What Caused the Civil War? Ayers Draft 6/22/05
What Caused the Civil War? Ayers Draft 6/22/05
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ON THE SIMPSONS, a popular ani- states’ rights” or “Southerners just wanted sides see crucial parts of the problem, but mated satire of American life, Apu to be left alone with their way of life.” it has proved difficult to reconcile the Nahasapeemapetilan, an industrious People deliver these explanations with an perspectives because they approach the South Asian immigrant in Springfield, air of savvy common sense, of putting the Civil War with different assumptions U.S.A., has studied hard for his citizen- matter to rest. about what drives history.2 One focuses ship test. “What was the cause of the Civil Historians are exasperated by such on deep social and cultural structures, the War?” is the final question on the oral assertions. No respected historian has other on public events close in time and quiz. “Actually, there were numerous argued for decades that the Civil War was consequence to the war’s beginning. Both causes,” says Apu. “Aside from the obvi- fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were perspectives see essential aspects of the ous schism between the abolitionists and mere hypocrites, or that only constitu- problem, but neither sees it whole. the anti-abolitionists, there were eco- tional concerns drove secession. Nor does Fundamentalists claim with confi- nomic factors, both domestic and in- any historian argue that white Northern- dence that the Civil War was a struggle ter—” The official, clearly bored with ers, suddenly discovering that slavery was over the future of the United States and such superfluous erudition, intones a gross injustice to African Americans, can say with justice that the war pitted flatly: “Just say slavery.” Apu eagerly con- rose up in 1861 to sacrifice 350,000 of slavery against freedom. Revisionists can cedes the point: “Slavery it is, sir.” With their sons, brothers, and fathers to eman- truthfully say that the Civil War was this declaration Apu wins his American cipate the slaves. Yet one still hears the caused by the disintegration of the citizenship.1 old explanations in virtually any discus- Democrats, the failure of compromise, Why is this funny? It’s not because sion of the Civil War. and the election of Abraham Lincoln. For slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, The challenge of explaining the Civil the fundamentalists, slavery is front and but because the bureaucrat demands a War has led historians to seek clarity in center; for the revisionists, slavery is bur- rote answer to explain a profoundly com- two ways of thought. One school, the fun- ied beneath layers of white ideology and plex problem at the center of the nation’s damentalists, emphasizes the intrinsic, politics. As thousands of books and ar- experience. Some Americans of course inevitable conflict between slavery and ticles show, both schools have a point. have other short explanations for the free labor. The other, the revisionists, “What caused the Civil War?” mis- Civil War. “It was really just economics,” emphasizes discrete events and political leads us because it seems such a straight- one often hears, or “it was really about structures rather than slavery itself. Both forward question. The implication of What Caused the Civil
EDWARD L. AYERS
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“what” is that some factor can be isolated, The Civil War came by a number of confusion, miscalculation. Both sides held apart from everything else. “Cause” small steps, each with an explicit logic all underestimated the location of funda- evokes a mechanical model of action and its own. Combined, these small steps led mental loyalty in the other. Both received reaction. “The” implies that the Civil War to large unanticipated consequences. incorrect images of the other in the par- was the four-year set of battles and out- Each period in the struggle between 1859 tisan press. Political belief distorted each comes that eventually unfolded, includ- and 1861, despite recurring language and side’s view of the other’s economy and ing Union victory and emancipation. personalities, was framed differently, pre- class relations. Both sides believed the Such a simple question virtually demands sented different challenges, permitted other was bluffing, both believed that the a simple answer. different solutions, and pushed toward other’s internal differences and conflicts We really need a series of questions different outcomes. The frame of percep- would lead it to buckle, and both believed that combine the structural explanation tion and decision making before John they had latent but powerful allies in the of the fundamentalists with the dynamic Brown differed from that which fol- other region that would prevent war. By explanation of the revisionists. The ques- lowed; that frame changed again when the time people made up their minds to tions should acknowledge that what be- the parties put four candidates in the fight, slavery itself had become obscured. came the Civil War was caused over and field, again when Lincoln won the Re- Southern white men did not fight for sla- over again as it changed from a political publican nomination, again when Lin- very; they fought for a new nation built conflict to a military conflict to a struggle coln won the election, again when the on slavery. White Northerners did not over emancipation. We need to set aside Gulf South states seceded, again when fight to end slavery; they fought to de- our knowledge of later events and their Fort Sumter was fired upon and the fend the integrity of their nation. Yet sla- outcome to ask the first key question: troops were called out. Each frame dic- very, as Abraham Lincoln later put it, “What motivated millions of Americans tated the range of actions, and those “somehow” drove everything. to declare themselves as enemies of one ranges grew ever more restricted with What we might call “deep contin- another in 1859, in 1860, and in 1861?” each stage. gency” can help explain this puzzle. All We must push below the surface of fa- Slavery was a profound economic, social life is “contingent,” implicated and miliar events to see how people through- political, religious, and moral problem, unpredictable, because all parts of life out the social order thought of them- the most profound the nation has ever depend on one another. What we think selves and their responsibilities. faced. But that problem did not lead to of as public and private, economic and war in a rational, predictable way. The political, religious and secular, and mili- war came through misunderstanding, tary and civilian are deeply connected.
