essay on what caused the civil war

What Were the Top Causes of the Civil War?

• M.A., History, University of Florida
• B.A., History, University of Florida

The question “What caused the U.S. Civil War?” has been debated since the horrific conflict ended in 1865. As with most wars, however, there was no single cause.

The Civil War erupted from a variety of longstanding tensions and disagreements about American life and politics. For nearly a century, the people and politicians of the Northern and Southern states had been clashing over the issues that finally led to war: economic interests, cultural values, the power of the federal government to control the states, and, most importantly, slavery in American society.

While some of these differences might have been resolved peacefully through diplomacy, the institution of slavery was not among them. With a way of life steeped in age-old traditions of white supremacy and a mainly agricultural economy that depended on the labor of enslaved people, the Southern states viewed enslavement as essential to their very survival.

Slavery in the Economy and Society

At the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the enslavement of people not only remained legal in all 13 British American colonies, but it also continued to play a significant role in their economies and societies.

Before the American Revolution, the institution of slavery in America had become firmly established as being limited to persons of African ancestry. In this atmosphere, the seeds of white supremacy were sown.

Even when the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789, very few Black people and no enslaved people were allowed to vote or own property.

However, a growing movement to abolish slavery had led many Northern states to enact abolitionist laws and abandon enslavement. With an economy based more on industry than agriculture, the North enjoyed a steady flow of European immigrants. As impoverished refugees from the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, many of these new immigrants could be hired as factory workers at low wages, thus reducing the need for enslaved people in the North.

How Slavery Spread Through the South

In the Southern states, longer growing seasons and fertile soils had established an economy based on agriculture fueled by sprawling plantations owned by White people that depended on enslaved people to perform a wide range of duties.

When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became very profitable. This machine was able to reduce the time it took to separate seeds from the cotton. At the same time, the increase in the number of plantations willing to move from other crops to cotton created an even greater need for enslaved people. The Southern economy became a one-crop economy, depending on cotton and, therefore, on enslaved people.

Though it was often supported throughout the social and economic classes, not every White Southerner enslaved people. The population of the pro-slavery states was around 9.6 million in 1850 and only about 350,000 were enslavers. This included many of the wealthiest families, several of whom owned large plantations. At the start of the Civil War , at least 4 million enslaved people were forced to live and work on the Southern plantations.

Conflict Between the North and the South

In contrast, industry ruled the economy of the North and less emphasis was on agriculture, though even that was more diverse. Many Northern industries were purchasing the South's raw cotton and turning it into finished goods.

This economic disparity also led to irreconcilable differences in societal and political views.

In the North, the influx of immigrants—many from countries that had long since abolished slavery—contributed to a society in which people of different cultures and classes lived and worked together.

The South, however, continued to hold onto a social order based on white supremacy in both private and political life, not unlike that under the rule of racial apartheid that persisted in South Africa for decades .

In both the North and South, these differences influenced views on the powers of the federal government to control the economies and cultures of the states.

States and Federal Rights

Since the time of the American Revolution , two camps emerged when it came to the role of government. Some people argued for greater rights for the states and others argued the federal government needed to have more control.

The first organized government in the U.S. after the Revolution was under the Articles of Confederation. The 13 states formed a loose Confederation with a very weak federal government. However, when problems arose, the weaknesses of the Articles caused the leaders of the time to come together at the Constitutional Convention and create, in secret, the U.S. Constitution .

Strong proponents of states' rights like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were not present at this meeting. Many felt that the new Constitution ignored the rights of states to continue to act independently. They felt that the states should still have the right to decide if they were willing to accept certain federal acts.

This resulted in the idea of nullification , whereby the states would have the right to rule federal acts unconstitutional. The federal government denied states this right. However, proponents such as John C. Calhoun —who resigned as vice president to represent South Carolina in the Senate—fought vehemently for nullification. When nullification would not work and many of the Southern states felt that they were no longer respected, they moved toward thoughts of secession.

Pro-Slavery States and Free States

As America began to expand—first with the lands gained from the Louisiana Purchase and later with the Mexican War —the question arose of whether new states would be pro-slavery states or free states. An attempt was made to ensure that equal numbers of free states and pro-slavery states were admitted to the Union, but over time this proved difficult.

The Missouri Compromise passed in 1820. This established a rule that prohibited enslavement in states from the former Louisiana Purchase north of the latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, except for Missouri.

During the Mexican War, the debate began about what would happen with the new territories the U.S. expected to gain upon victory. David Wilmot proposed the Wilmot Proviso in 1846, which would ban enslavement in the new lands. This was shot down amid much debate.

The Compromise of 1850 was created by Henry Clay and others to deal with the balance between pro-slavery states and free states. It was designed to protect both Northern and Southern interests. When California was admitted as a free state, one of the provisions was the Fugitive Slave Act . This held individuals responsible for harboring freedom-seeking enslaved people, even if they were located in free states.

Tensions Around Slavery Rise

The  Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was another issue that further increased tensions. It created two new territories that would allow the states to use popular sovereignty to determine whether they would be free states or pro-slavery states. The real issue occurred in Kansas where pro-slavery Missourians, called "Border Ruffians," began to pour into the state in an attempt to force it toward slavery.

Problems came to a head with a violent clash at Lawrence, Kansas. This caused it to become known as " Bleeding Kansas ." The fight even erupted on the floor of the Senate when anti-slavery proponent Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was beaten on the head by South Carolina Sen. Preston Brooks.

The Abolitionist Movement

Increasingly, Northerners became more polarized against enslavement. Sympathies began to grow for abolitionists and against enslavement and enslavers. Many in the North came to view enslavement as not just socially unjust, but morally wrong.

The abolitionists came with a variety of viewpoints. People such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass wanted immediate freedom for all enslaved people. A group that included Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan advocated for emancipating enslaved people slowly. Still others, including Abraham Lincoln, simply hoped to keep slavery from expanding.

Many events helped fuel the cause for abolition in the 1850s.  Harriet Beecher Stowe  wrote " Uncle Tom's Cabin ," a popular novel that opened many eyes to the reality of enslavement. The Dred Scott Case  brought the issues of enslaved peoples' rights, freedom, and citizenship to the Supreme Court.

Additionally, some abolitionists took a less peaceful route to fighting against slavery. John Brown and his family fought on the anti-slavery side of "Bleeding Kansas." They were responsible for the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which they killed five settlers who were pro-slavery. Yet, Brown's best-known fight would be his last when the group attacked Harper's Ferry in 1859, a crime for which he would hang.

The Election of Abraham Lincoln

The politics of the day were as stormy as the anti-slavery campaigns. All of the issues of the young nation were dividing the political parties and reshaping the established two-party system of Whigs and Democrats.

The Democratic Party was divided between factions in the North and South. At the same time, the conflicts surrounding Kansas and the Compromise of 1850 transformed the Whig Party into the Republican Party (established in 1854). In the North, this new party was seen as both anti-slavery and for the advancement of the American economy. This included the support of industry and encouraging homesteading while advancing educational opportunities. In the South, Republicans were seen as little more than divisive.

The presidential election of 1860 would be the deciding point for the Union. Abraham Lincoln represented the new Republican Party and Stephen Douglas , the Northern Democrat, was seen as his biggest rival. The Southern Democrats put John C. Breckenridge on the ballot. John C. Bell represented the Constitutional Union Party, a group of conservative Whigs hoping to avoid secession.

The country's divisions were clear on Election Day. Lincoln won the North, Breckenridge the South, and Bell the border states. Douglas won only Missouri and a portion of New Jersey. It was enough for Lincoln to win the popular vote, as well as 180 electoral votes .

Even though things were already near a boiling point after Lincoln was elected, South Carolina issued its "Declaration of the Causes of Secession " on December 24, 1860. They believed that Lincoln was anti-slavery and in favor of Northern interests.

Southern States Begin Seceding From the Union

President James Buchanan's administration did little to quell the tension or stop what would become known as " Secession Winter ." Between Election Day and Lincoln's inauguration in March, seven states seceded from the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

In the process, the South took control of federal installations, including forts in the region, which would give them a foundation for war. One of the most shocking events occurred when one-quarter of the nation's army surrendered in Texas under the command of General David E. Twigg. Not a single shot was fired in that exchange, but the stage was set for the bloodiest war in American history.

Causes of the Civil War

• The U.S. Civil War stemmed from a complex web of tensions over economic interests, cultural values, federal government power, and most significantly, the institution of slavery.
• While the North and South clashed over these issues for decades, the Southern states, rooted in white supremacy and reliant on enslaved labor for their agricultural economy, viewed enslavement as indispensable to their way of life—thus setting the stage for conflict.
• The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, representing the anti-slavery Republican Party, triggered Southern states' secession from the Union, marking a point of no return and leading to the outbreak of the bloodiest war in American history.
• B.S., Texas A&M University

DeBow, J.D.B. "Part II: Population." Statistical View of the United States, Compendium of the Seventh Census . Washington: Beverley Tucker, 1854. 

De Bow, J.D.B. " Statistical view of the United States in 1850 ." Washington: A.O.P. Nicholson. 

Kennedy, Joseph C.G. Population of the United States 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the 8th Census . Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864.

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From States’ Rights to Slavery: What Caused the American Civil War?

The Northern and Southern sections of the United States developed along different lines. The South remained a predominantly agrarian economy while the North became more and more industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed. All of this led to disagreements on issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements as well as states’ rights versus federal rights. At the crux of it all, however, was the fight over slavery.

Causes of the Civil War

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The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution.

The agrarian South utilized slaves to tend its large plantations and perform other duties. On the eve of the Civil War, some 4 million Africans and their descendants toiled as slave laborers in the South. Slavery was interwoven into the Southern economy even though only a relatively small portion of the population actually owned slaves. Slaves could be rented or traded or sold to pay debts. Ownership of more than a handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position, and slaves, as the property of individuals and businesses, represented the largest portion of the region’s personal and corporate wealth, as cotton and land prices declined and the price of slaves soared.

The states of the North, meanwhile, one by one had gradually abolished slavery. A steady flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery.

Th e Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott was a slave who sought citizenship through the American legal system, and whose case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The famous Dred Scott Decision in 1857 denied his request stating that no person with African blood could become a U.S. citizen. Besides denying citizenship for African-Americans, it also overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had restricted slavery in certain U.S. territories.

States’ Rights

States’ Rights refers to the struggle between the federal government and individual states over political power. In the Civil War era, this struggle focused heavily on the institution of slavery and whether the federal government had the right to regulate or even abolish slavery within an individual state. The sides of this debate were largely drawn between northern and southern states, thus widened the growing divide within the nation.

Abolitionist Movement

By the early 1830s, those who wished to see that institution abolished within the United States were becoming more strident and influential. They claimed obedience to “higher law” over obedience to the Constitution’s guarantee that a fugitive from one state would be considered a fugitive in all states. The fugitive slave act along with the publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped expand the support for abolishing slavery nationwide.

Harriet Beecher S towe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabins was published in serial form in an anti-slavery newspaper in 1851 and in book format in 1852. Within two years it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. The book succeeded at its goal, which was to start a wave of anti-slavery sentiment across the nation. Upon meeting Stowe, President Lincoln remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

The Underground Railroad

Some abolitionists actively helped runaway slaves to escape via “the Underground Railroad,” and there were instances in which men, even lawmen, sent to retrieve runaways were attacked and beaten by abolitionist mobs. To the slave holding states, this meant Northerners wanted to choose which parts of the Constitution they would enforce, while expecting the South to honor the entire document. The most famous activist of the underground railroad was Harriet Tubman , a nurse and spy in the Civil War and known as the Moses of her people.

The Missouri Compromise

Additional territories gained from the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848 heightened the slavery debate. Abolitionists fought to have slavery declared illegal in those territories, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had done in the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Advocates of slavery feared that if the institution were prohibited in any states carved out of the new territories the political power of slaveholding states would be diminished, possibly to the point of slavery being outlawed everywhere within the United States. Pro- and anti-slavery groups rushed to populate the new territories.

In Kansas, particularly, violent clashes between proponents of the two ideologies occurred. One abolitionist in particular became famous—or infamous, depending on the point of view—for battles that caused the deaths of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. His name was John Brown. Ultimately, he left Kansas to carry his fight closer to the bosom of slavery.

The Raid On Harpers Ferry

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and a band of followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in what is believed to have been an attempt to arm a slave insurrection. (Brown denied this at his trial, but evidence indicated otherwise.) They were dislodged by a force of U.S. Marines led by Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee.

Brown was swiftly tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. Southern reaction initially was that his acts were those of a mad fanatic, of little consequence. But when Northern abolitionists made a martyr of him, Southerners came to believe this was proof the North intended to wage a war of extermination against white Southerners. Brown’s raid thus became a step on the road to war between the sections.

T he Election Of Abraham Lincoln

Exacerbating tensions, the old Whig political party was dying. Many of its followers joined with members of the American Party (Know-Nothings) and others who opposed slavery to form a new political entity in the 1850s, the Republican Party. When the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, Southern fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery but said he would not interfere with it where it existed.

Southern Secession

That was not enough to calm the fears of delegates to an 1860 secession convention in South Carolina. To the surprise of other Southern states—and even to many South Carolinians—the convention voted to dissolve the state’s contract with the United States and strike off on its own.

South Carolina had threatened this before in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson , over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army (all Southern senators walked out in protest before the vote was taken), but a compromise prevented the confrontation from occurring.

Perhaps learning from that experience the danger of going it alone, in 1860 and early 1861 South Carolina sent emissaries to other slave holding states urging their legislatures to follow its lead, nullify their contract with the United States and form a new Southern Confederacy. Six more states heeded the siren call: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Others voted down secession—temporarily.

Fort Sumter

On April 10, 1861, knowing that resupplies were on their way from the North to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, provisional Confederate forces in Charleston demanded the fort’s surrender. The fort’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. At 2:30 p.m. the following day, Major Anderson surrendered.

War had begun. Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, refusing to fight against other Southern states and feeling that Lincoln had exceeded his presidential authority, reversed themselves and voted in favor of session. The last one, Tennessee, did not depart until June 8, nearly a week after the first land battle had been fought at Philippi in Western Virginia. (The western section of Virginia rejected the session vote and broke away, ultimately forming a new, Union-loyal state, West Virginia. Other mountainous regions of the South, such as East Tennessee, also favored such a course but were too far from the support of Federal forces to attempt it.)

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9 Events That Led to the Civil War

By: Patrick J. Kiger

Published: January 17, 2023

After the American Revolution , a divide between the North and South began to widen. Industrialized northern states gradually passed laws freeing enslaved people, while southern states became increasingly committed to slavery. Many southerners came to view slavery as a linchpin of their agricultural economy , and as a justifiable social and political institution.

Throughout the first half of the 1800s, the nation struggled to manage the clash between these two incompatible viewpoints, working out deals such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 , which sought to balance the number of new free and slave states and drew a line through the nation’s western territories, with freedom to the north and slavery to the south. But in the last decade before war broke out, the conflict gained momentum and intensity. 

“Throughout the 1850s, a series of events increased sectionalism, emboldened southern secessionists, and deepened northern resolve to defend the Union and end slavery,” explains Jason Phillips , the Eberly Family Professor of Civil War Studies at West Virginia University, and author of the 2018 book Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth Century Americans Imagined the Future. “Many of these crises revolved around politics, but economic, social and cultural factors also contributed to the war’s origins.”

Here are nine events from the 1850s to the early 1860s that historians view as critical in the march toward the American Civil War .

The Compromise of 1850

In the wake of the Mexican War , tensions developed between the North and South over whether the western land gained by the U.S. should become free or slave territory. Things came to a head when California sought approval to enter the Union as a free state in 1849, which would have upset the balance struck by the Missouri Compromise several decades before. Senator Henry Clay, a Whig from Kentucky, proposed a package of legislation to resolve the disputes, but the Senate—after seven months of discussions—rejected his proposal.

Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, came up with an alternative proposal that admitted California, established Utah and New Mexico as territories that could decide for themselves whether to permit slavery, defined boundaries for the state of Texas, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and obligated the entire country to cooperate in the capture and return of escaped slaves. But the deal only postponed the conflict.

“They didn’t really compromise,” says Michael Green , an Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of several books on the Civil War era, including Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War and Lincoln and the Election of 1860 . “They just agreed to disagree.”

The Fugitive Slave Act

An existing federal law, enacted by Congress in 1793, allowed local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners, and imposed penalties upon anyone who aided their flight. But the new version included in the Compromise of 1850 went much further, by compelling citizens to assist in capturing escapees, denying the captives the right to a jury trial, and increasing the penalty for anyone aiding their escape. It also put cases in the hands of federal commissioners who got $10 if a fugitive was returned, but only $5 if an alleged slave was determined to be a free Black.

Northern abolitionists rebelled against the law. After 50,000 anti-slavery protesters filled the streets of Boston to protest the arrest of a Black man named Anthony Burns in 1854, President Franklin Pierce sent federal troops to maintain order and provided a Navy ship to return Burns back to Virginia.

“Northerners who had questioned slavery said, ‘We told you so,’ and those who hadn’t thought to themselves, ‘This is going too far,’” says Green. “It’s a radicalizing moment.” As a result, Massachusetts and other free states began passing “personal liberty” laws, which made it difficult and costly for enslavers to prove their cases in court.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin' Is Published

In 1851, author Harriet Beecher Stowe , who was still grieving the loss of her 18-month-old son Samuel to cholera two years earlier, wrote to the publisher of a Washington, D.C.-based abolitionist newspaper, National Era , and offered to write a fictional serial about the cruelty of slavery. Stowe later explained that losing her child helped her to understand “what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is ripped away from her,” according to Stowe biographer Katie Griffiths .

Stowe’s story, published in 41 installments, boosted the paper’s circulation, and a Boston publisher decided to release it as a two-volume novel. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly sold 300,000 copies in its first year, and the vociferous public debate about the book exacerbated the differences between the North and South. Northerners were shocked by the brutal depiction of slavery, which Stowe had synthesized from published autobiographies of slaves and stories she had heard from friends and fugitive Blacks. In turn, “Southerners react noisily to it,” Green explains. “They’re saying, ‘This is terrible. You’re attacking us. You’re all against us.’” When Stowe visited the White House in 1862, President Lincoln asked, “So this is the little lady who made this big war?”

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854, Senator Douglas, the author of the Compromise of 1850, introduced another piece of legislation “to organize the Territory of Nebraska,” an area that covered not just that present-day state but also Kansas, as well as Montana and the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Senate’s history of the law. Douglas was promoting a transcontinental railroad that would pass through Chicago in his home state. But the envisioned northern route had to pass through the Nebraska territory, a place where slavery was prohibited by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Rivals, including slave owners, wanted a southern route.

To get what he wanted, Douglas offered a compromise, which would allow settlers in those territories to decide whether to legalize slavery. Massachusetts Senator  Charles Sumner , an opponent of slavery, attacked the proposal for creating “a dreary region of despotism.” Nevertheless it was passed by Congress, with cataclysmic results.

“It re-opened that land to the expansion of slavery, and destroyed a long-established political compromise on the issue of slavery in the West,” Phillips says. Pro-slavery and antislavery activists surged into the territories in an effort to sway the vote, and clashed violently in a conflict that became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” which foreshadowed the Civil War.

The Pottawatomie Massacre

One of those who went to Kansas was a radical abolitionist and religious zealot named John Brown , who had worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and founded an organization that helped slaves escape to Canada. Brown moved to Kansas Territory, where in May 1856, he was angered by the destruction of a newspaper office and other property in Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces. Brown decided retaliation was in order.

