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Conflict Source I
Yes. Slavery was the essential issue that divided the South from the North.
Even before the Civil War (1861-1865) began, debates about the causes already raged. In 1858, for example,
Republican Senator William Henry Seward of New York identified two alternate explanations of the sectional
tension that, within three years, divided the nation and exploded into war. There were, Seward argued, those who
regarded the sectional enmity as "accidental, unnecessary, [and] the work of interested or fanatical agitators." In
contrast (and opposition) to this group were others who, like Seward himself, believed there to be "an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces." Although Seward had no way of knowing that he had done so, he
outlined the contours of a debate that has engaged historians ever since.
The argument that the Civil War was "an irrepressible conflict" between the advocates and opponents of slavery
commanded the historiography early on. In the decades immediately following the war, historians generally
reflected the views of contemporaries who had participated in the conflict. To victorious Northerners, whose
interpretations prevailed, the war became a struggle between good and evil—a struggle that the depravity and
sinfulness of the slaveholders had made inevitable. According to this explanation, Southerners' unwillingness to
emancipate their slaves and their stubborn insistence on expanding slavery into the Western territories not only had
led to war but also had transformed that war into a moral crusade intent upon purging the land of evil. In History of
the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (1872-1877) Henry Wilson contended that Northerners had fought to preserve
both the Union and the system of free labor. They had taken up arms, Wilson observed, to defeat the insidious
designs of Southerners who would have destroyed capitalism and country to preserve bondage and tyranny.
A more moderate study that reached essentially the same conclusions was James Ford Rhodes's monumental History
of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893-1900). Like Wilson, Rhodes identified slavery as the
major, indeed as the only, cause of the war. "If the Negro had not been brought to America,"' Rhodes declared, "the
Civil War could not have occurred." Since the Northern and Southern views of slavery had, by the 1850s, become
entrenched, intractable, and irreconcilable, Rhodes concluded that compromise was impossible and that war was
thus "inevitable."
Although Rhodes focused on the moral and political controversy over slavery, he suggested at the same time that the
Civil War mirrored fundamental antagonisms between the Northern and Southern economic and labor systems,
which, as it turned out, also emerged as a result of the Southern commitment to slavery. Almost three decades
passed before the notion that the war was an irrepressible economic rather than moral conflict received full, careful,
and serious attention in Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization (1927). The Beards maintained
that slavery was not principally a social or cultural institution but an economic one, a system of organizing labor, not
society. "Inherent antagonisms" existed between Northern industrialists and Southern planters, each seeking to
dominate the federal government in order to safeguard its economic interests. Both the industrialists and planters
argued about slavery and states' rights to conceal their real quest for political and economic power.
The economic determinism of the Beards' interpretation influenced a generation of historians. Yet, most of those
who thought the Civil War "an irrepressible conflict" continued to search for its causes in the realm of political,
social, and cultural history. Allan Nevins underscored the importance of the social and cultural differences dividing
the North and the South in his great work, The Ordeal of the Union (1947-1971). Northerners and Southerners,
Nevins suggested, "were rapidly becoming separate peoples." At the root of this divergence was slavery.
Those historians who determined that war was an inevitable consequence of the fundamental antagonisms that
slavery engendered nonetheless differed markedly over whether to emphasize moral, cultural, social, political,
ideological, or economic causes. They generally agreed, however, that the animosity between the North and the
South was entrenched in the two societies, one slave and the other free, and that what Nevins called the crisis of the
Union was ultimately irrepressible.
Other historians rejected those conclusions and insisted that the differences between the North and the South were
not sufficiently important or irreconcilable to have started a war. The Civil War, according to this analysis, was a
tragic occurrence that more judicious statesmen could have avoided. President James Buchanan was perhaps the first
to advocate the idea that war was not inexorable, just as Senator Seward was among the first who thought that it
was. Buchanan was convinced that extremists, radicals, and agitators in both the North and the South had
unnecessarily encouraged the sectional' hostility that culminated in war. Had more prudent men silenced the
fanatics, war would not have come. Many Southerners who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century similarly
asserted that the anti-slavery fanaticism of the Republican Party had been responsible for inciting controversy and
conflict.
The thesis that war could have been avoided or prevented did not gain widespread currency among historians until
the 1920s and 1930s. Among the leading revisionists was James G. Randall, who discovered no difference so
elemental and deep-seated in the government, society, or culture of the North and South as to necessitate war. In The
Civil War and Reconstruction, originally published in 1937, Randall asserted that slavery was essentially benign and
was, in any event, already "crumbling in the presence of nineteenth-century tendencies" such as the rise and spread
of democracy. Only the political incompetence of a "blundering generation" of statesmen had brought on the Civil
War.
Avery Craven, another prolific revisionist historian, emphasized slavery as a cause of war more than Randall had
done. Yet, in The Coming of the Civil War (1942) Craven also remarked that the condition of the slaves was not
appreciably worse than that of Northern factory workers, and he agreed with Randall that slavery was on its way to
"ultimate extinction." Americans did not have to slaughter one another in a terrible war to destroy it. They could
have averted war altogether, Craven' wrote, had more skillful and responsible political leadership endeavored to
achieve a real and enduring compromise.
