Preface
Sir Llewellyn Woodward, in a preface to his short History of England (1947), wrote that writing a short history of a country with much to record ‘is like trying to pack the crown jewels into a hat-box’. Writing an account of a great subject like the origins of the American Civil War, which has inspired some of the most distinguished historical writing of the twentieth century, is likewise akin to trying to cover the Statue of Liberty with a tarpaulin. Consequently, this book is not a comprehensive history of the ante-bellum United States, but a study of the origins of its civil war. I have tried to combine the necessity of providing an accessible introduction to this enormous subject for the beginner with advancing my own views on the nature of the complex political, economic, social and military processes which brought this cataclysm about. This book is, therefore, a synthesis resting heavily on the wealth of recent writing on the subject produced by American and British historians. The American Civil War is a subject which has engaged the attention of many British historians, although United States history occasionally provokes ambivalence. It was extraordinary that during the Thatcher years, for example, the British government invoked a ‘special relationship’ in language of striking sentimentality, yet presided over an unprecedented disintegration of American Studies academic departments. Fortunately, some of this damage has been reversed in recent years. Thomas Carlyle once exclaimed that the United States was a country of 18 million bores. On the contrary, the history of the United States is an exciting and turbulent subject. If I have an excuse for taking so long to produce this book, it is that I have become too absorbed by my subject.
My indebtedness to this veritable scholarly cornucopia is made clear in my footnotes and bibliography. Although my sources have in the main been secondary works and primary printed material, in my concluding chapters I have made use of my own research among manuscript sources for a much more ambitious book on the Civil War. Nonetheless, I have relied very heavily on the writings of my many distinguished predecessors. Although comparisons are indeed odious they should still remain in the province of the historian; so if I am forced to single out one work on this subject which I would carry with me to the proverbial desert island (assuming, of course, that I could cram it into my carpet bag during moments of some anxiety as the ship went down), it would be Allan Nevins’s The Ordeal of the Union (8 vols, 1947–71). Sir Harold Nicolson, when indicating the influence of the works of Sir Charles Webster on the composition of his book, The Congress of Vienna (1946), remarked that ‘It is from this huge quarry that so many of us have gathered our little heap of stones’. Like many historians before me, I have often scurried to Nevins’s volumes, trowel in hand, never without gain.
I am indebted to a number of friends who have either helped me on detailed points, or read and commented on the entire typescript. My debt over the years to Professor Peter J. Parish is enormous, and he has gone to great lengths to straighten out what would otherwise be a tangled skein of ideas. Dr John White commented on Chapter 2, and gave me much useful advice on the vexed issue of race relations. I have relied on his advice for over twenty years and never ceased to profit from it. To Dr Martin Crawford I am especially grateful because he found time, despite many responsibilities as head of department, to read and comment on the entire typescript, greatly to its benefit. I am also indebted, in many unobtrusive ways, to Professor Richard J. Carwardine, Professor Bruce Collins and Dr Robert Cook, who helped pilot my course through treacherous and unpredictable waters. The advice that I miss the most is that of the late Marcus Cunliffe. I have no doubt his comments on my typescript would have been voluminous, delivered in that soft, gentle, but surprisingly firm voice, combined with an engaging charm. American Studies has still to reckon its loss by his premature death; as for myself, I miss his wisdom sorely. The ideas in Chapter 8 were first tried out at the University of Hull, Department of History, Alumni Conference, 2 June 1990. I am deeply grateful to two old friends, John Major, for organizing it, and Keith Simpson, my fellow ‘old boy’, for steadying words of advice and his mischievous jokes, which were sorely needed when my morale flagged. But my greatest debt is to the general editor of the series, Professor Harry Hearder. This book would not have been completed without his friendship, guidance, good sense and inexhaustible patience. It has been a pleasure to work with him.
Visits to the United States have been rendered even more enjoyable by invitations to lecture. Parts of my final chapter were first tried out at a conference on strategy held at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. My thanks are due to Professor Michael I. Handel for encouraging my work in this area and for inviting me. My final obligation is to my many friends in the British Army who have sustained my work over the last few years. The Staff College, Camberley, is perhaps the ideal place for study and reflection. The Staff College Library is without doubt the best I have ever used, and I am deeply grateful to its staff for managing my numerous queries with such efficiency and good humour, especially Mrs Pam Bendall, the College Librarian, and Mr Ken Franklyn. I am also exceedingly fortunate in my secretary, Mrs Penny Eldridge, for all her hard work in producing a final manuscript to such a high standard. Only I know the full extent of the privileges that I have enjoyed over recent years. My friend and colleague, Dr Richard Holmes, once observed that I had been working on this book for as long as he had known me. I hope with its publication not only that I have shown that I have put my time to good use, but also that I have answered the question that has been put to me so frequently as to what I do with it; and to my most vociferous interlocutor this book is dedicated.