At a spot near a crossing on Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin, Kansas, Brown, four of his sons and several others lured five proslavery men out of their houses with a promise that they would not be harmed, and then slashed and stabbed them with a saber and shot them in the head, according to a contemporary account of the attack. Brown’s brutality was denounced by Southern newspapers and by some Northern ones as well, and it “aroused emotions and distrust on both sides,” as an article from the Kansas Historical Society notes. The fighting in Kansas continued for another two years.

The Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott , an enslaved man, was born in Virginia and later lived in Alabama and Missouri. In 1831, his original enslaver died, and he was purchased by a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson. Emerson took him to the free state of Illinois and also Wisconsin, a territory where slavery was illegal due to the Missouri Compromise. During that time, Scott married and he and his wife had four children. In 1843, Emerson died, and several years after that, Scott and his wife sued Emerson’s widow in federal court for their freedom on the grounds that they had lived in free territory.

Scott, who was assisted financially by the family of his original owner, endured years of litigation until the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In an 1857 decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court decided that Scott was not entitled to U.S. citizenship and the protection of law, no matter where he had lived. In the court’s view, the Constitution’s framers had not intended for Black people to be free, but instead viewed them as property, with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The ruling made further political compromise too difficult.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

Brown dreamed of carrying out an even bigger attack, one that would ignite a mass uprising of Southern enslaved people. On a night in October 1859, he and a band of 22 men launched a raid on Harpers Ferry , a town in what is now West Virginia, and captured some prominent local citizens and seized the federal arsenal there. His small force soon was counterattacked by local militia, forcing him to seek refuge. The following afternoon, U.S. Marines under the command of then-Col. Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the arsenal, killing many of Brown’s men and capturing him. Brown was tried and charged with treason, murder and slave insurrection, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in December 1859. While the attack failed to trigger the widespread revolt he envisioned, it drove the North and South even further apart.

“Northern abolitionists who preferred pacificism praised Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom and even helped to finance his attack,” Phillips explains. “Southerners expected more acts of terrorism and prepared by bolstering their militias.” In many respects, Brown’s raid could be viewed as the first battle of the Civil War, he says.

The Election of 1860

Abraham Lincoln , a self-taught lawyer who had served a single term in Congress, emerged in the mid-1850s as an articulate and persuasive critic of slavery, and achieved national prominence with a series of debates against Senator Stephen Douglas in an unsuccessful campaign for Douglas’s seat. When the Republican Party held a convention to nominate a presidential candidate, the chosen location of Chicago gave Lincoln a home-court advantage over more experienced politicians such as Senator William H. Seward of New York.

“When they set up the convention floor, they put Illinois in a spot where they could get to the other delegations that were less committed,” Green says. “The New York delegation, which was supporting Seward, was put in a corner where they couldn’t get out.” That made it difficult for them to negotiate and persuade others to support their candidate. In the general election, Lincoln caught more lucky breaks. After the Democrats were unable to decide upon a candidate, southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, while northerners nominated Douglas. Breckenridge and Constitutional Party Candidate John Bell split the South, while Lincoln swept the northeastern and midwestern states except for Missouri (which went to Douglas), as well as Oregon and California to win the presidency despite getting just 40 percent of the vote. “For the first time, the Electoral College worked against the South,” Green explains.

The Formation of the Confederacy

The election of the first U.S. president who was a vocal opponent of slavery came as a shock to Southerners. “Now, there is going to be someone in the White House who is not going to do what the South says it wants done, reflexively,” Green explains. “Their feeling is, no matter what Lincoln says about protecting our rights, he’s not going to do that. We don’t trust him. He’s been elected by people who are out to get us.”

Less than six weeks after the election, the first secession convention met in Charleston South Carolina. About 60 percent of the 169 delegates were slave owners, and they voted unanimously to leave the Union . Local residents celebrated with bonfires, parades and the ringing of church bells. Five more states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana—soon followed. Representatives from those six states met in February 1861 to establish a unified government, which they called the Confederate States of America . Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected as Confederate President. Texas joined in March. 

After Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April and Lincoln called for federal forces to retake it, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee—left the union and joined the Confederacy as well.

Though the Confederacy’s leaders didn’t realize it, they actually were hastening the end of what they sought to protect. “Had they stayed, slavery as an institution almost certainly would have survived much longer,” Green says.

Instead, a four-year, bloody war devastated much of the South, took the lives of more than 650,000 from both sides, and led to the emancipation of more than 3.9 million enslaved Black Americans, in addition to changing the nation in numerous other ways.

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Myths & Misunderstandings: What Caused the Civil War

Earlier this summer, comments on one of our Facebook posts sparked a larger conversation about recurring debates about the Civil War. We asked our visitors, social media audiences, and staff to generate a list of the questions or topics about the Civil War that they think are the most misunderstood. 

In providing answers to these, our goal is to do the research for you, consulting with primary sources, leading historians, and the latest scholarship, and distill it into something you can read quickly over a cup of coffee. Join us every other week for the next installment of this new blog series: Myths and Misunderstandings. 

The war between the United States and the Confederate States began on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina. The immediate cause was Constitutional principle: the U.S. government refused to recognize the southern states’ right to secede from the Union, and the C.S. government asserted that right by seizing federal property within its states’ borders. President Abraham Lincoln’s April 15 call for volunteers to suppress the “insurrection” confirmed white southerners’ fears of Federal “coercion,” and prompted four Upper South states to join the Confederacy and, thus, widen the war.

Although they were the proximate cause of conflict, constitutional principle and secession were not the ultimate cause of the war. to identify that ultimate cause, we must examine the words of those who led the secessionist movement., in 1894, legendary confederate partisan leader, col. john s. mosby expressed surprise at a recent speech in which the orator dismissed “the charge that the south went to war for slavery” as a “‘slanderous accusation.’” “i always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the north about,” mosby observed. “i never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.”, in contrast to the post-war efforts to downplay the importance of slavery, it dominated the thinking and the rhetoric of southern statesmen in 1860-1861. deep south states sent commissioners to the upper south states to persuade them to leave the union. their arguments emphasized the mortal danger that the recent election of republican abraham lincoln as president posed to slavery and to white people in the south. the formal explanations that several states issued to justify secession similarly emphasized slavery. (for these sources, please see the related links accompanying this entry.) even virginia, which seceded after war began, had formulated a list of demands that the u.s. government must meet if virginia were to remain in the union; all of them related to slavery and race., typically, mississippi’s november 30, 1860 resolutions – passed in response to lincoln’s election – began with a strong defense of state sovereignty and rights, but moved quickly to a reminder of the original constitutional guarantees of slavery and the northern states’ violations of those guarantees. ironically, southerners were insisting on the enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws against northern assertion of their “states’ rights.”, defense of “states’ rights,” southern “honor” (that is, an intense resentment of perceived northern criticism and condescension), fear of federal “coercion,” and a growing belief that the south and north were divergent civilizations all factored into the decision making of southern statesmen in 1860-1861. but it was not those abstract motives that prompted secession and led to war. the south’s defense of the very real institution of slavery and of the economy, society, culture, and civilization built upon slavery was the indispensable factor that led to war..

Explore This Topic More:

• “Primary Source: The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States” (Civil War Trust)
• “Primary Sources: The Secession Commissioners” (Causes of the Civil War)
• “Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War” (by Charles Dew)

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American History: The Civil War (1861-1865) Essay

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Introduction

The civil war, northern versus southern interests, causes of the civil war, aftermath of the civil war.

Bibliography

American history is considered as the most inquisitive worldwide. Traditionally, American history started by a declaration of independence in the year 1776. This declaration was due to threats of British government towards American self-governed system. Declaration of Independence led to war in 1775 that was to liberate Americans.

With help of France in providing military and financial support, the patriots won American Revolution. In 1789, war hero George Washington became the first president of federal government by virtue of Constitution. With influence of European community, coping with scope of central government proved to be a challenging issue for American people.

In 1790s, creation of political parties was initiated, and later fought for the second independence in 1812. Consequently, this brought about expansion of US territory westwards. With this, the US managed to overcome modernizers who were solely interested in deepening its economy rather than helping American people in expanding their geography.

Heavy demand for cotton in southern states encouraged slavery of Africans even though it was illegal in northern states. In 1860, came the election of Abraham Lincoln as president and this triggered a crisis in slave states as he dejected the expansion of slave trade. Amongst the slave states, some of them seceded in forming the Confederate States of America in 1861. This brought about American Civil War, which was from 1861 to 1865.

In the American history, Civil War is the most momentous event that ever happened in the US. This iconic event redefined the American nation, as it was a fight that aimed at preserving the Union, which was the United States of America. From inauguration of the Constitution, differing opinions existed on the role of federal government.

It was a belief of Federalists that in order to ensure the union did not collapse, there was need for the federal government to hold on to power. Anti-federalists on the other hand, were of the opinion that sovereignty of the new states were to remain within their countries. Anti-federalists believed that each state had the right to determine their own set of laws and it is not right to indict them in following mandates of the federal government.

With the advent of the slavery, Northern states completely squared off against Southern states. The main reason for this being economic interests of north and south which were opposed to each other. In addition, Southerners largely depended on large-scale plantations of cotton, which was more labor-intensive.

On the other hand, northerners were more of a manufacturing region who produced finished goods by making use of raw materials. Southern ingrained culture of the plantation era encouraged slavery because it gave them an inexpensive labor source. The compromise of each group was the fear that one could gain an unequal amount of power. For example, northerners feared that if more slave states existed, then they would garner an unequal power in the nation.

The causes of the American Civil War, which claimed of over 618,000 casualties, are traceable back to early days in history of the US when tensions escalated. The main cause was difference in economic and social capabilities between the North and the South. The South mainly depended on cotton, which meant the urgent need for cheap labor most probably slaves, as they became one crop economy. On the other hand, northerners depended solely on industrial products.

This disparity, which existed between the two, was the major difference in their economies. The second cause was due to the infighting between those who favored states’ rights and those who favored federal rights. Emergence of these two camps that had differences in opinions ignited the war.

Third, the American Civil War was caused by in-fight between those who were proponents of slavery and those who were against slavery. Another cause of the American Civil War was the growth of the abolition movement. The fact that northerners were against slavery led to the increase of abolitionists who were against slaveholders. Lastly, when Abraham Lincoln was elected as president, it catalyzed the Civil War, as Southerners believed that he favored interests of the northerners because he was against slavery.

Surrender of General Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, marked an end to the Confederacy era. However, this did not stop the war completely as some small battles continued to occur. This was later to end when the last general, Stand Watie, surrendered on June 23, 1865.

Abraham Lincoln’s vision of reconstructing the nation did not bear much fruit as it failed to become a reality because of his assassination on April 14, 1865. The Radical Republicans imposed military rule on the southerners dealing with them harshly until Rutherford B. Hayes ended it in 1876. In the American history, Civil War is a watershed event and most importantly an event that officially ended slavery.

In conclusion, the Civil War was an important event in history of the American people. Moreover, its iconic stature is very vital, as the proponents who were against slavery became victors because their wish of anti-slavery was satisfied. In addition, it helped in liberating the people who had different opinions and gave them reasons to live for better ideals.

Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery . New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Kelly Martin. “ Overview of the American Civil War-Secession. ” About. Web.

Kelly Martin. “Top Five Causes of the Civil War: Leading up to Secession and the Civil War.” About. Web.

The History Channel. “ American Civil War. ” History. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 25). American History: The Civil War (1861-1865). https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-history-the-civil-war-1861-1865/

"American History: The Civil War (1861-1865)." IvyPanda , 25 Oct. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/american-history-the-civil-war-1861-1865/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'American History: The Civil War (1861-1865)'. 25 October.

IvyPanda . 2018. "American History: The Civil War (1861-1865)." October 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-history-the-civil-war-1861-1865/.

1. IvyPanda . "American History: The Civil War (1861-1865)." October 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-history-the-civil-war-1861-1865/.

IvyPanda . "American History: The Civil War (1861-1865)." October 25, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-history-the-civil-war-1861-1865/.

Trigger Events of the Civil War

The Civil War was the culmination of a series of confrontations concerning the institution of slavery. The following is a timeline of the events that led to the Civil War.​

1619-1865 | The Peculiar Institution

Slavery arrived in North America along side the Spanish and English colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries, with an estimated 645,000 Africans imported during the more than 250 years the institution was legal.  But slavery never existed without controversy. The British colony of Georgia actually banned slavery from 1735 to 1750, although it remained legal in the other 12 colonies. After the American Revolution, northern states one by one passed emancipation laws, and the sectional divide began to open as the South became increasingly committed to slavery. Once called a “necessary evil” by Thomas Jefferson, proponents of slavery increasingly switched their rhetoric to one that described slavery as a benevolent Christian institution that benefited all parties involved: slaves, slave owners, and non-slave holding whites. The number of slaves compared to number of free blacks varied greatly from state to state in the southern states. In 1860, for example, both Virginia and Mississippi had in excess of 400,000 slaves, but the Virginia population also included more than 58,000 free blacks, as opposed to only 773 in Mississippi. In 1860, South Carolina was the only state to have a majority slave population, yet in all southern states slavery served as the foundation for their socioeconomic and political order.

1820 | The Missouri Compromise

In the growth years following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Congress was compelled to establish a policy to guide the expansion of slavery into the new western territory.  Missouri’s application for statehood as a slave state sparked a bitter national debate.  In addition to the deeper moral issue posed by the growth of slavery, the addition of pro-slavery Missouri legislators would give the pro-slavery faction a Congressional majority.  

Ultimately, Congress reached a series of agreements that became known as the Missouri Compromise .  Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine was admitted as a free state, preserving the Congressional balance.  A line was also drawn through the unincorporated western territories along the 36°30' parallel, dividing north and south as free and slave.  

Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of this deal, “considered it at once as the knell of the Union.  It is hushed indeed for the moment.  But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”

1831 | Nat Turner’s Rebellion

In August of 1831, a slave named Nat Turner incited an uprising that spread through several plantations in southern Virginia.  Turner and approximately seventy cohorts killed around sixty white people.  The deployment of militia infantry and artillery suppressed the rebellion after two days of terror.  

Fifty-five slaves, including Turner, were tried and executed for their role in the insurrection.  Nearly two hundred more were lynched by frenzied mobs.  Although small-scale slave uprisings were fairly common in the American South, Nat Turner’s rebellion was the bloodiest.

Virginia lawmakers reacted to the crisis by rolling back what few civil rights slaves and free black people possessed at the time.  Education was prohibited and the right to assemble was severely limited.  

1846 - 1850 | The Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso was a piece of legislation proposed by David Wilmot (D-FS-R PA) at the close of the Mexican-American War.  If passed, the Proviso would have outlawed slavery in territory acquired by the United States as a result of the war, which included most of the Southwest and extended all the way to California.  

Wilmot spent two years fighting for his plan.  He offered it as a rider on existing bills, introduced it to Congress on its own, and even tried to attach it to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo .  All attempts failed.  Nevertheless, the intensity of the debate surrounding the Proviso prompted the first serious discussions of secession.

1850 | The Compromise of 1850

With national relations soured by the debate over the Wilmot Proviso, senators Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas managed to broker a shaky accord with the Compromise of 1850 .  The compromise admitted California as a free state and did not regulate slavery in the remainder of the Mexican cession all while strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act , a law which compelled Northerners to seize and return escaped slaves to the South.

While the agreement succeeded in postponing outright hostilities between the North and South, it did little to address, and in some ways even reinforced, the structural disparity that divided the United States.  The new Fugitive Slave Act, by forcing non-slaveholders to participate in the institution, also led to increased polarization among centrist citizens.  

1852 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe ’s fictional exploration of slave life was a cultural sensation.  Northerners felt as if their eyes had been opened to the horrors of slavery, while Southerners protested that Stowe’s work was slanderous.  

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second-best-selling book in America in the 19th century, second only to the Bible.  Its popularity brought the issue of slavery to life for those few who remained unmoved after decades of legislative conflict and widened the division between North and South.

1854 - 1859 | Bleeding Kansas

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established Kansas and Nebraska as territories and set the stage for “Bleeding Kansas” by its adoption of popular sovereignty. Under popular sovereignty, it is the residents of the territories who decide by popular referendum if the state is to be a free or enslaved. Settlers from the North and the South poured into Kansas, hoping to swell the numbers on their side of the debate.  Passions were enflamed and violence raged. In the fall of 1855, abolitionist John Brown came to Kansas to fight the forces of slavery. In response to the sacking of Lawrence by border ruffians from Missouri whose sole victim was an abolitionist printing press, Brown and his supporters killed five pro-slavery settlers in the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre in Kansas in May, 1856. Violence existed in the territory as early as 1855 but the Sack of Lawrence and the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre launched a guerilla war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. Although the violence was often sporadic and unorganized, mass feelings of terror existed in the territory. Although President Buchanan tried to calm the violence by supporting the Lecompton Constition, his relentless support for this consitution created a political crisis among the Democratic Party and only further aggravated sectional tensions. The violence subsided in 1859, the warring parties forged a fragile peace, but not before more than 50 settlers had been killed.

1857 | Dred Scott v. Sanford

Dred Scott was a Virginia slave who tried to sue for his freedom in court.  The case eventually rose to the level of the Supreme Court, where the justices found that, as a slave, Dred Scott was a piece of property that had none of the legal rights or recognitions afforded to a human being.  

The Dred Scott Decision threatened to entirely recast the political landscape that had thus far managed to prevent civil war.  The classification of slaves as mere property made the federal government’s authority to regulate the institution much more ambiguous.

Southerners renewed their challenges to the agreed-upon territorial limitations on slavery and polarization intensified.  

1858 | Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1858, Democratic Senator Stephen Dougla s faced a challenge for his seat from a relatively unknown one term former congressmen and “prairie lawyer” Abraham Lincoln. In the campaign that followed Lincoln and Douglas engaged in seven public debates across the state of Illinois where they debated the most controversial issue of the antebellum era: slavery. Although Douglas won the senate race, these debates propelled Lincoln to the national spotlight and enabled his nomination for president in 1860. In contrast, these debates further alienated Douglas from the southern wing of the Democratic Party and the arguments Douglas made in these debates come back to haunt him in 1860 destroying his presidential chances.  

1859 | John Brown’s Raid

Abolitionist John Brown supported violent action against the South to end slavery and played a major role in starting the Civil War. After the Pottawatomie Massacre during Bleeding Kansas, Brown returned to the North and plotted a far more threatening act. In October 1859, he and 19 supporters, armed with “Beecher’s Bibles,” led a raid on the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to capture and confiscate the arms located there, distribute them among local slaves and begin armed insurrection. A small force of U.S. Marines, led by Col. Robert E. Lee , put down the uprising. There were casualties on both sides; seven people were killed and at least 10 more were injured before Brown and seven of his remaining men were captured.  On October 27, Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia, convicted and hanged in Charles Town on December 2.

1860 | Abraham Lincoln’s Election

Abraham Lincoln was elected by a considerable margin in 1860 despite not being included on many Southern ballots.  As a Republican, his party’s anti-slavery outlook struck fear into many Southerners.  

On December 20, 1860, a little over a month after the polls closed, South Carolina seceded from the Union.  Six more states followed by the spring of 1861.  

1861 | The Battle of Fort Sumter

With secession, several federal forts, including Fort Sumter in South Carolina, suddenly became outposts in a foreign land.  Abraham Lincoln made the decision to send fresh supplies to the beleaguered garrisons.  

On April 12, 1861, Confederate warships turned back the supply convoy to Fort Sumter and opened a 34-hour bombardment on the stronghold.  The garrison surrendered on April 14.  

The Civil War was now underway.  On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to join the Northern army.  Unwilling to contribute troops, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee dissolved their ties to the federal government.

