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THE CIVIL WAR RESULTED FROM large and real disagreements between people in the South and the North—about two different political economies, two different cultures, and two irreconcilable moral understandings. The causes were not imaginary. But during the decades leading up to the war, those authentic causes became wrapped in self-serving fictions on both sides—moral and cultural and political fantasies.
As I’ve said, some conspiracies are real, especially ones with particular, narrow purposes. In Virginia in 1831, Nat Turner and his enslaved co-conspirators killed dozens of white people over two days, and in 1859 John Brown and his abolitionist co-conspirators staged a raid on a federal arms depot, intending to incite and equip a slave rebellion. The Underground Railroad was the work of an ongoing national conspiracy. And at the end of the war, a short-lived conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Lincoln. None of those were just theories.
Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of current events. In 1836, when anti-Masonic paranoia was burning itself out and abolitionism was still a fringe idea, for instance, an aging American revolutionary from South Carolina published The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the North Abolitionist. “The efforts of these conspirators,” he wrote, “at their midnight meetings, where the bubbling cauldron of abolition was filled with its pestilential materials, and the fire beneath kindled by the breath of the fanatics has often reminded us of the witch scene in Macbeth.”
The abolitionists were just as convinced of an all-powerful conspiracy on the other side. In 1852 the abolitionist party’s presidential candidate saw that “the inexplicable labyrinths of American politics for the last sixty years,” including the War of 1812 and the dismantling of the national bank, were all explained as parts of the slaveholders’ perfect plot, because “the Slave Power, like the power of the pit, never lacks for a stratagem.”
In the 1850s it seemed obvious to many Northerners that the current president and previous president had conspired secretly with the chief justice of the Supreme Court to entrench the Slave Power conspiracy. “We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert,” Abraham Lincoln said in his famous “House Divided” speech, during his failed run for the Senate in 1858. He figured his opponent, the incumbent Democrat, was another of the co-conspirators. We can’t absolutely know—but then Lincoln proceeded to draw a bright evidentiary line in the murk between motive and result. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen”—he then cutely gave only the first names of each of the alleged co-conspirators, including the U.S. senator from Illinois who was about to defeat him.
And we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few…in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that [the workmen] all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
Honest Abe, conspiracy theorist. In their speculations and theories, habitual believers in conspiracy do exactly what they imagine conspirators somehow do in the real world—make the tenons and mortices and lengths and proportions of different pieces fit exactly.
After secession happened and fighting broke out, conspiracy theories multiplied, most of them crazily implausible, like the one in an 1863 exposé called Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized and Its President a Spirit-Rapper. The author, a “resident of Ohio,” said it was no coincidence that abolitionism and the craze for communicating with the dead had taken off simultaneously during the late 1840s and 1850s. The spirits, dead people, “have a magnetism peculiar to themselves, fired with vengeance [and] hatred.” In other words, ghosts and their living American interlocutors—the spiritualists—were scheming to destroy the nation. “For a number of years before the war, the spiritualists were promised, by spirits, a president of their own faith.” Lincoln “sprang mysteriously from the prairies,” “selected by spirits for the very work—the equalization of white men and negroes—which he is now endeavoring to perform.” “These spirits…are now in control” of the Union. By means of “a secret hole in the White House, a rapping table,” “Mr. Lincoln, and at least a portion of his cabinet…are now holding spiritual circles in the executive mansion, and consulting spirits in regard to the prospects and conduct of the war.” The spirits had essentially hypnotized Lincoln and the Union leaders into thinking they’d win the Civil War in order to send America “down the broad road to ruin.”
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THEN THERE WERE the powerful religious rationales for annihilating one’s fellow Americans. Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God’s orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and civilians believed and said again and again, “God is on our side.”
Sermons on both sides depicted the war as part of the divine plan, a holy battle on the way to Armageddon and Christ’s reign. In fact, coming not long after the Second Great Awakening, the war made religion matter even more to Americans, bringing the grand Christian fantasy vividly back to life. “Repeatedly,” Davis writes of Northerners in The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, “the opponents of the Slave Power likened their stand to that of Protestant reformers from Luther to Wesley, and thought of their crusade as a reenactment of the sacred struggles against the Kingdom of Darkness.”
And each accused the other of being fanatics hijacking Christianity. An Alabama newspaper editor wrote that war-hungry, self-righteous New Englanders “exhibit those severe traits of fanaticism which had ever marked their history,” such as “burning witches.”
