged along sectional lines. The growing conflicts over slavery then convinced some Northerners that Southern politicians were introducing alien, undemocratic, and dangerous values. Southern efforts to plant slavery in Kansas and the violence that broke out there seemed a descent into European-style violence and despotism. Thus, the comparison with Europe began to suggest to some Northerners that pro-slavery forces must be resisted, even by violence if necessary.⁹

Edward Rugemer also has shown how Southerners reacted to and were affected by international developments, at least by those occurring in the Caribbean. A series of slave revolts or uprisings on various islands in the Caribbean received extensive newspaper coverage in the United States. That startling news, when added to slave uprisings in this country, convinced alarmed Southerners and many Northerners that all talk of liberty for slaves was dangerous and that a gag rule was necessary and justified. One topic for further investigation is how foreigners viewed this energized defense of slavery and the extent to which citizens of the United States worried about their nation’s reputation abroad. Certainly, Abraham Lincoln decried the damage that slavery did to America’s image as a republican government. It remains less clear how much Northern Democrats or Southerners thought about their standing in the Atlantic world. Little more than a decade before secession, Stephen Douglas was one of the Northern Democrats most involved in the Young America movement. After taking great pride in the example of self-government that the United States set before the world, did Douglas or other Democrats worry about the damage that sectionalism was causing to the country’s international image? Did Southern radicals give much thought to international reactions as they pursued their interests? Did they have connections with British or European leaders comparable to those that abolitionists and Northern reformers enjoyed?¹⁰

Sven Beckert’s impressive book Empire of Cotton: A Global History anchors Southern economic and social developments within not just an Atlantic context but a global frame of reference. European powers first employed war capitalism to conquer new lands and create global networks of trade in cotton. It was this war capitalism that “opened fresh lands and mobilized new labor, becoming the essential ingredient of the emerging empire of cotton” and the forging of industrial capitalism. But as British mills expanded, by 1800 they needed ever more cotton, and the fertile lands of the US Gulf of Mexico region could answer that need. After the invention of the gin, cotton production in the Gulf South soared because the US government seized Indian lands and legitimized the power of masters over their slaves. The “combination of expropriated lands, slave labor, and the domination of a state that gave enormous latitude to slave owners over their labor” proved to be “fabulously profitable.” As a major supplier of this empire of cotton, Southern planters amassed the wealth described by Huston. Beckert goes on to highlight the extensive ties between slavery in the South and American industrial development in the North. “Capitalism rested on the coexistence of war capitalism … with industrial capitalism,” in which “state power rather than masters” legislated property rights and encouraged “a powerful new system of wage labor.” Industrial capitalism, based on wage labor, legal definitions of property rights, and repression of workers’ movements, would become the giant of the postwar era.¹¹

But if we now have a far clearer image of the slaveholding cotton South as a wealthy part of the developing, global system of capitalism, we face new questions about its economic nature. An additional body of new work has revived old complications about descriptive or conceptual categories and created a new challenge for historians. The former debate about whether the slave South was capitalist or not has taken on new dimensions, and historians need to develop new categories for understanding the South’s character and the outlook or mindset of its leaders. What kind of economy did the South have? If not precapitalist and seigneurial, was it modernizing, partly capitalist, capitalist, or something else? How did its special features fit within the model of capitalist development? What is the correct way to describe the views of its leaders on political economy?¹²

On the one hand, the slave-based economy and wealth of the South were not an advantage for industrialization. “Slave states” worldwide, noted Beckert, “were notoriously late and feeble in supporting the political and economic interests ...