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civil war , a violent conflict between a state and one or more organized non-state actors in the state’s territory. Civil wars are thus distinguished from interstate conflicts (in which states fight other states), violent conflicts or riots not involving states (sometimes labeled intercommunal conflicts), and state repression against individuals who cannot be considered an organized or cohesive group, including genocides , and similar violence by non-state actors, such as terrorism or violent crime.

The definition of civil war clearly encompasses many different forms of conflict. Some analysts distinguish between civil wars in which insurgents seek territorial secession or autonomy and conflicts in which insurgents aim for control of the central government. Conflicts over government control may involve insurgents originating from within the centre or state apparatus, as in military coups , or challengers from outside the political establishment. Other analysts distinguish between ethnic civil wars , in which the insurgents and individuals in control of the central government have separate ethnic identities, and revolutionary conflicts, in which insurgents aim for major social transformation. Colonial conflicts are sometimes singled out as a type distinct from civil wars on a state’s core territory. Notwithstanding those distinctions, a given civil war will often combine several elements. For example, insurgencies may be both ethnic and ideologically based, and the insurgents’ aims can shift over time from secession for a limited territory to controlling the entire state.

Armed challenges to state authority are as old as states themselves. Despite numerous historical accounts of civil wars, however, there is little empirical data on civil conflicts prior to 1945. Although there have been relatively few interstate wars since then, civil wars have been common. Whereas interstate conflicts tend to be short, civil wars often persist for a long time, are less likely to be settled by formal agreements, and are much more likely to recur. Many experts regarded the outbreak of new civil conflicts immediately following the Cold War as evidence that the world would be more turbulent and violent after a long period of stability based on the strategy of nuclear deterrence adopted by the United States and the Soviet Union . Yet the number of new civil wars actually declined in relative terms after the initial peak after the Cold War. The specific causes that may underlie that decline remain disputed, and the number of ongoing civil wars remains high in absolute terms.

Civil wars are generally less severe than interstate wars, as measured in direct battle deaths. However, civil wars have been more frequent and lengthier, and the great majority of the recorded deaths in battle since the Cold War stem from civil wars. Furthermore, war can have a substantial indirect impact on human welfare beyond the direct loss of life. Studies have indicated that countries experiencing civil war suffer a pronounced decline in gross domestic product and never recover their earlier economic-growth trajectory. Civil wars also disrupt trade and investment and leave large social legacies in unemployed former combatants and displaced individuals. The negative consequences of civil war are not limited to the countries that experience them: neighbouring countries also suffer negative economic impacts and may be more prone to violence themselves.

Most civil wars take place within relatively poorer societies. Early contributions to the study of violence within societies tended to focus on economic deprivation and grievances as key motives. The American political scientist Ted Gurr, for example, highlighted inequality and how groups may resort to rebellion if they are dissatisfied with their current economic status relative to their aspirations . The literature on nationalist conflicts emphasized how both relatively poorer and wealthier groups are likely to rebel against the centre if they believe that they can do better under independence. Civil wars in Latin American countries were often interpreted within a framework focusing on economic grievances arising from either unequal land distribution or high income inequality . However, the empirical evidence linking individual income inequality and civil conflict is mixed.

Subsequent political-economic studies of civil war tended to dismiss the role of grievances. Some researchers argued that grievances are ubiquitous and that it is more important to focus on variation in the opportunities for violence. Thus the British economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler argued that low overall income makes it easier to mobilize insurgencies, since potential recruits have less to lose in foregone income from normal economic activities. The American political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin claimed that civil war is primarily a problem of weak states and that weakness is largely determined by economic development . Researchers in this tradition also linked mobilization to the role of individual incentives. Opportunities for insurgencies are greater when participants can prosper from war—for example, through looting or by gaining control of valuable natural resources . Empirical studies also supported the supposed link between the existence of valuable natural resources and a higher risk of civil war. Civil wars in Africa are often taken to support those perspectives.

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Article Contents

Space, time, and sectionalism, the historian's use of sectionalism and vice versa, … with liberty and justice for whom.

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What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

I would like to thank David Dangerfield, Allen Driggers, Tiffany Florvil, Margaret Gillikin, Ramon Jackson, Evan Kutzler, Tyler Parry, David Prior, Tara Strauch, Beth Toyofuku, and Ann Tucker for their comments on an early version of this essay, and to extend special thanks to Mark M. Smith for perceptive criticism of multiple drafts. I would also like to thank Edward Linenthal for his expert criticism and guidance through the publication process and to express my gratitude to the four JAH readers, Ann Fabian, James M. McPherson, Randall Miller, and one anonymous reviewer, for their exceptionally thoughtful and helpful comments on the piece.

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Michael E. Woods, What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature, Journal of American History , Volume 99, Issue 2, September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

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Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular Civil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.” 1

Despite the impulse to close ranks amid the culture wars, however, professional historians have not abandoned the debate over Civil War causation. Rather, they have rightly concluded that there is not much of a consensus on the topic after all. Elizabeth Varon remarks that although “scholars can agree that slavery, more than any other issue, divided North and South, there is still much to be said about why slavery proved so divisive and why sectional compromise ultimately proved elusive.” And as Edward Ayers observes: “slavery and freedom remain the keys to understanding the war, but they are the place to begin our questions, not to end them.” 2 The continuing flood of scholarship on the sectional conflict suggests that many other historians agree. Recent work on the topic reveals two widely acknowledged truths: that slavery was at the heart of the sectional conflict and that there is more to learn about precisely what this means, not least because slavery was always a multifaceted issue.

This essay analyzes the extensive literature on Civil War causation published since 2000, a body of work that has not been analyzed at length. This survey cannot be comprehensive but seeks instead to clarify current debates in a field long defined by distinct interpretive schools—such as those of the progressives, revisionists, and modernization theorists—whose boundaries are now blurrier. To be sure, echoes still reverberate of the venerable arguments between historians who emphasize abstract economic, social, or political forces and those who stress human agency. The classic interpretive schools still command allegiance, with fundamentalists who accentuate concrete sectional differences dueling against revisionists, for whom contingency, chance, and irrationality are paramount. But recent students of Civil War causation have not merely plowed familiar furrows. They have broken fresh ground, challenged long-standing assumptions, and provided new perspectives on old debates. This essay explores three key issues that vein the recent scholarship: the geographic and temporal parameters of the sectional conflict, the relationship between sectionalism and nationalism, and the relative significance of race and class in sectional politics. All three problems stimulated important research long before 2000, but recent work has taken them in new directions. These themes are particularly helpful for navigating the recent scholarship, and by using them to organize and evaluate the latest literature, this essay underscores fruitful avenues for future study of a subject that remains central in American historiography. 3

Historians of the sectional conflict, like their colleagues in other fields, have consciously expanded the geographic and chronological confines of their research. Crossing the borders of the nation-state and reaching back toward the American Revolution, many recent studies of the war's origins situate the clash over slavery within a broad spatial and temporal context. The ramifications of this work will not be entirely clear until an enterprising scholar incorporates those studies into a new synthesis, but this essay will offer a preliminary evaluation.

Scholarship following the transnational turn in American history has silenced lingering doubts that nineteenth-century Americans of all regions, classes, and colors were deeply influenced by people, ideas, and events from abroad. Historians have long known that the causes of the Civil War cannot be understood outside the context of international affairs, particularly the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Three of the most influential narrative histories of the Civil War era open either on Mexican soil (those written by Allan Nevins and James McPherson) or with the transnational journey from Mexico City to Washington of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis ). The domestic political influence of the annexation of Texas, Caribbean filibustering, and the Ostend Manifesto, a widely publicized message written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 that called for the acquisition of Cuba, are similarly well established. 4

Recent studies by Edward Bartlett Rugemer and Matthew J. Clavin, among others, build on that foundation to show that the international dimensions of the sectional conflict transcended the bitterly contested question of territorial expansion. Rugemer, for instance, demonstrates that Caribbean emancipation informed U.S. debates over slavery from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) through Reconstruction. Situating sectional politics within the Atlantic history of slavery and abolition, he illustrates how arguments for and against U.S. slavery drew from competing interpretations of emancipation in the British West Indies. Britain's “mighty experiment” thus provided “useable history for an increasingly divided nation.” Proslavery ideologues learned that abolitionism sparked insurrection, that Africans and their descendants would become idlers or murderers or both if released from bondage, and that British radicals sought to undermine the peculiar institution wherever it persisted. To slavery's foes, the same history revealed that antislavery activism worked, that emancipation could be peaceful and profitable, and that servitude, not skin tone, degraded enslaved laborers. Clavin's study of American memory of Toussaint L'Ouverture indicates that the Haitian Revolution cast an equally long shadow over antebellum history. Construed as a catastrophic race war, the revolution haunted slaveholders with the prospect of an alliance between ostensibly savage slaves and fanatical whites. Understood as a hopeful story of the downtrodden overthrowing their oppressors, however, Haitian history furnished abolitionists, white and black, with an inspiring example of heroic self-liberation by the enslaved. By the 1850s it also furnished abolitionists, many of whom were frustrated by the abysmally slow progress of emancipation in the United States, with a precedent for swift, violent revolution and the vindication of black masculinity. The Haitian Revolution thus provided “resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols” for antislavery and proslavery partisans alike and helped “provoke a violent confrontation and determine the fate of slavery in the United States.” 5

These findings will surprise few students of Civil War causation, but they demonstrate that the international aspects of the sectional conflict did not begin and end with Manifest Destiny. They also encourage Atlantic historians to pay more attention to the nineteenth century, particularly to the period after British emancipation. Rugemer and Clavin point out that deep connections among Atlantic rim societies persisted far into the nineteenth century and that, like other struggles over New World slavery, the American Civil War is an Atlantic story. One of their most stimulating contributions may therefore be to encourage Atlantic historians to widen their temporal perspectives to include the middle third of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding the hotly contested public memory of the Haitian Revolution, Rugemer and Clavin push the story of American sectionalism back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggesting that crossing geographic boundaries can go hand in hand with stretching the temporal limits of sectionalism. 6

The internationalizing impulse has also nurtured economic interpretations of the sectional struggle. Brian Schoen, Peter Onuf, and Nicholas Onuf situate antebellum politics within the context of global trade, reinvigorating economic analysis of sectionalism without summoning the ghosts of Charles Beard and Mary Beard. Readers may balk at their emphasis on tariff debates, but these histories are plainly not Confederate apologia. As Schoen points out, chattel slavery expanded in the American South, even as it withered throughout most of the Atlantic world, because southern masters embraced the nineteenth century's most important crop: cotton. Like the oil titans of a later age, southern cotton planters reveled in the economic indispensability of their product. Schoen adopts a cotton-centered perspective from which to examine southern political economy, from the earliest cotton boom to the secession crisis. “Broad regional faith in cotton's global power,” he argues, “both informed secessionists' actions and provided them an indispensable tool for mobilizing otherwise reluctant confederates.” Planters' commitment to the production and overseas sale of cotton shaped southern politics and business practices. It impelled westward expansion, informed planters' jealous defense of slavery, and wedded them to free trade. An arrogant faith in their commanding economic position gave planters the impetus and the confidence to secede when northern Republicans threatened to block the expansion of slavery and increase the tariff. The Onufs reveal a similar dynamic at work in their complementary study, Nations, Markets, and War. Like Schoen, they portray slaveholders as forward-looking businessmen who espoused free-trade liberalism in defense of their economic interests. Entangled in political competition with Yankee protectionists throughout the early national and antebellum years, slaveholders seceded when it became clear that their vision for the nation's political economy—most importantly its trade policy—could no longer prevail. 7

These authors examine Civil War causation within a global context, though in a way more reminiscent of traditional economic history than similar to other recent transnational scholarship. But perhaps the most significant contribution made by these authors lies beyond internationalizing American history. After all, most historians of the Old South have recognized that the region's economic and political power depended on the Atlantic cotton trade, and scholars of the Confederacy demonstrated long ago that overconfidence in cotton's international leverage led southern elites to pursue a disastrous foreign policy. What these recent studies reveal is that cotton-centered diplomatic and domestic politics long predated southern independence and had roots in the late eighteenth century, when slaveholders' decision to enlarge King Cotton's domain set them on a turbulent political course that led to Appomattox. The Onufs and Schoen, then, like Rugemer and Clavin, expand not only the geographic parameters of the sectional conflict but also its temporal boundaries. 8

These four important histories reinforce recent work that emphasizes the eruption of the sectional conflict at least a generation before the 1820 Missouri Compromise. If the conflict over Missouri was a “firebell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson called it, it was a rather tardy alarm. This scholarship mirrors a propensity among political historians—most notably scholars of the civil rights movement—to write “long histories.” Like their colleagues who dispute the Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative of the civil rights era, political historians of the early republic have questioned conventional periodization by showing that sectionalism did not spring fully grown from the head of James Tallmadge, the New York congressman whose February 1819 proposal to bar the further extension of slavery into Missouri unleashed the political storm that was calmed, for the moment, by the Missouri Compromise. Matthew Mason, for instance, maintains that “there never was a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went unchallenged.” Mason shows that political partisans battered their rivals with the club of slavery, with New England Federalists proving especially adept at denouncing their Jeffersonian opponents as minions of southern slaveholders. In a series of encounters, from the closure of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 to the opening (fire)bell of the Missouri crisis, slavery remained a central question in American politics. Even the outbreak of war in 1812 failed to suppress the issue. 9

A complementary study by John Craig Hammond confirms that slavery roiled American politics from the late eighteenth century on and that its westward expansion proved especially divisive years before the Missouri fracas. As America's weak national government continued to bring more western acreage under its nominal control, it had to accede to local preferences regarding slavery. Much of the fierce conflict over slavery therefore occurred at the territorial and state levels. Hammond astutely juxtaposes the histories of slave states such as Louisiana and Missouri alongside those of Ohio and Indiana, where proslavery policies were defeated. In every case, local politics proved decisive. Neither the rise nor the extent of the cotton kingdom was a foregone conclusion, and the quarrel over its expansion profoundly influenced territorial and state politics north and south of the Ohio River. Bringing the growing scholarship on both early republic slavery and proslavery ideology into conversation with political history, Hammond demonstrates that the bitterness of the Missouri debate stemmed from that dispute's contentious prehistory, not from its novelty. Just as social, economic, and intellectual historians have traced the “long history” of the antebellum South back to its once relatively neglected early national origins, political historians have uncovered the deep roots of political discord over slavery's expansion. 10

Scholars have applied the “long history” principle to other aspects of Civil War causation as well. In his study of the slave power thesis, Leonard L. Richards finds that northern anxieties about slaveholders' inordinate political influence germinated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Jan Lewis's argument that the concessions made to southern delegates at the convention emboldened them to demand special protection for slavery suggests that those apprehensions were sensible. David L. Lightner demonstrates that northern demands for a congressional ban on the domestic slave trade, designed to strike a powerful and, thanks to the interstate commerce clause, constitutional blow against slavery extension emerged during the first decade of the nineteenth century and informed antislavery strategy for the next fifty years. Richard S. Newman emphasizes that abolitionist politics long predated William Lloyd Garrison's founding of the Liberator in 1831. Like William W. Freehling, who followed the “road to disunion” back to the American Revolution, Newman commences his study of American abolitionism with the establishment of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. Most recently, Christopher Childers has invited historians to explore the early history of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. 11

Skeptics might ask where the logic of these studies will lead. Why not push the origins of sectional strife even further back into colonial history? Why not begin, as did a recent overview of Civil War causation, with the initial arrival of African slaves in Virginia in 1619? This critique has a point—hopefully we will never read an article called “Christopher Columbus and the Coming of the American Civil War”—but two virtues of recent work on the long sectional conflict merit emphasis. First, its extended view mirrors the very long, if chronically selective, memories of late antebellum partisans. By the 1850s few sectional provocateurs failed to trace northern belligerence toward the South, and vice versa, back to the eighteenth century. Massachusetts Republican John B. Alley reminded Congress in April 1860 that slavery had been “a disturbing element in our national politics ever since the organization of the Government.” “In fact,” Alley recalled, “political differences were occasioned by it, and sectional prejudices grew out of it, at a period long anterior to the formation of the Federal compact.” Eight tumultuous months later, U.S. senator Robert Toombs recounted to the Georgia legislature a litany of northern aggressions and insisted that protectionism and abolitionism had tainted Yankee politics from “ the very first Congress .” Tellingly, the study of historical memory, most famously used to analyze remembrance of the Civil War, has moved the study of Civil War causation more firmly into the decades between the nation's founding and the Missouri Compromise. Memories of the Haitian Revolution shaped antebellum expectations for emancipation. Similarly, recollections of southern economic sacrifice during Jefferson's 1807 embargo and the War of 1812 heightened white southerners' outrage over their “exclusion” from conquered Mexican territory more than three decades later. And as Margot Minardi has shown, Massachusetts abolitionists used public memory of the American Revolution to champion emancipation and racial equality. The Missouri-to-Sumter narrative conceals that these distant events haunted the memories of late antebellum Americans. Early national battles over slavery did not make the Civil War inevitable, but in the hands of propagandists they could make the war seem inevitable to many contemporaries. 12

Second, proponents of the long view of Civil War causation have not made a simplistic argument for continuity. Elizabeth Varon's study of the evolution of disunion as a political concept and rhetorical device from 1789 to 1859 demonstrates that long histories need not obscure change over time. Arguing that “sectional tensions deriving from the diverging interests of the free labor North and the slaveholding South” were “as old as the republic itself,” Varon adopts a long perspective on sectional tension. But her nuanced analysis of the diverse and shifting political uses of disunion rhetoric suggests that what historians conveniently call the sectional conflict was in fact a series of overlapping clashes, each with its own dynamics and idiom. Quite literally, the terms of sectional debate remained in flux. The language of disunion came in five varieties—“a prophecy of national ruin, a threat of withdrawal from the federal compact, an accusation of treasonous plotting, a process of sectional alienation, and a program for regional independence”—and the specific meanings of each cannot be interpreted accurately without regard to historical context, for “their uses changed and shifted over time.” To cite just one example, the concept of disunion as a process of increasing alienation between North and South gained credibility during the 1850s as proslavery and antislavery elements clashed, often violently, over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the extension of slavery into Kansas. Republican senator William Henry Seward's famous “irrepressible conflict” speech of 1858 took this interpretation of disunion, one that had long languished on the radical margins of sectional politics, and thrust it into mainstream discourse. Shifting political circumstances reshaped the terms of political debate from the 1830s, when the view of disunion as an irreversible process flourished only among abolitionists and southern extremists, to the late 1850s, when a leading contender for the presidential nomination of a major party could express it openly. 13

Consistent with Varon's emphasis on the instability of political rhetoric, other recent studies of Civil War causation have spotlighted two well-known and important forks in the road to disunion. Thanks to their fresh perspective on the crisis of 1819–1821, scholars of early national sectionalism have identified the Missouri struggle as the first of these turning points. The battle over slavery in Missouri, Robert Pierce Forbes argues, was “a crack in the master narrative” of American history that fundamentally altered how Americans thought about slavery and the Union. In the South, it nurtured a less crassly self-interested defense of servitude. Simultaneously, it tempted northerners to conceptually separate “the South” from “America,” thereby sectionalizing the moral problem of slavery and conflating northern values and interests with those of the nation. The intensity of the crisis demonstrated that the slavery debate threatened the Union, prompting Jacksonian-era politicians to suppress the topic and stymie sectionalists for a generation. But even as the Missouri controversy impressed moderates with the need for compromise, it fostered “a new clarity in the sectional politics of the United States and moved each section toward greater coherence on the slavery issue” by refining arguments for and against the peculiar institution. The competing ideologies that defined antebellum sectional politics coalesced during the contest over Missouri, now portrayed as a milestone rather than a starter's pistol. 14