Reprinted from What Caused the Civil War? by Edward L. Ayers. Copyright ©2005 by War? Edward L. Ayers. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Fort Sumter, as it appeared shortly after the Federal surrender. Library of Congress
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Social change can start anywhere and lead greater the eagerness with which those political stance. Many of the largest anywhere. As a result, the most profound states seceded. The deep South had a slaveholders of Mississippi and Louisi- kinds of self-understanding can change higher percentage of slaves, and the deep ana did everything they could to keep radically and abruptly. The American South seceded before the border South.3 their counties and states in the Union. Civil War stands as an example of how But there are problems with such simple Despite the misleading impressions cre- history can suddenly pivot and take a new mathematics. First of all, if those same ated by statewide numbers, we find few direction. Histories of other nations in tables showed the number, rather than statistical links between individual other times record similar seismic the percentage, of slaves, the pattern slaveholding and votes on secession. changes, changes explainable only would change. In 1860, Virginia held Slaveholders were not necessarily more through deep contingency. more enslaved people than any other likely than nonslaveholders to vote for An argument for deep contingency Southern state. The border South was immediate secession. is based on the simple principle that the fully invested in slavery. Second, suggest- Slavery held profound meaning for best explanation reckons with the most ing that a delay in secession implied a lack every person who lived within its orbit. information. Simple explanations that of commitment to slavery ignores the Slavery’s power stretched all the way to ignore complication in an impatient de- geopolitical calculation that shaped the the Mason-Dixon Line, into every facet termination to get to a bottom line or root course of secession. Unionists in the bor- of life. Yet the force of slavery was re- cause are worse than useless. They give der South did not waver on slavery; they fracted through prisms of social prac- the false impression that we have ex- counseled, in fact, that union offered the tice and belief. Slavery defended itself plained something when we have not. best protection for slavery. They were cor- with Unionism as well as with secession, Those who want a demographic ex- rect. with delay as well as action. Each planation for the Civil War, for example, Moreover, even in the deep South county’s and state’s strategy depended make the point that the higher the per- white Southern self-interest in slavery, so on where it fitted in the machinery of centage of slaves in Southern states, the real and so obvious, did not lead to one American politics.4
Library Congress of
Ostendorf Collection
Library Congress of
Stephen A. Douglas John C. Breckinridge John Bell
Library ofLibrary Congress
“Dividing the National Map,” a satire of the 1860 presidential election. Three of that
Library Congress of contest’s candidates—(from left) Lincoln, Douglas, and Breckinridge—tear at the western and southern sections of a map of the United States, while another candidate, John Abraham Lincoln Bell (far right), attempts to mend the northeastern section with glue. 14 NORTH & SOUTH SEPTEMBER 2005 • VOL. 8 • NUMBER 5
Northern politics proved just as trayal. With each decision the next round The war as a conflict between a modern complicated as that of the South. Men of choices became even narrower: yes or North and a pre- or antimodern South.5 held political loyalties for reasons that no, now or never, with us or against us. In this kind of fundamentalist interpre- had little to do with slavery. Democrats Slavery drove the United States to the tation, everything fits together neatly. appealed to Catholics and to men who Civil War, as the fundamentalists argue, Economy, politics, religion, gender rela- wanted the government to tax them as but politics determined the momentum, tions, literacy, demography—everything little and to do as little as possible. Re- timing, and outcome of regional suspi- aligns along the opposing axes of mo- publicans appealed to Protestants and to cion and hostility, as the revisionists in- dernity on either side of the Mason- men who wanted the government to ac- sist. We can reconcile the truth of the fun- Dixon Line. This interpretation avoids celerate economic growth and expansion. damentalists with the truth of the granting the North an enlightened racial Slavery presented itself to many Repub- revisionists by focusing on the connec- vision but grants it instead the sanction licans as an obstacle to Northern tion between structure and event, on the of world history. The North could not progress. White Northerners strongly relationships between the long-existing help fighting for autonomy, technology, opposed to slavery often viewed the Re- problem of slavery and the immediate diversity, and progress, for that is what publicans with mistrust. Predicting world of politics. The Civil War was modernity demands. The South could which men in a county or state would caused neither by the mere existence of not help fighting for hierarchy, agricul- vote for the new Republican party proved slavery nor by the twists and turns of ture, homogeneity, and the past, for that challenging in 1860 and is difficult even politics, however, but rather by catalysts is what modernity has overcome. Exactly in retrospect. The gears of the Northern that emerged in the two or three decades why differing degrees of modernization political mechanism spun around many before the war began. needed to lead to war is left unexplained, axes, of which slavery was only one—and To understand these catalysts not always