Since the 1960s many students of the war have modified and yet retained key elements of the revisionist thesis by
accentuating the role of political agitation in causing the war. In Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(1960), for example, David Herbert Donald affirmed that the politicians of the 1840s and 1850s were not unusually
inept. Rather, they had the misfortune to operate at a time when extensive economic changes and the rapid spread of
democracy had eroded traditional social, moral, and political restraints. Thus, the temperate, circumspect resolutions
to problems and differences that had worked in the past no longer applied.
In The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978) Michael Holt stressed the importance of the party system, rather than of
irreconcilable differences between the North and South, to detail the causes of civil war. Holt, though, was careful to
avoid blaming any one section, group (such as slaveholders or abolitionists), or political party. "Much of the story of
the coming of the Civil War," he concluded, "is the story of the successful efforts of Democratic politicians in the
South and Republican politicians in the North to keep the sectional conflict at the Center of the political debate."
Although the revisionist interpretation has of late gained ascendancy and made important contributions to the
understanding of the Civil War, the traditional interpretation that the war was an "irrepressible conflict" has not
disappeared, and indeed has, since the 1970s, recovered a, portion of its former credibility. In Free Soil, Free Labor,
Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970) Eric Foner made a powerful
restatement of the thesis that the war was an "irrepressible conflict," emphasizing the importance of the ideology of
free labor to winning support for the antislavery cause. The abolitionists' moral outrage over slavery, Foner
contended, did not prevail in the North. Northerners, who opposed slavery, including Abraham Lincoln, did so
primarily because they feared that it might spread to the North and West and thereby jeopardize the status of free
white laborers. Racism made many of the enemies of slavery more concerned with its effects on whites than on
blacks. Fearful that Southerners intended to extend slavery, Northerners, Foner avowed, were equally bent on
eradicating it. Such a determination made conflict inevitable.
The lines of historical debate are clear, but even after a conscientious reading of the varying authorities it is still
unclear whether Americans are any closer to understanding the role slavery played in causing a war that remains the
worst, and most tragic, ordeal in their national history. Slavery was essential to all that divided the North and the
South and, as such, was the most important cause of the Civil War. The war, however, was no mere struggle
between good and evil. It was, to be sure, a moral struggle—a struggle, as Eugene D. Genovese has long maintained,
between rival societies organized around rival social systems and dominated by rival social classes, each seeking to
vindicate the ways of God to man. Understood in this way, the war no longer seems a melodrama in which the
heroes and the villains are easily identifiable; rather, the tragic character of the Civil War becomes clearer if
historians approach it as a relentless struggle between two divergent societies and two alternate conceptions of the
good. For their part the slaveholders of the South, who thought of themselves as humane and Christian gentlemen,
could not have voluntarily given up their slaves. Doing so, in their minds, would have constituted an abdication of
their moral responsibilities, a failure to uphold the obligations with which God had entrusted them. They preferred to
go down in blood rather than to compromise, even though it made sense to rid themselves and their society of
slavery, which was arresting Southern economic development. As many Southerners read the signs of the dreadful
times to come, they concluded that their only hope of preserving their way of life lay in making a bold and desperate
attempt to win their independence from the Union. Their faith, pride, and determination made surrender to gradual
defeat and resignation to the slow and painful death of their world and their way of life unthinkable.
Historians, whatever their ideological perspective, can thus not avoid a confrontation with the tragic dimensions of
the Civil War. Southern slaveholders believed that slavery provided for a far more humane and Christian social
order than did the emerging industrial capitalism of the North. Just as Northerners feared a Southern threat, so
Southerners persuaded themselves that Northerners had grown implacably hostile to their social system, their
economic and political interests, their values, their morals, their worldview, and their way of life. Yet, for all the
integrity and honor that Southerners displayed, slavery was among the greatest enormities of the nineteenth century,
and, one way or another, slavery had to go. The war that ultimately brought about its destruction was an all but
inevitable engagement between two increasingly divergent civilizations, issued from the same seed, but, by 1860, no
longer able to live together under the same government or to coexist within a single nation.
-MARK G. MALVASI, RANDOLPH-MACON COLLEGE
Selected Bibliography
Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961).
Thomas Bonner, "Civil War Historians and the 'Needless War' Doctrine," Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (April
1956): 193-216.
Arthur C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870. (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919).
Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York: Scribners, 1942).
Craven, The Repressive Conflict, 1830-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939).
Marshall DeRosa, The Politics of Dissolution: The Quest for a National Identity & the American Civil War (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998).
David Herbert Donald, "American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War," South Atlantic Quarterly, 59
(Summer 1960): 351-355.
Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1960).
Donald, Liberty and Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Howard R. Floan, The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861 (New York: Haskell House, 1973).
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
(Athens: University, of Georgia Press, 1998).
Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, second
edition (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era,
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978).
Holt, The Rise and Fair of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of .the Civil War (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (New
York: Open Court, 1996).
Ludwell Johnson, Division and Reunion: America, 1848-1877 (New York: Wiley, 1978).
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, 8 volumes (New York: Scribners, 1947-1971).
Ann Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986).
David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968).
James G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, second revised edition (Lexington,
Mass.: Heath, 1969). James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 7 volumes (New York: Macmillan,
1893-1900).
John S. Rosenberg, "Toward a New Civil War Revisionism," American Scholar, 38 (Spring 1969): 250-272.
Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
Ernest L. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974).
Eric Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992),
William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966).
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Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, 3 volumes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872-1877).