A diverse body of scholarship identifies a second period of discontinuity stretching from 1845 to 1850. This literature confirms rather than challenges traditional periodization, for those years have long marked the beginning of the “Civil War era.” This time span has attracted considerable attention because the slavery expansion debate intensified markedly between the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Compromise of 1850. Not surprisingly, recent work on slavery's contested westward extension continues to present the late 1840s as a key turning point—perhaps a point of no return—in the sectional conflict. As Michael S. Green puts it, by 1848, “something in American political life clearly had snapped. … [T]he genies that [James K.] Polk, [David] Wilmot, and their allies had let out of the bottle would not be put back in.” 15

Scholars not specifically interested in slavery expansion have also identified the late 1840s as a decisive period. In his history of southern race mythology—the notion that white southerners' “Norman” ancestry elevated them over Saxon-descended northerners—Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. identifies these years as a transition period between two theories of sectional difference. White southerners' U.S. nationalism persisted into the 1840s, he argues, and although they recognized cultural differences between the Yankees and themselves, the dissimilarities were not imagined in racial terms. After 1850, however, white southerners increasingly argued for innate differences between the white southern “race” and its ostensibly inferior northern rival. This mythology was a “key element” in the “flowering of southern nationalism before and during the Civil War.” Susan-Mary Grant has shown that northern opinion of the South underwent a simultaneous shift, with the slave power thesis gaining widespread credibility by the late 1840s. The year 1850 marked an economic turning point as well. Marc Egnal posits that around that year, a generation of economic integration between North and South gave way to an emerging “Lake Economy,” which knit the Northwest and Northeast into an economic and political alliance at odds with the South. Taken together, this scholarship reaffirms what historians have long suspected about the sectional conflict: despite sectionalism's oft-recalled roots in the early national period, the late 1840s represents an important period of discontinuity. It is unsurprising that these years climaxed with a secession scare and a makeshift compromise reached not through bona fide give-and-take but rather through the political dexterity of Senator Stephen A. Douglas. 16

That Douglas succeeded where the eminent Henry Clay had failed suggests another late 1840s discontinuity that deserves more scholarly attention. Thirty-six years older than the Little Giant, Clay was already Speaker of the House when Douglas was born in 1813. Douglas's shepherding of Clay's smashed omnibus bill through the Senate in 1850 “marked a changing of the guard from an older generation, whose time already might have passed, to a new generation whose time had yet to come.” This passing of the torch symbolized a broader shift in political personnel. The Thirty-First Congress, which passed the compromise measures of 1850, was a youthful assembly. The average age for representatives was forty-three, only two were older than sixty-two, and more than half were freshmen. The Senate was similarly youthful, particularly its Democratic members, fewer than half of whom had reached age fifty. Moreover, the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster between March 1850 and October 1852 signaled to many observers the end of an era. In 1851 members of the University of Virginia's Southern Rights Association reminded their southern peers that “soon the destinies of the South must be entrusted to our keeping. The present occupants of the arena of action must soon pass away, and we be called upon to fill their places. … It becomes therefore our sacred duty to prepare for the contest.” 17

Students of Civil War causation would do well to probe this intergenerational transfer of power. This analysis need not revive the argument, most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, that the “blundering generation” of hot-headed and self-serving politicos who grasped the reins of power around 1850 brought on an unnecessary war. Caricaturing the rising generation as exceptionally inept is not required to profitably contrast the socioeconomic environments, political contexts, and intellectual milieus in which Clay's and Douglas's respective generations matured. These differences, and the generational conflict that they engendered, may have an important bearing on both the origins and the timing of the Civil War. Peter Carmichael's study of Virginia's last antebellum generation explores this subject in detail. Historians have long recognized that disproportionately high numbers of young white southerners supported secession. Carmichael offers a compelling explanation for why this was so, without portraying his subjects as mediocre statesmen or citing the eternal impetuousness of youth. Deftly blending cultural, social, economic, and political history, Carmichael rejects the notion that young Virginia gentlemen who came of age in the late 1850s were immature, impassioned, and reckless. They were, he argues, idealistic and ambitious men who believed deeply in progress but worried that their elders had squandered Virginia's traditional economic and political preeminence. Confronted with their state's apparent degeneration and their own lack of opportunity for advancement, Carmichael's young Virginians endorsed a pair of solutions that put them at odds with their conservative elders: economic diversification and, after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, southern independence. Whether this generational dynamic extended beyond Virginia remains to be seen. But other recent works, including Stephen Berry's study of young white men in the Old South and Jon Grinspan's essay on youthful Republicans during the 1860 presidential campaign, indicate that similar concerns about progress, decline, and sectional destiny haunted many young minds on the eve of the Civil War. More work in this area is necessary, especially on how members of the new generation remembered the sectional conflict that had been raging since before they were born. Clearly, though, the generation that ascended to national leadership during the 1850s came of age in a very different world than had its predecessor. Further analysis of this shift promises to link the insights of the long sectional conflict approach (particularly regarding public memory) with the emphasis on late 1840s discontinuity that veins recent scholarship on sectionalism. 18

Recent historians have challenged conventional periodization by expanding the chronological scope of the sectional conflict, even as they confirm two key moments of historical discontinuity. This work revises older interpretations of Civil War causation without overturning them. A second trend in the literature, however, is potentially more provocative. A number of powerfully argued studies building on David Potter's classic essay, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” have answered his call for closer scrutiny of the “seemingly manifest difference between the loyalties of a nationalistic North and a sectionalistic South.” Impatient with historians who read separatism into all aspects of prewar southern politics or Unionism into all things northern, Potter admonished scholars not to project Civil War loyalties back into the antebellum period. A more nuanced approach would reveal “that in the North as well as in the South there were deep sectional impulses, and support or nonsupport of the Union was sometimes a matter of sectional tactics rather than of national loyalty.” Recent scholars have accepted Potter's challenge, and their findings contribute to an emerging reinterpretation of the sectional conflict and the timing of secession. 19

Disentangling northern from national interests and values has been difficult thanks in part to the Civil War itself (in which “the North” and “the Union” overlapped, albeit imperfectly) and because of the northern victory and the temptation to classify the Old South as an un-American aberration. But several recent studies have risen to the task. Challenging the notion that the antebellum North must have been nationalistic because of its opposition to slavery and its role in the Civil War, Susan-Mary Grant argues that by the 1850s a stereotyped view of the South and a sense of moral and economic superiority had created a powerful northern sectional identity. Championed by the Republican party, this identity flowered into an exclusionary nationalism in which the South served as a negative reference point for the articulation of ostensibly national values, goals, and identities based on the North's flattering self-image. This sectionalism-cum-nationalism eventually corroded national ties by convincing northerners that the South represented an internal threat to the nation. Although this vision became genuinely national after the war, in the antebellum period it was sectionally specific and bitterly divisive. “It was not the case,” Grant concludes, “that the northern ideology of the antebellum period was American, truly national, and supportive of the Union and the southern ideology was wholly sectional and destructive of the Union.” Matthew Mason makes a related point about early national politics, noting that the original sectionalists were antislavery New England Federalists whose flirtation with secession in 1815 crippled their party. Never simply the repository of authentic American values, the nineteenth-century North developed a sectional identity in opposition to an imagined (though not fictitious) South. Only victory in the Civil War allowed for the reconstruction of the rest of the nation in this image. 20

If victory in the war obscured northern sectionalism, it was the defense of slavery, coupled with defeat, that has distorted our view of American nationalism in the Old South. The United States was founded as a slaveholding nation, and there was unfortunately nothing necessarily un-American about slavery in the early nineteenth century. Slavery existed in tension with, not purely in opposition to, the nation's perennially imperfect political institutions, and its place in the young republic was a hotly contested question with a highly contingent resolution. Moreover, despite their pretensions to being an embattled minority, southern elites long succeeded in harnessing national ideals and federal power to their own interests. Thus, defense of slavery was neither inevitably nor invariably secessionist. This is a key theme of Robert Bonner's expertly crafted history of the rise and fall of proslavery American nationalism. Adopting a long-sectional-conflict perspective, Bonner challenges historians who have “conflate[d] an understandable revulsion at proslavery ideology with a willful disassociation of bondage from prevailing American norms.” He details the efforts of proslavery southerners to integrate slavery into national identity and policy and to harmonize slaveholding with American expansionism, republicanism, constitutionalism, and evangelicalism. Appropriating the quintessentially American sense of national purpose, proslavery nationalists “invited outsiders to consider [slavery's] compatibility with broadly shared notions of American values and visions of a globally redeeming national mission.” This effort ended in defeat, but not because proslavery southerners chronically privileged separatism over nationalism. Rather, it was their failure to bind slavery to American nationalism—signaled by the Republican triumph in 1860—that finally drove slaveholders to secede. Lincoln's victory “effectively ended the prospects for achieving proslavery Americanism within the federal Union,” forcing slavery's champions to pin their hopes to a new nation-state. Confederate nationalism was more a response to the demise of proslavery American nationalism than the cause of its death. 21

Other recent studies of slaveholders' efforts to nationalize their goals and interests complement Bonner's skilled analysis. Matthew J. Karp casts proslavery politicians not as jumpy sectionalists but as confident imperialists who sponsored an ambitious and costly expansion of American naval power to protect slavery against foreign encroachment and to exert national influence overseas. For these slaveholding nationalists, “federal power was not a danger to be feared, but a force to be utilized,” right up to the 1860 election. Similarly, Brian Schoen has explored cotton planters' efforts to ensure that national policy on tariff rates and slavery's territorial status remained favorable to their interests. As cotton prices boomed during the 1850s, planters grew richer and the stakes grew higher, especially as their national political power waned with the ascension of the overtly sectional Republican party. The simultaneous increase in planters' economic might and decline in their political dominance made for an explosive mixture that shattered the bonds of the Union. Still, one must not focus solely on cases in which proslavery nationalism was thwarted, for its successes convinced many northerners of the veracity of the slave power thesis, helping further corrode the Union. James L. Huston shows that both southern efforts to nationalize property rights in slaves and the prospect of slavery becoming a national institution—in the sense that a fully integrated national market could bring slave and free labor into competition—fueled northern sectionalism and promoted the rise of the Republican party. Proslavery nationalism and its policy implications thus emboldened the political party whose victory in 1860 convinced proslavery southerners that their goals could not be realized within the Union. 22

As the standard-bearers of northern and southern interests battled for national power, both sides emphasized that their respective ideologies were consistent with the nation's most cherished principles. Shearer Davis Bowman has argued that “northern and southern partisans of white sectionalism tended to see their respective sections as engaged in the high-minded defense of vested interests, outraged rights and liberties, and imperiled honor, all embedded in a society and way of life they deemed authentically American.” In a sense, both sides were right. Recent scholarship in such varied fields as intellectual, religious, political, and literary history suggests that although often incompatible, the values and ideals of the contending sections flowed from a common source. Work by Margaret Abruzzo on proslavery and antislavery humanitarianism, John Patrick Daly and Mark A. Noll on evangelical Protestantism, Sean Wilentz on political democracy, and Diane N. Capitani on domestic sentimental fiction suggests that the highly politicized differences between northern and southern ideologies masked those ideologies' common intellectual roots. Some scholars have argued for more fundamental difference, maintaining that southern thinkers roundly rejected democracy and liberal capitalism, while others have gone too far in the other direction in presenting northern and southern whites as equally committed to liberalism. But the dominant thrust of recent work on sectional ideologies suggests that they represented two hostile sides of a single coin minted at the nation's founding. Since a coin flip cannot end in a tie, both sides struggled for control of the national government to put their incompatible ideals into practice. The nationalization of northern ideals was a hotly contested outcome, made possible only by armed conflict. Conversely, the sectionalization of white southern ideals was not inevitable. Proponents of both sections drew on nationalism and sectionalism alike, embracing the former when they felt powerful and the latter when they felt weak. “As long as the Government is on our side,” proslavery Democrat and future South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens wrote in 1857, “I am for sustaining it and using its power for our benefit. … [if] our opponents reverse the present state of things then I am for war .” 23

Together, recent studies of northern sectionalism and southern nationalism make a compelling case for why the Civil War broke out when it did. If the South was always a separatist minority and if the North always defended the American way, secession might well have come long before 1861. It is more helpful to view the sectional conflict as one between equally authentic (not morally equivalent) strands of American nationalism grappling for the power to govern the entire country according to sectionally specific values. Southern slaveholders ruled what was in many ways the weaker section, but constitutional privileges such as the infamous three-fifths clause, along with other advantageous provisions such as the rule requiring a two-thirds majority in the nominations of Democratic presidential candidates, allowed them to remain dominant prior to 1860, until their successes aroused a sense of northern sectionalism robust enough to lift the Republican party into power. Almost overnight, the proslavery nationalist project collapsed. Only then did decisive numbers of southern whites countenance disunion, a drastic measure whose use had long been resisted within the South. The Civil War erupted when northern sectionalism grew powerful enough to undermine southern nationalism. 24

In the model of Civil War causation sketched above, northern voters who joined the Republicans fretted over the fate of liberty in a slaveholding republic. But whose liberty was at stake? Recent scholarship powerfully demonstrates that for moderate opponents of slavery the most damnable aspect of the institution was not what it did to slaves but what it allowed slaveholders to do to northern whites. Popular antislavery grew from trepidation about the power of the slaveholding class and its threat to republican liberty, not from uproar against proslavery racism and racial oppression. And since this concern fueled the Republican party's rapid growth and 1860 presidential triumph, white northerners' indignant response to slaveholders' clout contributed significantly to the coming of the war by providing secessionists with a pretext for disunion. According to this interpretation of northern politics, slavery remains at the root of the sectional conflict even though racial egalitarianism did not inspire the most popular brands of antislavery politics and even though many of the debates over slavery, as Eric Foner has pointed out, “were only marginally related to race.” At the same time, recent scholarship on southern politics foregrounds slave agency and persuasively demonstrates that conflict between masters and slaves directly affected national affairs. If the fate of the enslaved did not preoccupy most northern whites, the same cannot be said of their southern counterparts, whose politics are intelligible only in the context of slave resistance. In sum, recent work confirms the centrality of slavery in the coming of the war in a very specific and nuanced way, showing that the actions and contested status of enslaved people influenced southern politics directly and northern politics more obliquely. This work reveals an asymmetry in the politics of slavery: in the South it revolved around maintaining control over slaves in the name of white supremacy and planters' interests, while in the North it centered on the problem of the slaveholding class. 25

Moral indignation at racial prejudice in the twentieth century does not necessarily provide the key to an understanding of the dispute between the sections in the nineteenth century. While some abolitionists were indignant at the slave system and what it did to black men, many more northerners became antisouthern and antislavery because of what the slave system did or threatened to do to them. A failure to recognize this can easily lead us into a blind alley of oversimplification, and to view the events of a hundred years ago as a morality play with heroes and villains rather than a plausible presentation of a human dilemma.

Many twenty-first century scholars have taken this point to heart while implicitly challenging Gara's stark contrast between moral and self-interested antislavery. They stress the primary importance of white liberty in popular antislavery critiques but show that slavery's “moderate” opponents were no less morally outraged than their “radical” counterparts. Slavery could be condemned on moral grounds for a wide variety of reasons, some of which had much to do with enslaved people and some of which—whether they stressed the degeneracy of southern society, the undemocratic influence of slaveholders' political clout, or the threat that proslavery zealots posed to civil liberties—did not. Thus, recent scholars have made Gara's “crucial distinction” while underlining the moral dimensions of ostensibly moderate, conservative, or racist antislavery arguments. Popular antislavery strove to protect democratic politics from the machinations of a legally privileged and economically potent ruling class. Slaveholders' inordinate political power was itself a moral problem. These findings may prompt historians to reconsider the relative emphasis placed on class and race in the origins and meanings of the Civil War, particularly regarding the political behavior of the nonabolitionist northern majority. 27

Numerous recent studies emphasize that perceived threats to white freedom pushed northerners to oppose the slave power, support the Republican party, and prosecute the Civil War on behalf of liberty and the Union. Nicole Etcheson's study of the violent struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over Kansas during the mid-1850s contends that the key issue at stake was freedom for white settlers. During the Civil War many Kansans who had fought for the admission of their state under an antislavery constitution applauded emancipation, but Etcheson persuasively argues that “Bleeding Kansas began as a struggle to secure the political liberties of whites.” Racist pioneers from both sections battled to ensure that the plains would remain a haven for white freedom, disagreeing primarily over slavery's compatibility with that goal. Similarly, Matthew Mason shows that antislavery politics in the early national period, spearheaded by Federalists, thrived only when northern voters recognized “how slavery impinged on their rights and interests.” Russell McClintock's analysis of the 1860 election and northerners' reaction to secession and the bombardment of Fort Sumter indicates that anxiety over slaveholders' power encouraged a decisive, violent northern response. As the antislavery position edged closer to the mainstream of northern politics, critiques of slavery grounded in sympathy for enslaved people faded as less philanthropic assaults on the institution proliferated. Carol Lasser's study of the shifting emphasis of antislavery rhetoric demonstrates that between the 1830s and the 1850s, “self-interest replaced sin as a basis for antislavery organizing,” as antislavery appeals increasingly “stressed the self-interest of northern farmers and workers—mainly white and mainly male.” Ultimately, popular antislavery cast “free white men, rather than enslaved African American women,” as “the victims of ‘the peculiar institution.’” 28

Even histories of fugitive slave cases underscore the preeminence of white liberty as the activating concern for many northerners. As the historian Earl M. Maltz has pointed out, the fugitive slave issue was never isolated from other political controversies. Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which seemed to prove the existence of a southern plot to spread slavery onto previously free western soil, fugitive slave cases during and after 1854 aroused increased hostility among white northerners who suspected that slaveholders threatened the liberties of all Americans. Those fears intensified throughout the 1850s in response to cases in which free northerners stood trial for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. In two of the three cases explored by Steven Lubet the defendants were not runaway slaves but predominantly white northerners accused of abetting fugitives from slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act's criminalization of noncompliance with slave catchers proved especially odious. “For all of its blatant unfairness,” Lubet argues, “the Act might have been considered tolerable in the North—at least among non-abolitionists—if it had been directed only at blacks.” It was not, of course, and some of the act's most celebrated cases placed white northerners in legal jeopardy for crossing swords with the slave power. Two recent studies of the Joshua Glover case reinforce this point. Formerly a slave in St. Louis, Glover escaped to Wisconsin and, with the help of sympathetic white residents, from there to Canada in 1854. But the dramatic confrontation between free-state citizens and the slaveholder-dominated federal government only began with Glover's successful flight, since the political reverberations of the case echoed for many years after Glover reached Canadian soil. Debates over the rights and duties of citizens, over the boundaries of state and federal sovereignty, and over the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act hinged on the prosecution of the primarily white Wisconsinites who aided Glover's escape. None gained more notoriety than Sherman Booth, the Milwaukee newspaper editor whose case bounced between state and federal courts from 1854 to 1859, and whose attorney, Byron Paine, capitalized on his own resulting popularity to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Long after attention left Glover, who was undoubtedly relieved to be out of the public eye, conflicts over northern state rights and individual rights highlighted the threat to white liberty posed by the slave power and its federal agents. 29

Of course, the white northerners prosecuted under proslavery law would have remained in obscurity if not for the daring escapes made by enslaved people. As Stanley Harrold has shown, runaway slaves sparked dozens of bloody skirmishes in the antebellum borderland between slavery and freedom. To stress the importance of conflicts over white liberty in the coming of the Civil War is not to ignore the political impact of slave resistance. Quite the reverse: recent studies of Civil War causation have deftly explored the relationship between slave agency and sectional antagonism, revealing that slave resistance provoked conflict between whites, even in situations where racial justice was not the main point of contention. Northern sectionalism was a reaction against proslavery belligerence, which was fueled by internal conflicts in the South. Narratives of Civil War causation that focus on white northerners' fears for their liberties depend on slave agency, for the aggressiveness of the slave power was, essentially, a response to the power of slaves. 30

Revealingly, recent works by John Ashworth and William W. Freehling both stress this theme. Both scholars published long-awaited second volumes of their accounts of Civil War causation in 2007. Beyond this coincidence, however, it would be difficult to find two historians more dissimilar than Ashworth, a Marxist who privileges labor systems and class relations, and Freehling, a master storyteller who stresses contingency and individual consciousness. For all their methodological and ideological differences, however, Ashworth and Freehling concur on an essential point: the struggle between masters and slaves accelerated the sectional conflict by forcing masters to support undemocratic policies that threatened northern liberties. The resulting hostility of northerners toward slaveholders provoked a fierce response, and the cycle continued. By weaving the day-to-day contest between masters and slaves into their political analyses, both authors fashion a “reintegrated” American history that blends the insights of social and political history. 31

According to Ashworth, class conflict forced ruling elites in both sections to pursue clashing political and economic policies. Thus, structural divergence in social and economic systems between North and South inflamed the political and ideological strife that resulted in disunion. Class conflict was especially problematic in the South, whose enslaved population did not accept proslavery principles in the same way that, by the 1850s, some northern workers embraced free-labor ideology. Instead, interminable slave resistance compelled southern masters to gag congressional debate over slavery, to demand stringent fugitive slave laws, and to agitate for a territorial slave code—in short, to act the part of an authoritarian slave power. “Behind every event in the history of the sectional controversy,” Ashworth argues in his first volume, “lurked the consequences of black resistance to slavery.” A dozen years of additional work confirmed this thesis. In his second volume, Ashworth contends that “the opposition of the slaves to their own enslavement is the fundamental, irreplaceable cause of the War.” The Civil War did not begin as a massive slave rebellion because southern masters managed to contain the unrest that threatened their rule, but the price of this success was a deteriorating relationship with northerners. By contending for their freedom, slaves obliged their masters to behave in ways that convinced even the most bigoted northern whites that slavery menaced their own liberties. 32

colliding democratic and despotic governing systems. The Old South combined dictatorship over blacks with republicanism for whites, supposedly cleanly severed by an All-Mighty Color Line. But to preserve dictatorial dominion over blacks, the slaveholding minority sometimes trenched on majoritarian government for whites, in the nation as well as in their section. … Northerners called the militant slavocracy the Slave Power, meaning that those with autocratic power over blacks also deployed undemocratic power over whites. Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or abolitionists. Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white men's majoritarian rights.