King’s College, London – Arwenack House, Falmouth – Staff College, Camberley – The George Washington University, Washington DC
Brian Holden Reid
She [Mrs Lightfoot Lee] had read philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to nothing – nothing.
HENRY ADAMS, Democracy1
The Civil War is the decisive event in American history. Not only does it furnish a pantheon of heroes which enjoy enduring, irresistible appeal (and whose support is summoned by all presidents no matter what their party allegiance and policy), but the Civil War forms a fundamental touchstone, a symbol of wisdom and inspiration, which is invoked during any polemical controversy or national crisis. During the Gulf War of 1990–91 a television series on the Civil War struck a moving national chord in the weeks before the launching of the ground offensive, Operation ‘Desert Storm’. Although Americans pride themselves on being a peace-loving people, the United States was born in war and grew to maturity nourished on the legends of war, mainly of the Civil War. Indeed one can go further and suggest that American nationalism was born in the disunity of the revolutionary struggles and nurtured in the fratricidal strife of the Civil War. It was the Civil War that determined the course of American national development. After the North’s victory, the term ‘the nation’ began to be used rather than the earlier ‘Union’ to describe the American polity (‘the nation’ or ‘this nation’ is now perhaps used to irritating excess to non-American ears).
The Civil War provides a sense of identity, of resurrection through disintegration, and a set of common reference points for all Americans – including, of course, a recalcitrant and sulky South, which remained on the margins of national development until the 1960s. Yet while remaining stubbornly apart, southern pride in the martial achievements of 1861–65, gave southerners a common link in a broadly American experience. North and South had shared a common loss, a common tragedy, and by about 1900 there was agreement (especially among New South reconciliationists) that they had shared a common triumph. ‘I believe there is today,’ wrote James Longstreet in his memoirs, ‘because of the war, a broader and deeper patriotism in all Americans; that patriotism throbs the heart and pulses the being as ardently of the South Carolinian as of the Massachusetts Puritan.’2 Indeed Senator Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, irritated by the accusation of Roscoe Conkling of New York that former Confederate senators held their seats by grace rather than right, replied that he had indeed been ‘a secessionist, earnest and active’ and had sent a hundred regiments to the front. ‘We fought you honestly. We were as earnest, as honest, as bold, and as gallant as you were in the struggle. We believed we were right.’ But the war was over and southern politicians were prepared to acquiesce in its result and share in American expansion. The consummation of vast American economic potential, and the emergence after the Spanish-American War in 1898 of the United States as a great power, possibly the greatest power, seemed to vindicate those, like Brown, who were prepared to forgive and forget. ‘Let us move grandly and gloriously in united effort,’ he declared, ‘to restore to every section of the Union substantial, growing, material prosperity; and we will then bring to the whole country peace, happiness and fraternal relations. This seems to me to be a consummation devoutly to be wished by patriotic people of all parts of the Union.’3
Yet this consensus – that the war constituted a shared triumph – had been achieved at ferocious cost. When Colonel Silas Lapham observes in William Dean Howells’ novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, ‘Gettysburg. That’s my thermometre. If it wa’nt for that, I shouldn’t know when to come in when it rains’, he speaks for a generation whose powers of decision were tempered by the experience of war, and offered up thanks to a capricious fate: they had survived while others had not. Lapham continued, The day of small things is past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country’. Lapham was an ambitious businessman who was conscious of the price paid for his (temporary as it turned out) prosperity.4 The Civil War was the costliest of American wars. More corpses were strewn over Civil War battlefields than in all other American wars combined. The price of victory was 620,000 dead (360,000 northerners and 260,000 southerners), though less than half of these were actually killed in battle.5
The question, therefore, had to be posed by historians. Could this price have been less, or could such heavy payment, a colossal mortgage on the lives and health of young men, have been avoided? Could the American experiment have proved equally as successful (and bountiful) without a civil war? And, indeed, given the universal agreement among most Americans by the turn of the century that blacks should remain in a strictly subordinate, dependent condition, deprived of the rights and privileges open to whites, was the abolition of slavery worth the cost? Many thought not.