the most important one. we need to set aside a formula that The political mechanisms of the has come to seem obviously true: North, the South, and the nation as a whole had to be reset several times in the Right: Dred Scott (left) and late 1850s and early 1860s. The regular John Brown. rhythms of the 1840s, when victories be- tween the Democrats and Whigs swung back and forth in small and predictable arcs, gave way to erratic and jolting swings. The Whigs died, the Know-Noth- ings came and went, and the Republicans emerged. Powerful and unforeseeable events jarred the regular patterns of elec- tions. John Brown’s raid and the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln’s election and the secession conventions made the old po- litical mechanism seem obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of events. The political meaning of slavery changed with each occurrence, shifting with events, re- actions to events, and reactions to the reactions. The political system itself helped bring on the Civil War. The mechanism assembled over the first half of the nine- teenth century turned around binary choices between two parties and only two parties. Party regulars demanded that true loyalists were all or nothing. To be undecided and open to persuasion was to be less than a man. As the two-party system strained and broke in the 1850s, American voters took this habit of mind with them; they felt driven to dichoto- ary of Congress mous choices of Republican or Demo- All Libr crat, Union or Confederacy. Voices of caution and moderation were drowned “Attack on the insurgents at the bridge by the railroad men” (c.1859) depicts out beneath charges of cowardice and be- members of John Brown’s band coming under fire during their raid on Harper’s Ferry. VOL. 8 • NUMBER 5 • SEPTEMBER 2005 NORTH & SOUTH 15 but it apparently seems self-evident to many people. The role of modernity in the Civil War might better be understood as a catalyst for both the North and the South rather than as a simple difference be- tween them. The debate and anger that fed into what became the Civil War con- tained “modern” elements that would not have existed before the middle of the nineteenth century: a struggle over a hypothetical railroad, a novel writ- ten by an obscure woman, an act of symbolic terrorism, a media war over a distant territory. There can be little doubt that the North embodied many elements of what we would now see as modern: high lit- Library Congress of eracy, rapidly growing towns and cities, early and widespread adoption of indus- Above: “A slave auction at trial methods, innovation in transporta- the south” (c. 1861) by tion and communication, the dominance Theodore R. Davis depicts black men, women, and of market values, and strong political en- children being auctioned off gagement by a broad electorate of white for sale. men. The new Republican party com- Right: A group of Free bined these various notions in a potent Staters, who battled with ideology. The slave South generated fewer proslavery forces in Bleeding towns and factories than the North, to Kansas. be sure, and its lower population density sustained fewer schools and newspapers. all their own, that allowed the
ansas State Historical Society, Topeka Historical Society, ansas State On the other hand, the white South wel- Confederacy to form an enor- K comed political parties, nationalism, and mous army out of almost political mobilization; it welcomed print, nothing, and that permitted them to consequence. With the papers, events rapid change in ideas, and intimate con- wage effective war against the most thor- large and small stirred the American nection to the cultural centers of Europe oughly modern state in the world for four people every day. The press nurtured an- and the North; it welcomed the adoption years. Slavery was not accidental in this ticipation and grievance. Americans of of useful machinery of production and process, not a mere drag on progress, but the 1850s grew newly self-conscious, transportation, openness to immigra- gave the Confederacy its only reason for deeply aware of who they were and who tion, rapid growth in churches, higher existence. others said they were. The “North” and education, and missionary societies.6 Two critical components of moder- the “South” took shape in words before Make no mistake: Southern slavery nity shared by the North and the South— they were unified by armies and shared was, as W.E.B. DuBois put it, “a cruel, print and popular politics—created the sacrifice. dirty, costly and inexcusable anachro- necessary contexts for the war. Print per- It was surely no accident that a long- nism, which nearly ruined the world’s mitted people to cast their imaginations brewing sectional animosity boiled over greatest experiment in democracy,” a sys- and loyalties beyond the boundaries of when railroads, telegraphs, and newspa- tem of oppression that created “wide- their localities, to identify with people pers proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s. spread ignorance, undeveloped re- they had never met, to see themselves in Suddenly, local bargains and gentlemen’s sources, suppressed humanity and an abstract cause. People learned to imag- agreements in Washington could not unrestrained passions.”7 But the Ameri- ine consequences of actions, to live in the stand. Politicians could no longer get can South created prosperity for much future.8 away with saying one thing in one place of its white population, a sophisticated Print shaped everything we associ- and something altogether different some- means of communication and gover- ate with the coming of the Civil War. Al- where else, for their speeches raced ahead nance, and a sense among white South- though Bleeding Kansas was far removed of them by telegraph and newspapers. Ri- erners of themselves as an advanced and from the East and John Brown’s raid freed val editors wrenched the most inflamma- enlighted Christian people. The slave no slaves, these events gained critical sig- tory words out of context, underlining South, in other words, was modern in nificance because they were amplified their danger, amplifying their threat. Ter- precisely the ways that encouraged white and distorted by newspapers. Without ritorial expansion took on a new mean- Southerners to think of themselves as the papers, many events we now see as ing when railroads and steamboats ac- members of a new nation with a destiny decisive would have passed without wide celerated America’s frantic rush in every 16 NORTH & SOUTH SEPTEMBER 2005 • VOL. 8 • NUMBER 5