Scholars who foreground northern concern for white liberty in a slaveholding republic underline the importance of class conflict between northern voters and southern elites in the coming of the Civil War. Moderate antislavery northerners condemned slaveholders for aristocratic pretensions and tyrannical policies, not for racial bigotry. But for many scholars, race remains the key to understanding antebellum sectional politics. The tendency remains strong to frame the sectional conflict and the Civil War as one campaign in a longer struggle for racial justice. Not surprisingly, studies of radical abolitionism are the most likely works to employ this framework. Radical abolitionists nurtured a strikingly egalitarian conception of race and fought for a social vision that most scholars share but one that the modern world has not yet realized, and therein lies their appeal. Moreover, those who foreground race in the coming of the war do not naïvely suggest that all northern whites were racial egalitarians. Since the 1960s, commitment to an admirable antiracist ideal, not wishful thinking, has given a powerful boost to a primarily racial interpretation of the sectional conflict. But the recent scholarly emphasis on issues of class and the slave power suggests that framing the sectional conflict as a clash over racial injustice is not the most useful approach to understanding Civil War causation. 34

The slave power was defined not by racism but by slaveholders' capacity to use federal law and muscle to advance their class interests. Proslavery racism was, like all racism, reprehensible, but it is easily, even when subtly, overstated in accounts of Civil War causation. It is, for example, hardly incorrect to refer to the proslavery ideologue James Henry Hammond as “a fiercely racist South Carolina politician,” but that characterization emphasizes a trait he shared with most northern voters rather than what alienated Hammond from them and thus hastened the rise of the Republican party and the outbreak of war. What distinguished Hammond from his northern antagonists was his “mudsill” theory of society (which he outlined in an 1858 Senate speech) and its implications for American class relations. Proceeding from the presumption that every functioning society must rest upon the labors of a degraded “mudsill” class, Hammond argued that the southern laboring class, because it was enslaved, was materially better off and politically less threatening than its northern counterpart. Hammond's highly public articulation of this theory outraged proponents of free labor and made him a particularly notorious proslavery propagandist. Illinois Republicans who rallied under a banner declaring “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln” recognized the deep-seated class dimensions of their party's conflict with Hammond and his ilk. Moreover, Hammond's comparison of the northern and southern working classes suggests a curious ambiguity in the relative importance of class and race in proslavery ideology. This subject demands further scholarly attention, but important advances have recently been made. On the one hand, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have indicated that the irascible George Fitzhugh, who proclaimed that working people of all colors would be better off as slaves, was not alone in developing a defense of slavery compatible with racism but ultimately based on class relations. On the other hand, slaveholders, at least as much as any other antebellum Americans, benefited from portraying slavery as a fundamentally racial issue. As Frank Towers has shown, planters feared the day when nonslaveholding southern whites might begin to think in terms of class and shuddered at the prospect of working-class politics in southern cities. That one of the most strident articulations of the race-based proslavery argument—which promised that the subjugation of blacks made equals of all white men—appeared in 1860 was no coincidence, as southern elites sought to ensure regional white unity on the eve of a possible revolution. In pursuit of their interests, southern ideologues drew on both class- and race-based arguments, and if the latter stand out to modern readers, the former did more to alienate individuals in the free states. Slaveholders' conflict with northern voters, the collision that triggered secession and war, grew not out of clashing racial views but out of competition for political power. 35

The most broadly appealing brands of antislavery defined this competition as one between classes. Proponents of popular antislavery presented sectional issues in terms of class more often than race, and with tremendous effect. Their interpretation of sectional friction generated mass sympathy for a cause that otherwise would have remained a fringe movement. This moderate antislavery ideology is easily discounted if we attribute genuine antislavery sentiments only to those few northerners uncontaminated by racism. It grew from many sources: Jacksonian antipathy to concentrated economic and political power; an often-radical producerism that would guarantee to the worker the fruits of his labor; a demand for land reform that would reserve western soil for white farmers; and a morally charged concern about the fate of democracy in a nation dominated by slaveholders. Class-based Jacksonian radicalism thus informed the ideology of the Free Soil party and, crucially, the Republicans. Antislavery politicians such as New Hampshire's John P. Hale, a Democrat who drifted into the Republican ranks via the Free Soil party, “defined the controversy over slavery and its continuation as an issue between aristocratic slave owners and ‘sturdy republicans’ rather than between innocent slaves and sinful masters,” points out Jonathan H. Earle. It was this contest that aroused a northern majority to vote Lincoln into office and to enlist in the Union army. The issues of money, power, class, and democracy that concerned Jacksonian and other moderate antislavery northerners were not less morally charged because they focused on white liberty and equality in a republic. Nor should we forget that this class-based antislavery critique contained the seeds of a racial egalitarianism that sprouted, however feebly, during the Civil War. The experience of war often turned whites-only egalitarianism into a far more sweeping notion of human equality. To ignore this transformation is to discount the radicalizing influence that the Civil War had on many northern soldiers and civilians. 36

When coupled with an analysis of southern politics that emphasizes slave agency, this revival of scholarly interest in popular antislavery ideology offers not only a convincing interpretation of Civil War causation but also a politically and pedagogically important narrative about class and politics in American history. Adam Rothman's 2005 essay on the slave power is a model of this fresh and constructive approach. On one level, he presents an accessible introduction to the history and historiography of nineteenth-century slaveholders. But the chief contribution of the work lies in the context in which the essay was published: an anthology on American elite classes, from early national merchant capitalists to postwar anti–New Dealers, and their relationship with American democracy. Casting the slave power in this light gives the sectional conflict a bold new meaning, one that reveals the Civil War to have been both much more than and much less than a precursor to the civil rights movement. It appears as a struggle between (an imperfect) popular democracy and one of the most powerful and deeply rooted interests in antebellum politics. One might argue that Americans simply replaced one set of masters—southern planters—with another, the rising robber barons. Nevertheless, the Civil War offers one of precious few instances in American history in which a potent, entrenched, incredibly wealthy, and constitutionally privileged elite class was thoroughly ousted from national power. This makes the class-based issues that helped spark the war too important to forget. 37

That narrative may also aid in the quest for that holy grail of academic history: a receptive public audience. The neo-Confederate outcry against the alleged anti-southern bias of McPherson's 2000 “What Caused the Civil War?” essay and the ongoing controversy over the Confederate flag indicate that much of the public does not share in the scholarly consensus on slavery's central place in Civil War causation. Unfortunately, no quick fix exists for popular misconceptions about the war, but scholarship that frames the conflict over slavery as a struggle in which the liberties of all Americans were at stake may influence minds closed to depictions of the war as an antiracist crusade. This is not to argue that historians should pander to popular prejudice or that race is not a central theme in the history of the Civil War era. Rather, historians can and should capitalize on the political and pedagogical advantages of an important body of scholarship that sharpens our understanding of Civil War causation by explaining why even incorrigible northern racists voted and fought against southern slaveholders, and that reminds us that slavery impacted all antebellum Americans, North and South, black and white. When northerners urged the “necessity” of defending their liberty against the encroaching “tyranny” of a government “under the absolute control of an oligarchy of southern slave holders,” as Judge F. C. White of Utica, New York, wrote in 1858, they meant precisely what they said. To gainsay the salience of race in the causes, course, and outcome of the Civil War would be a terrible mistake, but it would be equally misleading to neglect the matters of class, power, and democracy at the heart of the slavery debate; these issues contributed mightily to the origins of the nation's bloodiest conflict and to its modern-day significance. 38

Whatever its ultimate fate in the classroom and public discourse, recent scholarship on the coming of the Civil War reveals an impatience with old interpretive categories, an eagerness to challenge the basic parameters that have long guided scholarly thinking on the topic, and a healthy skepticism of narratives that explain the war with comforting, simplistic formulae. The broad consensus on slavery's centrality has not stifled rapid growth and diversification in the field. Indeed, the proliferation of works on Civil War causation presents a serious challenge to anyone seeking to synthesize the recent literature into a single tidy interpretation. Rather than suggest an all-encompassing model, this essay has outlined three broad themes that could provide fertile ground for future debate. A reaction against the expanding geographic and temporal breadth of Civil War causation studies, for example, might prompt scholars to return to tightly focused, state-level analyses of antebellum politics. Recent political histories of antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana suggest that this approach has much to contribute to our understanding of how national debates filtered down to state and local levels. Other scholars might take an explicitly comparative approach and analyze the causes, course, and results of the American Civil War alongside those of roughly contemporaneous intrastate conflicts, including the Reform War (1857–1861) in Mexico and China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Comparative history's vast potential has been amply demonstrated by Enrico Dal Lago's study of agrarian elites and regionalism in the Old South and Italy, and by Don H. Doyle's edited collection on secession movements around the globe. Similarly, scholars undoubtedly will challenge the interpretive emphases on proslavery American nationalism, antislavery northern sectionalism, and the class dimensions of the sectional conflict that pervade much of the recent scholarship and receive close attention in this essay. But others might carry on this work by studying phenomena such as the disunionist thrust of radical abolitionism. The campaign for free-state secession never sank deep roots in northern soil. But by the late 1850s it was a frequent topic of editorials in abolitionist publications such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and it captured mainstream headlines through events such as the 1857 Worcester Disunion Convention. And even if race, southern sectionalism, and northern Unionism dominate future narratives of Civil War causation, further debate will sharpen our analysis of an easily mythologized period of American history. 39

These debates will be no less meaningful because of scholars' near-universal acknowledgement of the centrality of slavery in the coming of the Civil War. Instead, they illustrate C. Vann Woodward's observation that “most of the important debates over history … have not been about absolute but about relative matters, not about the existence but about the degree or extent of the phenomenon in question.” Beneath a veneer of consensus lies interpretive nuance and healthy disagreement, which we can hope will inform both academic and popular commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial. 40

The title of this article borrows from Howard K. Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War,” Social Science Research Bulletin, 54 (1946), 53–102. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953–1955), VIII, 332–33; James M. McPherson, “What Caused the Civil War?,” North and South, 4 (Nov. 2000), 12–22, esp. 13. This consensus extends into college textbooks, many written by James McPherson, which “contain little debate over war causation since they recognize that slavery was the root cause of the war.” See William B. Rogers and Terese Martyn, “A Consensus at Last: American Civil War Texts and the Topics That Dominate the College Classroom,” History Teacher, 41 (Aug. 2008), 519–30, esp. 530. See also Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean, “A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks,” Civil War History, 51 (Sept. 2005), 317–24. Charles W. Joyner, “The Flag Controversy and the Causes of the Civil War: A Statement by Historians,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 24 (Winter 2001), 196–98, esp. 197. For lengthier exposés of slavery, secession, and postbellum mythmaking from recent years, see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2001); and James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, eds., The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” (Jackson, 2010).

Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, 2008), 4. Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York, 2005), 128. For Edward Ayers's call for reinvigorated debate on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War, see ibid. , 131–44.

For analyses of earlier literature, see Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War”; Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York, 1962); David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the Civil War,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, by David M. Potter (Baton Rouge, 1968), 87–150; and Eric Foner, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History, 20 (Sept. 1974), 197–214. For more recent historiographical assessments of specific topics related to the sectional crisis, see Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, 2005), 25–200. For a reinterpretation of the full century and a half of scholarship on Civil War causation that briefly samples recent literature, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (June 2011), 237–64. Several important bodies of literature are underrepresented in my historiography. One is work on the five months between Abraham Lincoln's election and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which addresses the question of why and how secession sparked a shooting war. This outcome was not inevitable, because the causes of disunion were not identical to the causes of the Civil War itself. This essay focuses on the former topic. For recent interpretations of the latter, see Dew, Apostles of Disunion; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001); Larry D. Mansch, Abraham Lincoln, President-Elect: The Four Critical Months from Election to Inauguration (Jefferson, 2005); Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007); Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, 2008); Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2008); Lawrence M. Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis: The Effort to Prevent Civil War (Jefferson, 2009); William J. Cooper Jr., “The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (Feb. 2011), 3–16; Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War, 1861 (New York, 2011); and Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011). Biographies are also not explored systematically here. Recent biographies related to the coming of the Civil War include William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia, S.C., 2001); John L. Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, 2005); John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, 2005); Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2006); and Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis . Thanks in part to the close proximity of Lincoln's bicentennial birthday and the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholarship on the sixteenth president continues to burgeon. For analyses of this vast literature, see James Oakes, “Lincoln and His Commas,” Civil War History, 54 (June 2008), 176–93; Sean Wilentz, “Who Lincoln Was,” New Republic, July 15, 2009, pp. 24–47; and Nicole Etcheson, “Abraham Lincoln and the Nation's Greatest Quarrel: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History, 76 (May 2010), 401–16. For an account of Lincoln historiography in the Journal of American History, see Allen C. Guelzo, “The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History, ” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 400–416. That biography and studies of the secession winter are thriving suggests a possible waning of the long-dominant “irrepressible conflict” interpretation, as both approaches emphasize contingency and individual agency. Collective biography, particularly on Lincoln's relationships with other key figures, has also flourished. On Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007); Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008); and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008). On Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, see Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York, 2008); and Roy Morris, The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (New York, 2008). A third body of literature that needs further historiographical analysis relates to gender and the coming of the Civil War. See, for example, Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, 2003); Nina Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill, 2008); Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge, 2009); and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). For discussions of the classic schools of scholarship, see Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, by Kenneth M. Stampp (New York, 1980), 191–245; Ayers, What Caused the Civil War?, 132–33; and Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003), 78–79. For a call for a synthesis of the fundamentalist and revisionist interpretations, see Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? On the continued relevance of these camps, see James Huston, “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War,” Reviews in American History, 34 (Sept. 2006), 329. The coming of the Civil War has long shaped discussions of historical causation, including Lee Benson and Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: Two Appraisals,” History and Theory, 1 (no. 2, 1961), 163–85; and William Dray and Newton Garver, “Some Causal Accounts of the American Civil War,” Daedalus, 91 (Summer 1962), 578–98.

Key works on the transnational turn include “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–542; Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” History Teacher, 36 (Nov. 2002), 37–64; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006); and Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007). Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), I, 3–5; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 3–5; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 1–6. On continental expansion and sectional conflict, see Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1997). On the divisive influence of sectionalized fantasies of tropical conquest, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973). For an early work on Haiti's transnational significance, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988). On the relationship between the Ostend Manifesto and domestic politics, see Robert E. May, “A ‘Southern Strategy’ for the 1850s: Northern Democrats, the Tropics, and Expansion of the National Domain,” Louisiana Studies, 14 (Winter 1975), 333–59, esp. 337–42; and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. II: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (New York, 2007), 395–98.

Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 7; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 5. Other recent transnational studies of Civil War causation include Timothy Roberts, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Antebellum Violence in Kansas,” Journal of the West, 44 (Fall 2005), 58–68; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, Ga., 2011). Several recent dissertations explore the equally permeable boundary between North and South. See Joseph T. Rainer, “The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000); Wesley Brian Borucki, “Yankees in King Cotton's Court: Northerners in Antebellum and Wartime Alabama” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 2002); Eric William Plaag, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2006); and Alana K. Bevan, “‘We Are the Same People’: The Leverich Family of New York and Their Antebellum American Inter-regional Network of Elites” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). On the “mighty experiment,” see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002). The compelling scholarship on global antislavery undoubtedly encouraged the internationalization of Civil War causation studies. David Brion Davis's contributions remain indispensable. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 –1823 (Ithaca, 1975); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006). For a work that places antebellum southern thought, including proslavery ideology, into an international context, see Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols., Chapel Hill, 2004).

Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 6–7; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 9–10.

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2009), 10; Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville, 2006). John Majewski offers a different perspective on slavery and free trade, acknowledging that slaveholders were hardly united in favor of protection and arguing that the moderate Confederate tariff represented a compromise between protectionists and free traders. See John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, 2009).

On the centrality of cotton exports in the economic history of the South—and the United States—see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961). On the Old South's place in world economic history and its dependency on the global cotton market, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (New York, 1983), 34–60. On the cotton trade and Confederate diplomacy, see Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr., King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931). On the early history of the cotton kingdom, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html . The foundational text for “long movement” scholarship is Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233–63. An influential application of this paradigm is Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008). For a sharp critique of the long movement concept, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265–88. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006), 5.

John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007). For an accessible introduction to the early struggles over slavery, see Gary J. Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821 (Lanham, 2010). On slavery's post-Revolution expansion, see Rothman, Slave Country . For the social and intellectual history of early proslavery thought, see Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829: An Anthology (Columbia, S.C., 2006); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2008); and Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009).

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 28–51; Jan Lewis, “The Three-Fifths Clause and the Origins of Sectionalism,” in Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio, 2008), 19–46; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, 2006); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002); Christopher Childers, “Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay,” Civil War History, 57 (March 2011), 48–70. For a discussion of the temporal parameters of his own work, see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), vii.