Early in the war, after things went badly for the Union armies, plenty of Northerners thought that was the result not of bad generals and bad luck but of God punishing the North for not yet outlawing slavery. Two years in, an evangelical mania—mass baptisms, battlefield revival meetings, thousands of conversions—swept through both armies, especially the Confederates, who were starting to lose. Weeks before the war ended, Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, beloved today for its even-handed suggestion that the Lord was neither side’s commander-in-chief: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God….let us judge not that we be not judged.”
However, between there and the lovely end (“With malice toward none”), Lincoln’s next couple of hundred words, rarely quoted, conclude that God is in charge and essentially is on the Union side. And three months later, with the war won, the sermon of a New York minister was typical: God had “yoked the whirlwinds of carnage and of civil war to the chariot of his own predestined triumph.” Victory (and 750,000 deaths) had been the divine plan all along.
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IN ADDITION TO fighting on behalf of a religious dream, the Confederacy fought to preserve an elaborate secular dream, maybe more powerful—the fantasy that the South was the last outpost of the old-fashioned virtues of chivalry, honor, grace, and charm.
This myth too was extruded from a germ of historical reality. Following the first colonists in Virginia, the ones whose dreams of gold came to nothing, a generation of aristocrats arrived from England with titles to large American estates. They came because they’d been on the losing side in the English Civil War against…the Puritans. Just as Puritan was originally a slur against Protestants, the Puritans in turn had denigrated their opponents as imperious and snobbish Cavaliers, who adopted the name themselves. The transplanted Southern Cavaliers set about re-creating feudal Olde England in the New World, with black slaves instead of white serfs.
By the 1800s, of course, not many Southerners were either well-to-do or aristocratic, but the myth endured. And as the North grew still more northern—urban, calculating, censorious, grasping—and started phasing out slavery, the Southern myth was fomented and believed more devoutly than ever. In American books, according to Google’s Ngram—the database of millions of digitized books—the frequency of the word cavalier quintupled between 1810 and 1840.*1 All kinds of people in the South came to think of themselves as civilized gentlemen and ladies who had been opposed forever by the same breed of unromantic fanatics and gradgrinds.
Southerners’ fictionalized self-conception was encouraged and shaped for decades by novels that enshrined the Cavalier myth and depicted the plantation system as idyllic. Swallow Barn, published in 1832, was immensely popular. “I am quite sure they could never become a happier people than I find them here,” the narrator says of the fictional slaves on a Virginia plantation. “No tribe of people has ever passed from barbarism to civilization whose…progress has been more secure from harm, more genial to their character, or better supplied with mild and beneficent guardianship, adapted to the actual state of their intellectual feebleness, than the Negroes of Swallow Barn.” The author revised and reissued the novel in 1852, he explained at the time, as “an antidote to the abolition mischief.”*2
But even more influential in feeding Southerners’ self-glorifying fantasy of the South were novels not quite so on the nose, set neither in America nor in the present day. Walter Scott’s books—such as Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Woodstock, or The Cavalier—are overwrought, sentimental historical fictions of English and Scottish knights and lords and ladies of centuries past. There had never been an author more popular. He published a new novel every eighteen months between 1814 and 1832, just as Southerners became desperate to justify and romanticize their slave-based neofeudalism. “The appearance of a new novel from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than did some of the battles of Napoleon,” an American publisher and contemporary of Scott’s wrote after he died. “Everybody read these works; everybody.”
Everybody especially in the South, where children and steamboats and plantations and dozens of towns were named after Scott’s fictional and fictionalized characters and olden-times and imaginary places. Shortly after the Civil War, another famous novelist, a former Southerner, specifically blamed the great catastrophe of the South and of America’s nineteenth century on Scott’s novels. The region had been modernizing along with the North during the decades after the Revolution, Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, but things changed: “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,” and
the change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person. By his single might [he] checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion;…with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs…and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote….It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war….
Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
Twain was a hyperbolist, for sure, but his conclusion still bears repeating: a particular set of historical fictions and fantasies led to secession and Civil War.
*1 Throughout this book, I cite quantified historical rises and falls in the use of words and phrases; they’re all derived from Google Ngram.
*2 The views of the author, a friend of many of the most celebrated novelists of his day, evolved, as we now say of politicians: he was proposed to be Lincoln’s vice president in 1860 and during the war became an abolitionist.