a process chemical in its complexity and subtlety. You mean, in short, history, the living connection among fundamental structures, unfolding processes, and un- predictable events. In one field of human understand- ing after another, a cultural historian has recently reminded us, causality has come to be understood in terms of “increas- ing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty.”10 Histori- cal understanding needs the same per- spective, what I have called deep contin- gency. The perspective argues for the intricate interplay of the structural and the ephemeral, the enduring and the emergent. Simple stories of intrinsic qualities and unfolding inevitability are not worthy of history. We should sim- ply refuse to settle for simple explana- tions for complex problems.
ary of Congress
Libr Deep contingency should be distin- guished from what we might call surface contingency, the familiar historical staples of accident, personality, and tim- Secession meeting in front of the Mills House on Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 1, 1860. ing, the clichés of what ifs and almosts. By itself, a recognition of surface con- direction, when American Indians were dividing them against their neighbors tingency leads only to the predictable ob- removed and foreign threats faded. and relatives. The political system existed servation that battles and elections are The Civil War was brought on by for such connections, for cooperation unpredictable. While surface contin- people imaginatively constructing chains and division. The system created policy gency can sometimes trigger deep con- of action and reaction beyond the bound- to help feed the machinery, created con- tingency, the great majority of unpre- aries of their own time and space. In dis- troversy to attract the undecided, created dictable events come and go without tinctly modern ways, people North and positions to reward the faithful. The sys- much consequence; deep contingency South in 1860 and 1861 anticipated tem was the end as well as the means.9 reverberates throughout the recesses of events, made warnings and threats, imag- The role of modernity in the Ameri- the social order. To understand deep ined their responses, imagined the re- can Civil War, in short, was exactly the contingency we must try to comprehend sponses of others. This is one reason the opposite of what we usually take it to be. a society as a whole, its soft structures of Civil War seems to have, as Lincoln put A modern North did not go to war to ideology, culture, and faith as well as its it, “come,” why the war seemed both in- eradicate an antimodern South. Instead, hard structures of economics and poli- evitable and surprising, easily explainable modernity was a shared catalyst between tics. All structures must be put into mo- yet somehow incomprehensible. People North and South, a shared medium, a tion and motion put into structures. It on both sides were playing out future sce- necessary precondition for anything like is hard, of course, perhaps impossible, narios even as they responded to imme- the war that began in 1861. to portay deep contingency in a fully sat- diate threats. They recognized how deeply What caused the Civil War? If you isfactory way, but that should not stop contingency could run and how quickly have to offer a one-word answer, go us from trying. things could shift; a Supreme Court de- ahead and just say slavery. But you There is no way to understand his- cision or a presidential election could should know what you mean by that tory except to study it, to question it, to change the evolution of vast structures of answer. The Civil War did not come from challenge it. History does not fit on a slavery and economic development. the sheer intolerable existence of slavery bumper sticker. New evidence, new The political system joined print in in a nation built on the ideals of free- methods, and new perspectives necessar- teaching Americans to think of them- dom, or from the past and the future ily change our understanding of history, selves as connected to places beyond their caught in a death struggle, or from a fa- and we should welcome revisionist his- communities. Long before an integrated miliar sequence of political events that tory just as we welcome revisionist medi- national economy evolved, political par- crashed into one another in a chain re- cine and revisionist science. History that ties welded American places together. The action like so many billiard balls. Rather, comes to us as nostalgia and fable does Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans gave you mean slavery as the key catalytic more harm than good. Honest history Americans common cause with people agent in a volatile new mix of democratic answers our questions only by asking who lived thousands of miles away while politics and accelerated communication, something of us in return. ■ VOL. 8 • NUMBER 5 • SEPTEMBER 2005 NORTH & SOUTH 17