Paul Calore, The Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Territorial Disputes between North and South (Jefferson, 2008). John B. Alley, Speech of Hon. John B. Alley, of Mass., on the Principles and Purposes of the Republican Party: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Monday, April 30, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 2; Robert Toombs, Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs, on the Crisis. Delivered before the Georgia Legislature, December 7, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 5. Emphasis in original. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 99; Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, 2010). On the memory of the American Revolution in William Lloyd Garrison's proudly anachronistic rhetoric, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 2003). On abolitionists' use of public commemorations of British emancipation to recruit new activists, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, “‘No Occurrence in Human History Is More Deserving of Commemoration Than This’: Abolitionist Celebrations of Freedom,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 200–219. On the link between collective memory of the Texas Revolution and the growth of Confederate nationalism in Texas, see Andrew F. Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 114 (July 2010), 21–36. On the memory of the Civil War, see, for example, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); William Alan Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 5, 17, 317–22, esp. 17, 5. Emphasis in original.

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, 2007), 3. Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 211.

Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, 2010), 17–18. For recent studies of the slavery expansion issue in the late 1840s and early 1850s, see Joel H. Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York, 2005); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007); John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, 2003); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York, 2010); and Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2010). Also in the late 1840s, antislavery activists shifted away from efforts to abolish the interstate slave trade and toward the restriction of slavery's expansion. See Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power, 113–39. General histories that begin in the 1845–1850 period include Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (New York, 1934); Nevins, Ordeal of the Union; Potter, Impending Crisis; Ludwell H. Johnson, Division and Reunion: America, 1848–1877 (New York, 1978); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore, 1988); Robert Cook, Civil War America: Making a Nation, 1848–1877 (London, 2003); and Green, Politics and America in Crisis .

Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 28. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, 2000), 61–80; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, 2009), 21–122. For accessible accounts of the Compromise of 1850, see Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War; and Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice.

Green, Politics and America in Crisis, 41. On the ages of representatives and senators in 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1964), 32, 40. On the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), 494. “Address, 1851, of the Southern Rights Association of the University of Virginia to the Young Men of the South” [Dec. 19, 1850?], folder 1, box 1, William Henry Gist Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia).

The classic statement of this “revisionist” interpretation is J. G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27 (June 1940), 3–28. For a different psychological interpretation of generational influences on politics, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979). For a generational analysis of the rise of immediate abolitionism around 1830, see James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History, 56 (Nov. 1990), 633–35. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill, 2005). Earlier works that emphasize secession's popularity among youthful southern whites include William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974); and Henry James Walker, “Henry Clayton and the Secession Movement in Alabama,” Southern Studies, 4 (Winter 1993), 341–60. Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, 2003); Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–78.

David M. Potter, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” in South and the Sectional Conflict, by Potter, 34–83, esp. 75, 65.

Grant, North over South, 6; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 42–74. See also Kevin M. Gannon, “Calculating the Value of Union: States' Rights, Nullification, and Secession in the North, 1800–1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2002).

Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009), xv, 84, 217. On slaveholders' influence over national policy and their use of federal power to advance proslavery interests, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, completed and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago, 2010). For a work that argues that the slave power thesis was not mere paranoia and disputes the dismissive interpretation of earlier historians, see Richards, Slave Power . Works that Leonard Richards disputes include Chauncey S. Boucher, “ In re That Aggressive Slavocracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 8 (June–Sept. 1921), 13–79; and David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1970). The painful shift from proslavery American nationalism to proslavery southern nationalism can be traced in the career of the Alabama Whig Henry Washington Hilliard. See David I. Durham, A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808–1892 (Baton Rouge, 2008).

Matthew J. Karp, “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (May 2011), 283–324, esp. 290; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 197–259; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003).

Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2010), 12. Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 2002); Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), esp. xxii, 576, 791; Diane N. Capitani, Truthful Pictures: Slavery Ordained by God in the Domestic Sentimental Novel of the Nineteenth-Century South (Lanham, 2009). On the antidemocratic impulse behind secession in South Carolina and, ostensibly, the rest of the Confederacy, see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000). See also Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (Tuscaloosa, 2009). On the southern rejection of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York, 2005); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York, 2008). For the argument that both sections were equally dedicated to liberalism, see David F. Ericson, The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America (New York, 2000). For a compelling argument that secession stemmed from a fierce reaction against nineteenth-century liberal trends and from fealty to the true American republic, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 12–13. Francis W. Pickens to Benjamin F. Perry, June 27, 1857, folder 3, box 1, B. F. Perry Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Emphasis in original.

On the fragility of an antebellum nationalism built on ideals that developed clashing sectional characteristics, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, 2002), 8–9.

This work expands on a theme advanced in Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (1949; East Lansing, 1964). Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 120.

Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History, 15 (March 1969), 5–18, esp. 9, 6.

On the difficulty of placing antislavery activists on a spectrum of political opinion, see Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge, 2005), 265.

Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, 2004), 8; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 5; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, 26–28. On the importance of “the Union”—antebellum shorthand for an experiment in democratic self-government freighted with world-historical significance—in arousing the northern war effort, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic, 28 (Spring 2008), 113, 112.

Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence, 2010), 54. Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 44. The white defendants Steven Lubet examines are Castner Hanway, charged with treason for his involvement in an 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania, clash, and Simeon Bushnell, a participant in an 1858 Oberlin, Ohio, slave rescue. The third case Lubet looks at is that of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio, 2006); Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave (Madison, 2007).

Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010). On fugitive slaves and national politics, see R. J. M. Blackett, “Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery after 1850,” American Nineteenth Century History, 10 (June 2009), 119–36.

John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York, 1995); Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, II; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1961 (New York, 2007). For an exploration of their differences, see John Ashworth, “William W. Freehling and the Politics of the Old South,” American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (Spring 2004), 1–29. On the “reintegration” of political and social history, see William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994).

Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, I, 6, II, 1.

Freehling, Road to Disunion, II, xii, xiii. On the relationship between slave resistance and politics in antebellum Virginia, see William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2003). On the political consequences of mass panic over suspected slave revolts in 1860, see Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge, 2007).

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, 2008); Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 103. Elizabeth Varon mentions the speech but not its impact on northern workers. See ibid ., 308–10. For the class implications of James Henry Hammond's theory, see Samantha Maziarz, “Mudsill Theory,” in Class in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Robert E. Weir (3 vols., Westport, 2007), II, 549–50. On northerners' response to the speech, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982), 347. On the Republican banner, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 196–98. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Slavery in White and Black . Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2004). J. D. B. DeBow, The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder: The Right of Peaceful Secession; Slavery in the Bible (Charleston, 1860). On elite secessionists' heavy-handed efforts to mobilize nonslaveholding whites behind secession and the only partial success of racist demagoguery, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–84.

In his vindication of Jacksonian antislavery, Daniel Feller criticizes the “fixation with race” that leads too many scholars “to question the sincerity or good intentions of any but the most outspoken racial egalitarians among the opponents of slavery.” Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 50. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 92; Feller, “Brother in Arms”; Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois,” Civil War History, 47 (March 2001), 7–29; Sean Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (Sept. 2004), 375–401. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 190–253; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York, 2007), 12, 221; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology during the Civil War,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation, ed. Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia, 2002), 103–27.

Adam Rothman, “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 64–91. On the collapse of planters' national power, despite their continued regional dominance, see Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review, 95 (Feb. 1990), 75–98.

F. C. White to John P. Hale, Feb. 16, 1858, folder 8, box 12, John P. Hale Papers (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord). On the response to McPherson's essay, see John M. Coski, “Historians under Fire: The Public and the Memory of the Civil War,” Cultural Resource Management, 25 (no. 4, 2002), 13–15. On the Confederate flag controversy, see J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, 2000); K. Michael Prince, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (Columbia, S.C., 2004); and John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2003). Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005); Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens, Ga., 2010). On the Worcester Disunion Convention, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1995), 140–41; and Ericson, Debate over Slavery, 74–79.

C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 79.

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Causes of the Civil War

By michael e. woods.

Without the presence of slavery, disunion and war would not have taken place. But did slavery's presence make that outcome inevitable?

What caused the Civil War? To ask the question is to invite intense debate. History’s present-day relevance is on full display in the countless discussions—online and offline—that this topic continues to generate. Americans remain deeply and personally invested in the Civil War, making it an exciting but challenging field for anyone committed to rigorous scholarship. When South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut explained secession in 1861, she focused on visceral rage: "We are divorced, North from South, because we hated each other so." [1] Today, traces of these feelings linger, making careful study essential to a thorough understanding of the war that Chesnut’s contemporaries fought.

Students of Civil War causation should clearly state the historical problem they wish to solve and carefully decide where in time to begin and end their narratives. Good history begins with precise questions. Asking what caused the war is not the same, for example, as asking why soldiers enlisted, or whether the North and South were more alike or different by 1861. Our questions must also inspire nuanced answers. “ What caused the war?” invites us simply to list sectional differences or major events. We might quarrel over how to rank the enumerated items. We might (more profitably) explore the connections between them. But the “what” question risks implying that history is a series of isolated episodes rather than an intricate process of change over time. Historians do their best work when they ask “why” or “how” questions. These questions reflect and respect the complexity of the past and invite more satisfying answers. We might ask: “ Why did the Civil War happen?” Or: “ How did disunion and war become possible?”

The narratives we write in response must start and stop at specific points in time. Most studies of Civil War causation conclude in April 1861 with the outbreak of war in Charleston, South Carolina. But when should the narrative start? This decision dramatically influences accounts of the war's origins. If we start with the Constitutional Convention, sectional conflict might appear as an unavoidable result of compromises made, and decisions postponed, by the Founding Fathers, with the war serving as a bloody climax to philosophical debates commenced at Independence Hall. But if we begin in 1819 with the clash over slavery in Missouri, or in 1845, with the annexation of the slaveholding Texas Republic, our narrative might spotlight a series of crises over westward expansion. The war would grow from sectional wrangling over the spoils of continental empire. To choose a third starting point, if we commence in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the war will be a battle over the legitimacy of secession.

Each of these narratives offers considerable insight. But each one inevitably obscures important points as well. The first account, for example, situates the war within a longer struggle between southern defenders of states’ rights against primarily northern champions of federal power. But what about the ways in which southern statesmen used the federal government to defend their interests, particularly in the recovery of runaway slaves? This narrative would make little sense to northerners like Gideon Welles (later Secretary of the Navy under Abraham Lincoln), who denounced the Fugitive Slave Act as a "consolidating measure," an “abandonment” of the “doctrines and teachings of Jefferson,” and an "invasion of the states." [2] Similarly, despite the significance of the territorial issue, the final secession crisis commenced with a presidential election, not the conquest of fresh acreage. And while the war’s immediate trigger was secession, thorough accounts of its origins must explain why an election that followed the letter of constitutional law provoked disunion.

This essay offers a basic framework for thinking about Civil War causation. It proceeds from two foundational questions and adopts a unique approach to the chronology. The questions open up layers of puzzles to solve: Why did eleven states secede after the 1860 presidential election? Why did secession trigger war? I will address them in reverse order, working backward from 1861. Each episode on the road to war grew out of earlier conditions and events, and this essay reverses the timeline to explore what made each one possible. This does not mean that the outcome was inevitable. But it shows that every historical explanation leads to more questions, which can only be answered by moving further back in time. Each layer of historical excavation uncovers a few answers and many more challenges.

Why did secession lead to war? Many accounts focus on President Abraham Lincoln's handling of the secession crisis. But the Confederates fired first; President Jefferson Davis's perspective is, therefore, equally important. Obviously, the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter, an island installation in Charleston, South Carolina’s expansive harbor, defied the Confederacy's claim to independence. Most other federal property in the seceded states had been seized peacefully, but Fort Sumter capitulated only after enduring the opening salvos of the war. There were, however, deeper motivations for the bombardment. By April 1861, Davis faced two challenges: one was to vindicate the independence of the seven Deep South states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) which then comprised the Confederacy. The second was to convince the other eight slave states, home to most of the South's industry and white manpower, to join them. Many upper south states, including Virginia and Arkansas, had rejected secession so far, and even in the Deep South it had been controversial. War offered a solution to both problems. In the seceded states, armed conflict would transform dissent and apathy into martial zeal. "[U]nless you sprinkle a little blood in the face of the people of Alabama," warned one correspondent, "they will be back in the old Union in less than ten days!" [3] War would also force upper south whites to choose sides, and Davis expected they would fall in with the Deep South once the shooting started. Davis chose war, and at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, southern artillery commenced a bombardment of Fort Sumter that lasted more than thirty hours. Ironically, the cannonade killed no one. But it inspired citizens on both sides to rally to the colors. Northerners responded to Lincoln's April 15 call for 75,000 volunteers with patriotic fervor. Four slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—responded by seceding. Davis did not win over the border region, but the Confederacy swelled to eleven states and nine million inhabitants. The war had begun.

But why did Lincoln cling so tenaciously to Fort Sumter? The unfinished and undermanned citadel was ill-prepared to withstand a determined barrage. Some of Lincoln's closest advisors, including Secretary of State William Seward, urged him to abandon it in order to preserve an uneasy peace and prevent strategic upper south states like Virginia from seceding. But Lincoln's resolve grew from his understanding of the Union and his duties as president. He believed that the Constitution’s “more perfect Union” was perpetual and that Confederates had rebelled against lawful authority. Like Andrew Jackson in the Nullification Crisis (1832-33), he would execute the laws peacefully if possible, forcibly if necessary.

Lincoln outlined his intentions in his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861. No other American president inherited such a volatile situation: seven states had seceded, eight more seemed poised to follow, and most federal property in the Deep South, including forts, arsenals, and dockyards, had fallen to Confederates. Lincoln pledged neither to seek war, nor to buy peace at any price. He repudiated secession and deemed the Union "unbroken." He promised that the laws would be "faithfully executed in all the States" and that the government would "defend and maintain itself." This need not cause bloodshed, but if force was required to maintain normal government operations, he would use it. Lincoln concluded that his opponents would decide the outcome. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine , is the momentous issue of civil war....You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it.'" [4] This meant holding federal property, including Charleston’s Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida. Lincoln resolved to replenish both garrisons' dwindling provisions and keep the Stars and Stripes flying. Fort Pickens never surrendered, but Confederates blasted Fort Sumter into submission before supplies arrived.

War exploded at the Charleston flashpoint because neither side could back down without sacrificing principle or losing face. But the confrontation resulted from secession. Confederates necessarily defended its validity; to Unionists, secession amounted to anarchy and treason. But why had the first wave of secession, in which seven states departed the Union between December 1860 and February 1861, not been halted? Threats of disunion had permeated American political rhetoric and a secession scare had been averted in 1850. Why was there no Compromise of 1861?

It was not for a lack of effort. Throughout the winter of 1860-61, members of the 36 th Congress scrambled to enact compromise legislation. Moderates nationwide begged them to preserve the Union and keep the peace. "For God's sake," urged a Kentuckian, "and for the sake of humanity, persevere in the noble efforts at conciliation." [5] Both houses of Congress formed special committees to tailor a compromise. The content of their proposals reflected slavery’s central importance. No one doubted that a viable compromise must address slavery’s expansion and the return of fugitive slaves to their masters; these were the rocks on which the Union was foundering. Dozens of ideas circulated in Washington, but the leading plan came from Senator John Jordan Crittenden of Kentucky. The "Crittenden Compromise" consisted of six proposed constitutional amendments. Crittenden sought to avert secession by redefining the relationship between the federal government and slavery. His amendments would do the following:

Together, Crittenden's amendments would have weakened the federal government's ability to restrict slavery and required it to protect the institution. They were controversial not because they limited or expanded federal power generally, but because pro- and antislavery politicians disagreed about how that power should be used.

Despite provoking intense discussion, neither Crittenden’s proposal, nor anyone else’s, forestalled secession. To state the challenge Crittenden faced is to indicate why he failed: he and other would-be compromisers had to satisfy the most ardent proslavery extremists and the most unwavering antislavery zealots. To secessionist fire-eaters, the amendments offered only paper guarantees, not the ironclad security that they associated with southern independence. To antislavery Republicans, Crittenden's plan seemed destined to make the federal government an openly proslavery agency. Lincoln threw his influence as president-elect against any compromise that would allow slavery to expand. He offered concessions on other points, including the recovery of fugitives and a constitutional amendment prohibiting Congress from abolishing slavery. But against slavery expansion he urged congressional Republicans to stand firm, lest they forsake a core tenet of their party's platform. Lincoln clarified the issue in a letter to his friend, future Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.” [6] But it was a world of difference. In this formulation, the conflict was both a matter of policy—should slavery be extended (by active federal protection) or restricted (by active federal prohibition)?—and of morality. Neither facet of the problem was easily compromised. The prospects for compromise faded away as Congress adjourned in early March.

But why was compromise necessary? Lincoln received only a plurality (just under 40%) of the popular vote, but his share of the electoral votes (180 out of 303, with 152 needed to win) far exceeded the constitutionally-required majority. He would likely face a hostile Congress, as well as the Supreme Court that had rendered the stridently proslavery Dred Scott decision. How much damage could Lincoln do? Why did his by-the-book election push seven Deep South states to secede?

Lincoln's letter to Stephens and his party's rejection of Crittenden’s amendments help explain why the Republican victory so deeply disturbed proslavery southerners. Historians have labored to show that most Republicans were not “radical abolitionists,” that they did not immediately threaten slavery in the fifteen states where it was legal. Lincoln wearily reiterated this point in his Inaugural, disavowing any intention to “interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” [7] But Republicans did endorse an antislavery agenda calculated to contain slavery and facilitate its eventual collapse. The fact that this would be entirely constitutional was of little comfort to those with an economic, political, or social stake in slavery as a labor system and a means of racial domination, and in the billions of dollars invested in four million enslaved people.

Antebellum Republicans acknowledged that slavery was a state institution which Congress could not touch. Most abolitionists actually agreed, leading some of them to denounce the Constitution as a wickedly proslavery compact. But Republicans combined a variety of antislavery policy proposals to craft a strategy for bringing slavery to a gradual end. They advocated a two-pronged campaign: Congress would outlaw slavery in areas under its direct jurisdiction, including western territories and Washington, DC. This would hem in the slave states, surrounding them with free soil and depriving slaveholders of fresh land. Meanwhile, the federal government would stop supporting slavery, leaving it up to the states to return fugitive slaves and otherwise protect masters’ property claims. Thus, Republicans defied proslavery politicians by demanding that slavery truly be treated as a state institution – not one entitled to federal aid. Under these conditions, Republicans predicted that, like a scorpion encircled by fire, slavery would sting itself to death. Their pledge to respect slavery in the states, therefore was attached to predictions of slavery’s destruction. As New York Congressman Anson Burlingame put it, the “Republican party does not wish to interfere in the internal government or social institutions of the slave States, but merely to place around them a cordon of Free States. Then this horrible system will die of inanition; or, like the scorpion, seeing no means of escape, sting itself to death .” [8] Slavery would die by state-level abolition, as border and upper south states abandoned it, or by constitutional amendment, once the number of Free states reached three-quarters of the total. Republicans candidly discussed these goals. Their 1860 platform, for example, proclaimed that the “normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom” and condemned efforts to legislate for slavery’s expansion. [9]

The 1860 election was an unprecedented Republican triumph, and the prospect of a Lincoln administration alarmed many white southerners. Fresh memories of John Brown’s October 1859 raid made Lincoln’s victory seem even more dangerous. Lincoln’s predecessor had dispatched federal troops to crush the abolitionist conspirators—but could a Republican be trusted to do the same? Convinced that Republicans menaced slavery’s growth and stability, secessionists candidly justified their decisive response. South Carolina secessionists blamed antislavery “agitation” for the “election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Upon Lincoln’s inauguration in March, they warned, the government would fall to a party that had “announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory…and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.” [10] Republican gradualism did not make slavery’s death easier to swallow, especially for white South Carolinians, who lived among an enslaved black majority in a state where nearly half of white families owned slaves. They had every reason to secede first, which they did on December 20, 1860. Georgians agreed, recognizing that “anti-slavery” was the Republican Party’s “mission and purpose.” To avoid the “evils” of Republicans’ encirclement strategy, Georgia secession convention delegates led their state out of the Union. [11] Other secession documents followed similar logic; Mississippi’s was the most forthright. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” proclaimed Magnolia State secessionists, and now they had to choose between “submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.” Confronted by a party dedicated to “extinguish[ing]” slavery “by confining it within its present limits,” Mississippi secessionists chose disunion. “We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede.” [12]

Given secessionists’ reading of Republican aims, their response to Lincoln’s election appears drastic but not necessarily irrational. But why did the Republicans win in 1860? Their party was six years old. It is not overly dramatic to call the party’s rise “one of the most striking success stories in political annals.” [13] How did Republicans convince a majority of free-state voters, few of whom favored abolitionism or any semblance of racial egalitarianism, to support them at the polls?

Lincoln did not face united opposition in 1860. Rather, the election developed into a four-way race. Democrats split into rival northern and southern wings, nominating Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas and the current vice president, Kentucky’s John Cabell Breckinridge, respectively. Led by upper and border south moderates, a new Constitutional Union Party rallied behind John Bell of Tennessee. But the proliferation of competitors did not by itself bring Republican success. Lincoln would have won even if all his rivals’ votes had gone to a single opponent. [14] Moreover, the four-sided contest largely became a pair of two-way races, pitting Bell against Breckinridge in the South, and Lincoln against Douglas in the North. It was Lincoln’s near sweep of the Free states (he divided New Jersey’s electoral votes with Douglas), coupled with northern demographic might, that secured his victory. Why did a commanding 54% of free-state voters support the rail splitter?

The Republican Party’s origins provide clues about its appeal. In 1854, the United States reached a fateful milestone on the road to civil war: the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was in opposition to this law—condemned by Michigan Republicans as a “gigantic wrong” [15] —that the Republican Party coalesced. Ironically, the divisive law was not necessitated by the acquisition of new land. Rather, it was designed to organize governments for a region that, on paper, had belonged to the U.S. since 1803. Most of the Louisiana Purchase was already carved into states or territories, but a massive “Unorganized Territory”—covering part or all of modern-day North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska—remained in legal limbo.

White farmers who coveted these lands had an ally in Stephen A. Douglas. The pugnacious Democrat’s career was a product of westward migration; born in Vermont, Douglas thrived on the Illinois prairies and, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, he vigorously promoted western political and economic development. He yearned to establish governments in the Unorganized Territory, but earlier efforts had failed. Much of the opposition came from the South because the proposed territories lay north of the 36° 30’ line, which since 1820 had divided the Louisiana Purchase into slave and free zones. In 1854, Douglas offered a new plan: organize two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, not under the free soil restriction, but under the principle of popular sovereignty, which allowed territorial voters to decide for or against slavery. Southerners demanded that the bill explicitly repeal the Missouri Compromise. Douglas acquiesced, Congress approved, and in May President Franklin Pierce signed it into law.

Rather than stifle sectionalism, the Kansas-Nebraska Act unleashed a frightful debate that propelled the nation closer to war. To many northerners, the Act seemed like a conspiracy to transform land preserved for freedom into slave territory. Indeed, northern opposition began even before it became law. Shortly after Douglas introduced the bill, six northern legislators published an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” in which they castigated the proposal “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary reign of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” [16] Many critics of the bill began to build a new party opposed to slavery expansion. Some hoped that non-slaveholding white southerners might join, but many imagined it as a sectional organization; one editorialist concluded that “the People of the North and West” must “unite in a Party of Freedom, with a fixed purpose to regain possession of the Federal Government” from the Democratic Party, which had become an agent of slaveholders. [17] From this this wave of indignation the Republican Party was born.

Still, the party’s presidential triumph was not inevitable. Republican success required fusing disparate factions into a single organization. What could unite former Whigs, who wanted protective tariffs and federal support for railroads, with former Democrats, who demanded free land for western settlers and strict economy in public expenditures? How could seasoned antislavery activists cooperate with racists who objected to slavery expansion because they wanted the west reserved for whites? The Republicans were not a single-issue party and championed a variety of causes, including Democrats’ long-cherished homestead legislation and a Whiggish program of public support for internal improvements. But opposition to slavery’s expansion, and to the political power of slaveholders and their allies, glued the Republican coalition together.

Two features of antebellum politics made this possible—and boosted the Republicans’ popular appeal. First, the line between “slavery” and “other issues” was blurry. Northerners noticed, for example, that southern votes repeatedly blocked Senate approval of a homestead bill. They resented this stranglehold on this and other measures, especially when, as a Pennsylvanian wrote in 1850, “Northern interests as usual must succumb to Southern.” [18] It was a short step from this broad dissatisfaction to a much sharper critique of the so-called “slave power.” The notion that southern politicians exerted disproportionate power in the federal government was not far-fetched. The Constitution’s 3/5 Clause inflated slave-state influence in Congress and the Electoral College and it was no accident that a slaveholder was president for 50 of the 62 years before 1850. National policy—from the Fugitive Slave Act to the removal of Native Americans from rich cotton-planting lands in the Deep South—seemed to confirm that slaveholders wielded the levers of national power. Republicans capitalized on the issue, warning that the “national Government…is as fully under the control of these few extreme men of the South, as are the slaves on their plantations.” [19] Northerners opposed the slave power for diverse reasons, but their shared grievance swelled Republican vote tallies and embedded the slavery controversy into apparently unrelated issues.

Second, the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s results validated Republican opposition to popular sovereignty and to slavery’s champions. Popular sovereignty invited opponents and proponents of slavery to race to Kansas to determine its fate. The result was widespread fraud and violence. During a March 1855 election to choose a territorial legislature, thousands of Missourians, led by Senator David Rice Atchison, crossed the border to vote illegally for proslavery candidates. Antislavery settlers refused to acknowledge the proslavery legislature and established a rival government. Heavily armed northern migrants arrived to resist Missouri Border Ruffians and over the next four years, between fifty and two hundred people died in the clashes between them. Republicans pointed to Bleeding Kansas as proof of popular sovereignty’s failure and of the brutality of proslavery zealots.

The hostilities spread eastward from the Great Plains. In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts Republican, condemned proslavery violence in Kansas, comparing slavery expansion to the “rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery” for the purpose of “adding to the power of slavery in the National Government.” [20] His deliberately provocative speech infuriated South Carolina Congressman Preston Smith Brooks, who beat Sumner into unconsciousness on the Senate floor two days later. For many northerners, Brooks personified the slave power, a menace to freedom in Kansas and free speech in Congress. The Bleeding Sumner incident increased support for the Republicans in the presidential election that November. Republican John C. Frémont finished second to Democrat James Buchanan, but came within two states of winning the contest and received a plurality of northern ballots.

Subsequent efforts to close the book on Kansas only reaffirmed, to Republicans at least, that slaveholders sought to use federal power to safeguard slavery’s expansion. In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued its notorious decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford . Most famously, it held that Scott, a slave who had been taken from Missouri into free territory and sued for his liberty, could not sue because African Americans could not be U.S. citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” [21] But the decision was also calculated to foster slavery expansion by ruling that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could bar slavery from a territory. The fact that five of the nine justices hailed from slave states fueled conspiracy theories and supported claims that the slave power, as a New York editorialist wrote, had “converted” the Court “into a propagandist of human slavery.” [22] Similarly, President Buchanan’s subsequent efforts to push Congress to admit Kansas as a state under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, which had not been fully submitted to Kansas voters for approval, provoked fierce resistance from Republicans and most northern Democrats, including Douglas, who believed that the “Lecompton swindle” violated popular sovereignty. [23] This political environment fertilized Republicans’ growth into the North’s leading party.

Of course, this account of the short- and medium-term roots of the Civil War leads to more questions. Why were many southerners so adamant about Kansas? The security of slavery’s northwestern flank had something to do with it, as did the desire to establish a precedent for territorial property rights that might be needed later in Mexico or Cuba. Why were many northerners primed to react so fiercely to the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) kept slavery in northerners’ minds and refreshed hostility toward the slave power that had flourished after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Why was westward expansion so divisive? One could trace the slavery expansion issue back in time, through the Compromise of 1850, the clash during and after the Mexican War (1846-48) over slavery’s status in the freshly-conquered southwest, Texas annexation, the admission of Missouri, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which barred slavery from the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. Why did northerners fear southern domination? One could follow northern hostility to the slave power back through the Gag Rule debates (1836-44) over the reception of antislavery petitions in Congress, the lasting resentment of the 3/5 Compromise, to the Constitutional Convention – where, as James Madison put it, “the real difference of interests lay, not between the large and small but between the N. and Southn. States,” with the “institution of slavery and its consequences form[ing] the line of discrimination” between them. [24] To understand these sectional issues, we would then have to explore politics within regions and states. We could study how northern political candidates used the slave power theory to denounce local opponents who courted southern allies. We might examine how differences between the upper and lower south exacerbated sectional conflict by convincing cotton-state planters that their counterparts along the South’s vulnerable northern border might not defend slavery to the last ditch.

A thorough account of Civil War causation, therefore, could easily grow into a history of the United States to 1861. It would show that without the presence of slavery, disunion and war would not have taken place. But did slavery’s presence make that outcome inevitable? When Abraham Lincoln warned that the country could not endure half slave and half free, Stephen Douglas asked, why not? It had done so for generations. To understand why this precarious balance ultimately failed requires that we do much more than list the issues that divided Americans into hostile sections. Participants made it clear that war, secession, and slavery were inextricably interconnected. But there is always more to learn about why so many decent people were willing to kill for what they believed.

• [1] Diary entry for March [between 11 and 15], 1861, in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War , (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 25.
• [2] Gideon Welles to My Dear Sir, October 16, 1861, Gideon Welles Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT.
• [3] Quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 273.
• [4] “First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp (accessed October 13, 2014).
• [5] Thomas H. Clay to John J. Crittenden, January 9, 1861, in Mrs. Chapman Coleman, ed., The Life of John J. Crittenden, with Selections from His Correspondence and Speeches ,  2 vols. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1873), 2:253.
• [6] Quoted in Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 178.
• [7] “First Inaugural Address.”
• [8] Quoted in James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 26.
• [9] “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29620 (Accessed October 13, 2014).
• [10] “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp (Accessed October 13, 2014).
• [11] “Georgia Secession,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_geosec.asp (Accessed October 13, 2014).
• [12] “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” Avalon Project,  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp (Accessed October 13, 2014).
• [13] William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3.
• [14] For an excellent discussion of these important what-if questions about the election, see the Appendix entitled “1860 Election Scenarios and Possible Outcomes” in Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
• [15] Quoted in Francis Curtis, The Republican Party: A History of its Fifty Years’ Existence and a Record of its Measures and Leaders, 1854-1904 , 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 1:189.
• [16] Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States ([Washington, DC]: Towers, Printers, [1854]), 1.
• [17] National Era , June 1, 1854.
• [18] Paul S. Preston to Jackson Woodward, January 2, 1850, Preston-Woodward Correspondence, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
• [19] Cong. Globe, 35 th Cong., 2d Sess., appendix, 190 (1858).
• [20] Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas. The Apologies for the Crime. The True Remedy. Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, in the Senate of the United States, 19 th and 20 th May, 1856 (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 5.
• [21] Quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 347.
• [22] Quoted in Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 52.
• [23] Opponents of the Lecompton Constitution often used the “swindle” term to denounce it. For one example of its use in Congressional debate, see the remarks of Massachusetts Republican Henry Wilson in the Cong. Globe , 35 th Cong., 1 st Sess., 499 (1858). For Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton, see especially ibid., 15-18.
• [24] Quoted in Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 77.

If you can read only one book:

Levine, Bruce. Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

• Causes of the Civil War Essay
• Causes of the Civil War Resources
• Author's Biography Michael E. Woods

Ashworth, John. The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Bonner, Robert E. Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bowman, Shearer Davis. At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Cooper, William J. We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860 – April 1861. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2012.

Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

Egerton, Douglas R. Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.

Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press 1995.

Forbes, Robert Pierce. The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery & the Meaning of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Freehling William W. The Road to Disunion, Volume 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

———. The Road to Disunion, Volume 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Oakes, James. The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Richards, Leonard L. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Shelden, Rachel A. Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Varon, Elizabeth R. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Woods, Michael E. Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Organizations:

Society of Civil War Historians

The SCWH is among the leading professional organizations for historians of the Civil War era of all types. The organization hosts a biennial conference and has adopted the Journal of the Civil War Era as its official journal.

Visit Website

Web Resources:

This website provides links to numerous primary source documents related to the sectional conflict and the coming of the Civil War.

Run by the National Park Service, this site offers a brief overview of Civil War causation and links to pages on historical sites of interest related to the coming of the war.

Furman University’s Department of History has organized this helpful site, which provides scores of editorials related to Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott case, and John Brown’s raid.

Hosted by the Civil War Trust, this website features teacher resources, including lesson plans, related to the Civil War. “The Gathering Storm” offers an online exhibit and lesson plans for all grade levels related to the coming of the Civil War.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History offers a “Civil War 150 Multimedia” page that includes podcast videos related to the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War. Videos related to Civil War causation cover topics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln’s inauguration, and African American abolitionists.

Other Sources:

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Michael E. Woods

Matthew Mason

Rachel A. Shelden

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History Resources

What Caused the Civil War?

By edward l. ayers.

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Learn how the Institute impacts history education through our work guiding teachers, energizing students, and supporting research.

What were two of the main causes of the Civil War?

The four Causes of the Civil Wars Slavery, One Union vs state's rights, The growing differences between the North and the South and The election of President Lincoln.

I would say Communism played a big role in it too.

hope this helps and have a great day!

Related Questions

Question 1 In Mexico and Central America, which ethnic group makes up a large part of the population? A. Mestizos B. Moroccans C. Japanese D. Bosnians

A. Mestizos

Explanation:

A. Mexico and Central America is mostly made up of Hispanic people and that's the closest word that can actually relate to your questions.

B. Moroccan is an African ethnic race centered in northern east Africa below Spain.

C.  Japanese are in East Asia and most of the are in Japan.

D. Bosnians are a Muslim ethnic group in the Balkans, most of them are in the present nation Bosnia-Herzegovina.

What allows Congress to make laws on issues not mentioned in the Constitution?

According to each source, what were the short term and long term impacts of the Holocaust?

The Renaissance was considered the _______________________ of acapella singing.

All of the following are true about the 1876 Texas Constitution EXCEPT: a. It is still in use today b. It has never been amended c. It originally did not include the rights of African Americans d. It severely limits the power of the state government

As of 2019 (the 86th Legislature), the Texas Legislature has proposed a total of 690 amendments. Of these, 507 have been adopted, and 180 have been defeated by Texas voters. Thus, the Texas Constitution has been amended 507 times since its adoption in 1876.

How did the Magna Carta change the relationship between the people and their king?

It transformed England, language and culture would never be the same. It was a promise between the king and his subjects , it gave basic rights to all people and established laws that had to be abided by all people (even the king), it gave right to trial, rule by law, a voice in the law and taxes.

Which of the following statements is FALSE? a. Texas lags far behind the rest of the country in electronics and computer production. b. There was a big push for advancements in science and technology in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. c. Dozens of aircraft and aviation supply companies built factories in Texas to support the U.S. war effort during WWII. d. In the 1960s, aircraft manufacturing ranked 6th in the state’s most important industries. Please select the best answer from the choices provided A B C D

C Dozens of aircraft and aviation supply companies built factories in Texas to support the U.S. war effort during WWII

What did Jefferson Davis have over Lincoln? (Background)

As president of the Confederate States of America throughout its existence during the American Civil War (1861–65), Jefferson Davis presided over the South's creation of its own armed forces and acquisition of weapons.

Lincoln wanted equality for all people, including slaves, while Davis wanted the Southern states to enjoy the freedom of owning slaves if they choose. What did Jefferson Davis do? As president of the Confederate States of America throughout its existence during the American Civil War (1861–65), Jefferson Davis presided over the South's creation of its own armed forces and acquisition of weapons.

Who were the Freedom Riders?

The Freedom Riders were 13 black and white men and women of various ages from across the United States .

EASY POINTS!! EASY POINTS!! NO LINKS OR FILES!!

2. What is a steerage?

Steerage is the lower deck of a ship, where the cargo is stored above the closed hold. In the late 19th and early 20th century, steamship steerage decks were used to provide the lowest cost and lowest class of travel, often for European and Chinese immigrants to North America.

Answer:Steerage is the lower deck of a ship

What are the NAFTA agreement and the NATO organization examples of? international cooperative agreements international conflict O wars where many died turning points in military history

international cooperative agreements

Hope it helps!

Who according to Lincoln has consecrated or made holy the battlefield more than the speakers at the ceremony?

Those who fought on the battlefield. Both the dead and the living at the time.

According to Abraham Lincoln, it is "those who fought on the battlefield. Both the dead and the living at the time, " that consecrated or made holy the battlefield more than the speakers at the ceremony.

The above statement was made by Abraham Lincoln when he delivered a speech in Pennsylvania in November 1863 following the Union history against the Confederates soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In his words, he declared that "...But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract..."

What is the climate of India like?

Answer: India are subject to a humid subtropical climate and a subtropical highland climate. Though they experience warm to hot summers, temperatures during the coldest months generally fall as low as 0 °C (32 °F)

(;-;) i need more emotes like this Coolest one gets brainliest​

^.^ I tried lol

civil war propaganda when and where would you expect to see one of these elements of propaganda?

Propaganda is everywhere and has been around for a long time. Every newspaper, magazine, news channel, radio station, advertisement, or any other types of mass media contain elements of propaganda. Propaganda is often given a negative connotation due to its history of power and control

Before the discovery of oil , How did Texas  make money by growing ? What A) cotton B)tobacco C) wheat D) corn

How did Tuskegee University Impact African American education? O It helped remove Jim Crow laws against African American education. O It was the first college that allowed African Americans to enroll. O It trained many African Americans as teachers. O It focused on research that helped end slavery.

Along with independence from Britain, what did Thomas Paine propose for the colonies? A. A required oath of allegiance to America B. A daft for the Patriot militia C. A trade agreement with the British D. A reputation government

In the third section, Paine examines the hostilities between England and the American colonies and argues that the best course of action is independence. Paine proposes a Continental Charter (or Charter of the United Colonies) that would be an American Magna Carta.

Using information from the chart, select the row that contains the correct information about the impact of urbanization and industrialization on the United States:

the third one i think

sorry if i'm wrong

List 2 reasons why was it difficult for U.S. soldiers identify the Vietcong. ​

The Vietcong had an intricate knowledge of the terrain. They won the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people by living in their villages and helping them with their everyday lives. Their tunnel systems, traps and jungle cover meant they were difficult to defeat and hard to find.

What are three things Sherman did before the CivilWar.

One: When he was 16 he went to a military school.

Two: He fought in the Second Seminole war in Florida

Three: He was the president of the St. Loise Streetcar company

Explanation: i got this imformation from https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/william-t-sherman

i hope this helps you

Which of the following is an example of a nonvascular plant? Group of answer choices trees moss flowers grass

Hello! Your correct answer is moss! Hope this helps!

Which group of anti-Soviets did the US support in Afghanistan?

Answer: This sounds like "Mujahadeen"

Write an essay repose to the following question- The main reason for the US entry into the Korean War was their fear of communism. How far do you agree?

What was not a provision affecting Germany in the Treaty of Versailles Gained territory Paid war reparations Must sign the war guilt cause Military was limited

Gained Territory.