EDWARD L. AYERS Bio Life and the American South, 1810–1860 number of railroad miles increased from (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro- 2,818 to 36,626. Lorman A. Ratner and lina Press, 2004); James Huston, Calcu- Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire- lating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Property Rights, and the Economic Origins Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University Press, 2003), 9, 18. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 24–66; 9. Important books that emphasize the dy- and Peter Carmichael, The Last Genera- namics of the political system itself in NOTES tion: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and bringing on the Civil War include 1. On The Simpsons, see the transcript for Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the the episode “Much Apu about Nothing,” North Carolina Press, 2005). 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978) and Po- written by David S. Cohen and directed 6. A stimulating and innovative account litical Parties and American Political De- by Susie Dietter, Production Code: 3F20, that emphasizes the modernity of the velopment from the Age of Jackson to the Original Airdate in N.A.: 5-May-96, Cap- Confederacy is Drew Gilpin Faust, The Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana sule revision C, 10-Jun-96, in “The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ide- State University Press, 1992); William E. Simpsons Archive” on the World Wide ology and Identity in the Civil War South Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Web: http://www.snpp.com/. I am grate- (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford ful to Scot French for calling this episode Press, 1989). On the projection of bound- University Press, 1986); William W. to my attention. aries in time, see Peter S. Onuf, “Federal- Freehling, The Road to Disunion: The Se- 2. See Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the ism, Republicanism, and the Origins of cessionists at Bay (New York: Oxford Uni- Coming of the Civil War: A American Sectionalism,” in Edward L. versity Press, 1990) and The Reintegration Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen of American History: Slavery and the Civil American History 90 (June 2003), 76–105. Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All over War (New York: Oxford University Press, Kornblith offers a useful survey of the lit- the Map: Rethinking American Regions 1994). erature on the issue. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 10. Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Cau- 3. See, for example, James M. McPherson, Press, 1996). On the South’s self-image, sality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Or- of Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univer- (New York: Oxford University Press, der: Intellectual Life and the American sity Press, 2004), 6. 1988), 255, and William W. Freehling, The South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: Univer- South vs. the South: How Anti-Confeder- sity of North Carolina Press, 2004). Any ate Southerners Shaped the Course of the explanation has to begin with the ac- Civil War (New York: Oxford University knowledgment that all white Southern- Press, 2001), 22–24. ers possessed an enormous and rational 4. For a thoughtful and helpful overview of economic interest in the institution. this literature, see Daniel W. Crofts, Re- James Huston has demonstrated that luctant Confederates: Upper South Union- property in enslaved people accounted ists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: for almost 19 percent of all the nation University of North Carolina Press, 1989). wealth in 1860 and that American slaves The local bases of politics in Virginia have were worth more than American rail- been portrayed in Crofts, Old roads and manufacturing combined. Southampton: Politics and Society in a Vir- Ranked by wealth per capita for the white ginia County, 1834–1869 (Charlottesville: population, the slave states were the rich- University Press of Virginia, 1992); the est in the United States; even the poorest complexities of its state-level politics ap- slaveholding state, North Carolina, pear in William G. Shade, Democratizing ranked ahead of New York, Pennsylvania, the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Sec- and Ohio. Huston, Calculating the Value ond Party System, 1824–1861 of the Union, 65. (Charlottesville: University Press of Vir- 7. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction: An ginia, 1996). Essay Toward a History of the Part Which 5. In addition to the books described in Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Recon- “Worrying about the Civil War” in this struct Democracy in America, 1800–1860 volume, the issue of modernity is ana- (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), lyzed in considerable detail in the digital 715. article prepared by William G. Thomas 8. This is the argument of one of the most III and myself: “The Differences Slavery influential books to appear in recent years Made: A Close Analysis of Two Ameri- in the social sciences: Benedict Anderson, can Communities,” American Historical Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Review 108 (December 2003): 1298–1307 Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. and http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR. and extended ed., London: Verso, 1991). In addition to the works discussed there, By 1860 the United States had 3,725 see Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel newspapers with an annual circulation of Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in nearly 888 million copies—up from 186.5 Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: million copies in 1840. The number of Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael telegraph miles in service went from 0 to O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual 50,000 in those twenty years, and the
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