Germany, in the Treaty of Versailles, for sure had to pay for war reparations that had left them in huge debt, had to sign the war guilt cause that forced them to take full responsibility for everything that happened in the war and their military was limited and cut down causing many Germans to be angry, as their military had been a source of pride for them. However, I don't believe that gained territory was a provision that affected Germany.

[tex]\boxed {\boxed { \sf A. \ Gained \ territory}}[/tex]

After World War I, the Paris Peace Conference began to discuss the terms and end of the war.

The US wanted to establish the 14 Points and create peace to avoid another war, but Britain, France, and Italy were set on punishing Germany. The Treaty of Versailles had many provisions that affected Germany:

So, the answers choices of paid war reparations, signed the war guilt clause, and miltary was limited are all true. However, Germany did not gain any territory. In fact, they lost it!

A provision that did not affect Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was A. gained territory.

How was governmental authority organized in both 17th century absolutism and 20th century totalitarianism?

The monarch was able to maintain absolute control over the society with the addition of feudalism, which involved people being placed into different estates of power, such as: clergy, nobility and peasants.

The Adams-Onis Treaty resolved issues between Spain and the United States concerning Florida and Louisiana.

The statement is True

The United States and Mexico have a long history as American and Spanish people fought for land in the past. The border between the two countries established in 1819 by the Adams Onis Treaty (the Florida Purchase Treaty) between the United States and Spain. The border defined in the region of the western side of the Mississippi River. The border was again reaffirmed in 1828 through the Treaty of Limits after Mexico got its independence from Spain.  

what were some experiences of the people who went west?

none differ from east

This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Weapons of class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted. Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours. Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning until 7 a.m., when The Purge concludes. Blessed be our New Founding Fathers and America, a nation reborn. May God be with you all.''

Awesome, I've been waiting for this

Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Civil War

Essays on Civil War

Civil war essay topic examples.

The American Civil War is a significant part of our nation's past, filled with fascinating stories, debates, and events. Whether you want to argue, compare, describe, persuade, or narrate, we have a wide range of essay topics that will take you on a journey through this pivotal period in American history. Join us as we delve into the heart of the conflict, examine key figures, analyze strategies, vividly depict battles, and explore the moral imperatives that shaped the course of the Civil War. These essay topics will guide you on your historical voyage, offering insights into the complexities and enduring legacies of this era.

Argumentative Essays

Argumentative Civil War essays require you to analyze and present arguments related to this historical conflict. Here are some topic examples:

• 1. Argue whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or states' rights.
• 2. Analyze the role of key political figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, in shaping the outcome of the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War stands as a monumental chapter in our nation's history, marked by conflicting ideologies and profound repercussions. In this essay, I will argue that at its core, the Civil War was a struggle over the institution of slavery and its implications for the United States.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the argument for the centrality of slavery in the Civil War underscores its deep-rooted impact on our nation's evolution. As we reflect on this defining period, we are challenged to confront the enduring legacy of this conflict and its implications for our society today.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast Civil War essays involve examining the differences and similarities between various aspects of the conflict. Consider these topics:

• 1. Compare and contrast the strategies and leadership styles of Union and Confederate military commanders.
• 2. Analyze the impact of the Civil War on the lives of soldiers and civilians in the North and the South.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: The American Civil War featured diverse military strategies and leadership styles, alongside varying experiences for those directly affected. In this essay, I will delve into the differences and similarities between Union and Confederate military commanders and the profound effects of the war on individuals on both sides of the conflict.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of military leaders and civilian experiences during the Civil War provide a multifaceted view of this historic event. As we examine these aspects, we gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of this period in American history.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive Civil War essays enable you to vividly depict events, battles, or notable figures from the era. Here are some topic ideas:

• 1. Describe the Battle of Gettysburg, emphasizing its pivotal role in the outcome of the war.
• 2. Paint a detailed portrait of Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his leadership qualities and the challenges he faced during the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: The American Civil War witnessed significant battles and iconic figures that have left an indelible mark on our history. In this essay, I will immerse you in the vivid details of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the conflict, and provide a descriptive portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the leader who steered the nation through this tumultuous period.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive exploration of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's leadership underscores the indomitable spirit of a nation in crisis. As we reflect on these historical aspects, we gain insight into the resilience and determination that defined this era.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive Civil War essays involve convincing your audience of a particular perspective or interpretation of the conflict. Consider these persuasive topics:

• 1. Persuade your readers that the Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point in the Civil War and a moral imperative.
• 2. Argue for or against the notion that the Reconstruction era effectively addressed the issues arising from the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: The Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction era represent critical chapters in the aftermath of the Civil War. In this persuasive essay, I will present the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation not only altered the course of the war but also marked a moral imperative in the struggle for freedom.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument for the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation challenges us to acknowledge the moral dimensions of the Civil War. As we examine this transformative period, we are urged to consider the enduring impact of this historic document on the journey toward equality.

Narrative Essays

Narrative Civil War essays allow you to tell a compelling story from the perspective of a historical figure or a fictional character during the Civil War era. Explore these narrative essay topics:

• 1. Narrate a day in the life of a Civil War soldier, conveying the challenges and emotions they faced on the battlefield.
• 2. Imagine yourself as a journalist covering the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and recount your experiences and emotions during that historic event.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War was a time of upheaval and turmoil, experienced firsthand by soldiers and civilians alike. In this narrative essay, I will transport you to the battlefield and the tumultuous events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, offering a personal perspective on these historical moments.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the narrative accounts of a Civil War soldier's life and a journalist's experiences during the Lincoln assassination bring history to life in a profoundly human way. As we immerse ourselves in these narratives, we gain a deeper appreciation for the individuals who lived through these tumultuous times and the resilience they displayed.

The Missouri Compromise: a Precursor to Civil War

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The Civil War Between The Northern and Southern States of America

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Civil War Reconstruction

Reconstruction's disappointment after the civil war, african americans during the civil war, an analysis of the reason for participating in the american civil war, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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The Factors of Civil War According to Oates

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April 12, 1861 - April 26, 1865

United States

Confederate States of America, United States

Battle of Antietam, Fort Pillow Massacre, Battle of Gettysburg, Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, Battle of Monocacy

Abraham Lincoln, who served as the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln's leadership and steadfast commitment to preserving the Union were instrumental in guiding the Northern states to victory. General Robert E. Lee, who served as the commander of the Confederate Army. Lee's military prowess and strategic genius earned him respect even among his adversaries. Clara Barton, known as the "Angel of the Battlefield," made a lasting impact as a nurse and humanitarian during the war. She later founded the American Red Cross, which continues to provide humanitarian assistance worldwide.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, was a defining moment in the history of the United States. It emerged from a complex set of circumstances and prerequisites that spanned several decades. One of the primary prerequisites was the issue of slavery. The institution of slavery had long been a divisive issue between the Northern and Southern states. The expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, heightened tensions and fueled regional conflicts. Economic differences also played a significant role. The Northern states had undergone rapid industrialization, while the Southern states relied heavily on agriculture, particularly cotton production. This led to differing priorities and conflicting interests between the two regions. Political factors, such as debates over states' rights and the balance of power between the federal government and the states, further exacerbated the tensions. The election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, who opposed the expansion of slavery, intensified the divide and prompted several Southern states to secede from the Union. The historical context of the American Civil War was characterized by deep-rooted divisions over slavery, economic disparities, and political conflicts. These factors ultimately culminated in a devastating conflict that reshaped the nation's history and had long-lasting consequences for both the United States and the institution of slavery.

One of the most significant effects was the abolition of slavery. The Civil War served as a catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declared slaves in Confederate territories to be free. Ultimately, the war led to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865, officially abolishing slavery nationwide. The Civil War also had far-reaching political consequences. It solidified the power of the federal government over the states and established the supremacy of the United States as a single, indivisible nation. The conflict clarified the relationship between the federal and state governments, paving the way for the expansion of federal authority in subsequent years. Moreover, the war's aftermath brought about significant social and cultural changes. Reconstruction efforts aimed to rebuild and integrate the Southern states into the Union, but the process was marked by challenges, resistance, and the rise of racial segregation. These struggles set the stage for the civil rights movement in the following century. Economically, the war transformed the United States into a more industrialized nation. The demand for supplies and weaponry during the war accelerated industrialization in the North. Additionally, the emancipation of slaves created a labor force that contributed to the country's economic growth.

In the Union states, there was a prevailing sentiment that the war was necessary to preserve the Union and end the institution of slavery. Many Northerners supported the cause, viewing it as a fight for justice and the preservation of the nation's democratic ideals. Abolitionists and those who opposed the expansion of slavery were particularly vocal in their support of the Union cause. In the Confederate states, public opinion leaned towards defending their perceived rights to self-governance and the institution of slavery. The idea of states' rights and the defense of Southern traditions resonated strongly among many Southerners. They believed in the necessity of secession to protect their way of life and preserve their economic system. Public opinion within individual communities could also vary. Families were often divided, with some members fighting for the Union and others for the Confederacy. People in border states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, experienced particularly complex and nuanced views due to their proximity to both sides. Over time, public opinion on the Civil War has evolved. The war's causes and consequences have been reevaluated and interpreted through different lenses, leading to ongoing discussions and debates. Today, the Civil War is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in American history, with public opinion encompassing a range of perspectives that continue to shape our understanding of the conflict.

Films: "Gone with the Wind" (1939), "Glory" (1989), "Lincoln" (2012). Literature: "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane, "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara.

The topic of the American Civil War holds immense importance for academic exploration and essay writing due to its significant impact on American history and society. This conflict, fought between the Northern and Southern states from 1861 to 1865, centered on fundamental issues like slavery, states' rights, and the preservation of the Union. Studying the American Civil War allows us to delve into the complexities of the nation's past and comprehend the deep-rooted divisions that led to this brutal conflict. It provides a platform to analyze the moral, political, and socioeconomic factors that shaped the war's outcomes and repercussions. Furthermore, exploring the Civil War fosters a deeper understanding of the struggle for civil rights and the long-lasting consequences that continue to shape the United States today. By examining primary sources, historical narratives, and varying perspectives, essays on the American Civil War can shed light on pivotal events, influential figures, military strategies, and the experiences of individuals affected by the war. It offers an opportunity to critically analyze the causes, motivations, and legacies of this watershed moment in American history, ultimately contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the nation's past and its ongoing pursuit of equality and justice.

1. Foner, E. (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company. 2. McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. 3. McPherson, J. M. (2003). Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. Oxford University Press. 4. McPherson, J. M. (2007). This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford University Press. 5. Miller, R. J. (2003). Lincoln and His World: The Civil War Era. University of Nebraska Press. 6. Oakes, J. (2012). Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. W. W. Norton & Company. 7. Potter, D. M. (1990). The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Harper Perennial. 8. Robertson, J. I. (2002). Civil War: America Becomes One Nation. DK Publishing. 9. Symonds, C. L. (2001). The American Heritage History of the Battle of Gettysburg. HarperCollins. 10. Ward, G. C. (1990). The Civil War: An Illustrated History. Alfred A. Knopf.

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The Spark that Ignited the English Civil War: an In-Depth Analysis

This essay is about the event that precipitated the English Civil War, focusing on King Charles I’s attempt to arrest five members of Parliament in January 1642. The essay explores the broader context of Charles’s reign, marked by his belief in the divine right of kings, contentious relationship with Parliament, and religious tensions. It examines how Charles’s actions, including his controversial fundraising methods and attempts to impose Anglican practices, led to increasing opposition. The failed arrest attempt demonstrated the breakdown of trust between the king and Parliament, galvanizing opposition and setting the stage for the Civil War. The essay concludes by highlighting the lasting impact of this pivotal moment on British history.

How it works

The English Civil War, a seminal event in British history, was not the result of a single cause but rather a complex interplay of political, religious, and social factors that built up over time. However, one event that stands out as a critical catalyst for this conflict was King Charles I’s attempt to arrest five members of Parliament in January 1642. This dramatic episode not only symbolized the escalating tensions between the monarchy and Parliament but also set the stage for the broader conflict that followed.

To understand why this event was so pivotal, it is essential to consider the broader context of Charles I’s reign. Charles, who ascended to the throne in 1625, had a tumultuous relationship with Parliament from the outset. His belief in the divine right of kings, which held that his authority was granted directly by God, often put him at odds with Parliament, which sought to limit his powers and ensure greater accountability. This ideological clash was exacerbated by Charles’s frequent resort to controversial measures to raise funds, such as imposing taxes without parliamentary consent and forcing loans from his subjects.

Religious tensions also played a significant role in the lead-up to the Civil War. Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France raised suspicions among his Protestant subjects and Parliament about his religious loyalties. Furthermore, his attempts to impose Anglican practices on Scotland, which was predominantly Presbyterian, led to the Bishops’ Wars in the late 1630s. These conflicts drained the royal coffers and forced Charles to call Parliament in 1640 after an eleven-year period of personal rule known as the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny.”

The Long Parliament, which convened in November 1640, immediately sought to address grievances accumulated during Charles’s personal rule. It quickly became a battleground for competing visions of governance and authority. Tensions reached a boiling point in late 1641 when Parliament presented Charles with the Grand Remonstrance, a document listing their grievances and demanding greater parliamentary control over the army and church reforms. Charles’s refusal to compromise and his subsequent attempts to assert his authority only deepened the divide.

The situation came to a head on January 4, 1642, when Charles made the fateful decision to arrest five members of Parliament—John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode—whom he accused of treason. Accompanied by armed soldiers, Charles entered the House of Commons, only to find that the members had been forewarned and had fled. This brazen act was unprecedented and shocked the nation. It demonstrated Charles’s willingness to use force against his own government and highlighted the irreparable breakdown of trust between the king and Parliament.

The failed arrest attempt had immediate and far-reaching consequences. It galvanized opposition to Charles and strengthened the resolve of his critics. London, already a hotbed of anti-royalist sentiment, erupted in protest, and many who had been on the fence now sided with Parliament. In the months that followed, both sides began to mobilize for war, with Charles raising his standard at Nottingham in August 1642, effectively signaling the start of the Civil War.

In retrospect, the attempt to arrest the five members can be seen as the spark that ignited the powder keg of tensions that had been building for years. It crystallized the fundamental issues at stake: the extent of royal authority, the role of Parliament, and the religious future of the nation. While many factors contributed to the outbreak of the English Civil War, this event was undoubtedly a key turning point that pushed the country beyond the point of no return.

The English Civil War had profound and lasting effects on the British Isles. It led to the temporary overthrow of the monarchy, the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The conflict also set important precedents for the development of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy in Britain. By examining the events leading up to the war, particularly the attempted arrest of the five members, we gain valuable insights into the complex interplay of power, politics, and religion that shaped this tumultuous period in history.

In conclusion, the attempted arrest of the five members of Parliament by Charles I in January 1642 was a decisive moment that precipitated the English Civil War. This dramatic event highlighted the deep-seated conflicts between the monarchy and Parliament and served as a catalyst for the broader struggle that followed. Understanding this pivotal episode helps to illuminate the broader causes and consequences of one of the most significant conflicts in British history.

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Book Review: The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory

by ECWGuestReview

Posted on July 23, 2024

Reviewed by Patrick Young

In spite of the title, this is not a 280-page examination of the “Limits of the Lost Cause.” Like many essay collections, some offerings are right on point with the title; others, too good to throw away, are only tangentially related to the central theme.

Gaines Foster, a professor of history at Louisiana State University, has been researching the continuing battle over the memory of the Civil War in the South and throughout the nation. Works on Civil War memory are not new ground for Professor Foster. His well-regarded book Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South appeared in 1988, well before most enthusiasts of the conflict had even heard the phrase “Civil War Memory Studies.” Some of the essays in Limits of the Lost Cause supplement his earlier work, while others pursue new paths. Rather than try to summarize all eight sometimes disparate selections included in the book, below are a few thoughts on some of the salient essays.

The first essay, “Woodward and Southern Identity,” questions C. Vann Woodward’s contention that the defeat of the Confederacy shaped the South’s character. Foster argues that the white South’s defeat on the battlefield did not hinder its people from recovering after 1865 and modernizing their social structure to replace romantic slavery with a legal and social system of what he calls the “racial separation and exploitation” of the Black one-third of the population of the South. After the end of Reconstruction, the Lost Cause interpretation of the war convinced white Southerners that they had nothing to be ashamed of with their performance on the battlefield. Their view was that they were overwhelmed by Union numbers, not by natural intelligence or education. The power of the Lost Cause interpretation meant that by the late 19th Century white Southerners had nothing to regret.

“Guilt Over Slavery” looks at some 20th-century historians’ claims that Southern identity was shaped by guilt. As Foster says in another essay, “Most white southerners, even some who lamented the South’s sins, turned to their faith not for judgment but for solace.” (p. 42) Guilt over slavery or for betraying their country did not afflict the white South no matter how hard academic historians tried to look for it. Ulrich B. Phillips and his progeny from the William Dunning Reconstruction school of thought offered white Southern readers “feel-good” accounts of ignorant Africans who were Christianized and civilized brought by their masters and provided with food, clothing, shelter, and protection by their natural white superiors. Why would they feel guilty over that? Additionally, the theological consensus in the white Southern community did not question the behaviors of the ruling elite during the Civil War or before it.

In another article, “The Fiery Cross and the Confederate Flag,” Foster doubts most historians’ arguments that claim that D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was really a homage to the Confederacy. Griffith and Thomas Dixon, the author of the book the movie was based on, tied the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan to symbols that were not utilized in the 1860s. Foster believes that the “Fiery Cross” set alight outside Black people’s homes in the movie was tied not to the Confederacy but to a later resurgent Protestant nationalism. This “modern” 20th-century history created by Griffith did not intend to build a new Confederacy based on sectionalism but to reinforce the ties that bound white Protestants against Catholic, Jew, and Black threats to racial and religious hegemony. Birth of a Nation was meant to unite bigots, both North and South, against a common enemy.

Yet another selection, “The Solid South and the Nation State,” explains that for all the claptrap about the white South’s resistance to Federal power, for most of the first half of the 20th Century, Southern voters wanted the Federal government to do more, not less. White Southerners supported increased Federal intervention. Southern politicians took on national crusades to use the Federal government to advance their goals like outlawing perceived sinful actions like lotteries and risqué books and magazines. Many Southerners supported Prohibition, which involved the Federal government trying to stamp out liquid vice. When Prohibition became part of the Constitution, Southern politicians voted for increased allocations to agencies designed to eradicate the flow of bootleg liquors nationally. Southern whites also supported Federal agencies to regulate agriculture. And, of course, during the Depression, Southerners lined up for Federal aid from Washington. Southern white politicians did not oppose Federal action, unless it was to ban lynchings or other forms of local terror against Black voters.

If readers are interested in Civil War memory, this collection of essays may not be the best place to start. However, if they have read David Blight and several other introductory studies in this particular field, Limits to the Lost Cause may be a good study for further examination with a long-time expert.

Patrick Young is a Special Professor at Hofstra Law School and the author of the Reconstruction Era Blog .

4 Responses to Book Review: The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory

Sounds like he’s right on point on a number of issues, particularly about the national rather than regional nature of some issues.

Fascinating review. Well done.

This book looks very good. I have noted before that Foster, who’s work predates Blight’s, is the perfect counter argument to Blight. Between the two I think Foster makes the better argument. The Lost Cause never went as deep or as far as many supposed, but rather offered another good boogeyman for intellectuals to beat for a variety of reasons.

Nice review and great point about southern Dems solid support for New Deal programs … New Deal scholars argue that they only supported the Social Security Act of 1935 because it excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which in some parts of the south were 70-80 percent African Americans … thus, it was possible for southern Dems to both enthusiastically support FDR’s progressive agenda and proudly back Jim Crow.

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