Thus a dual tradition developed. The Civil War was both a triumph and tragedy. One could celebrate the moral grandeur of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the bravery of men charging up the slopes of Malvern Hill or plunging through the thickets of the Wilderness, marvel at the resource and finesse of Lee or Grant, yet still deplore that the war could (and should) have broken out. Locating the causes of this vast fratricidal conflict became a veritable industry among historians. What was the issue, was it really Negro slavery? The prejudice of race’, writes Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America in the 1830s, ‘appears to be strongest in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known’.6 Half a century later, the venom of this racial prejudice had not subsided. The migratory movements of southern blacks to northern cities had spread the racial problem to the North and had not excited the sympathy of any but the most earnest and determined liberals. In 1884 Booker T. Washington, the distinguished black leader and educationalist, declared: ‘In spite of all the talk of exodus the Negroes’ home is permanently in the South: for coming to the bread-and-meat side of the question, the white man needs the Negro, and the Negro needs the white man’. Yet the white man North and South wanted the Negro only if he was prepared to forgo civil rights and accept permanent subordinate status.7
The idealistic aspect that had prefaced the war in regard to race relations in certain circles in the Republican Party, and which was given such a boost by the war itself, was forgotten after 1877. During the war years what else could justify the expense of blood and wealth than the destruction of the southern slavocracy and the emancipation of the Negro? In January 1867 Thaddeus Stevens declared to the House of Representatives:
Unless the rebel States, before admission [after seceding in 1860–61] should be made republican in spirit, and placed under the guardianship of loyal men, all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain. Having these states, as we all agree, certainly in the power of Congress, it is our duty to take care that no injustice shall remain in their organic laws. There is more reason why colored voters should be admitted to the rebel States than in the Territories. Without it all are sure to be ruled by traitors; and loyal men, black and white, will be oppressed, exiled or murdered.8
A consensus in the 1890s had grown up that the men who had advocated ‘Negro equality’ were hypocritical, shabby schemers, who had attempted to manipulate ignorant, helpless blacks for their own venal and partisan ends. This perspective was adopted towards the study of both the outbreak of the war and reconstruction afterwards, with some variations. Whereas the corruption of Radical Republicans was stressed after 1865, the deplorable fanaticism of abolitionists was stressed before 1861. Only the sagacity of Abraham Lincoln held both of these lamentable forces in check during the war itself; on his passing in 1865 the twin evils of passion and corruption ran riot.
Thus whatever the vagaries of historiographical fashion,9 by the second decade of the twentieth century, this consensus had taken a firm shape, much influenced by the American entry into the First World War in 1917 and the subsequent disillusionment. The ‘revisionists’ considered the outbreak of war in 1861 to have been an avoidable disaster. They believed that ‘reality’ conformed to peaceful norms; as the northern and southern peoples were not separated by any marked enmity, then the causes of the war were ‘artificial’ and could have been avoided if ‘appearance’ had been rejected and statesmen had concentrated on hard, substantive fact. Instead, they succumbed to the hypnotic, misguided blandishments of ‘extremists’. The war, therefore, was the shameful result of perverted, idealistic fanaticism. This was a war without an issue. Charles Ramsdell argued that the ‘one issue’, slavery, was more apparent than it was real. Slavery had a ‘natural limit’ to its expansion. Anxiety over the territorial expansion of this institution thus resembled chasing shadows. The most distinguished exponent of this interpretation was James G. Randall. Randall’s colleagues and followers propounded a thesis of such coherence and persuasiveness that we are still confronting its implications today, even if it is to reject it without reservation. Without a ‘blundering generation’ of over-zealous idealists or petty, partisan politicians there would have been no war. The interpretation of Randall and others focused on the operation of the political process in relation to public protest, and reserved its most powerful denunciation for the abolitionists. A second influential interpretation grew up simultaneously, but like Randall revisionism, it was no less a product of Progressivism, that liberal ferment of reform that emphasized conflict and strife in the American social fabric. This was advanced most brilliantly by that academic maverick, Charles A. Beard. He, like Randall, exhibited little interest in the condition of blacks, either slave or free, but unlike Randall, he wrote off the abolitionists as people of the utmost insignificance. For Beard the Civil War was a Second American Revolution, a ‘social cataclysm in which the capitalists, labourers and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South’.10
This interpretation catered to the hearty appetite before 1939 for explanations which stressed economic factors. According to Beard, the political system resembled a puppet theatre whose strings were pulled by economic muscles and financial sinews. Beard’s books were widely read and sold in large numbers. His work, too, added further interest to a discussion of the significance of the failure of the American political system in bringing about the war. This appeared quite inadequate to bear the strains imposed on it. The presidents elected in the years before 1860 were uninspiring and uninspired. Allan Nevins took up this argument after the Second World War. In appraising James Buchanan, he offers a tepid endorsement which actually damns Buchanan with faint praise as a prelude to a devastating indictment of those who preceded him.
In a line of mediocre Presidents not one of whom would be esteemed fit today to lead a large corporation, bank or university, he had more ability than Taylor or Fillmore, more steadiness than Pierce, and more civil experience than the three combined. Yet he was as ill-equipped for a supreme test as they.11
No less an authority than President Harry S. Truman, who knew something about taking decisions, was widely read in the historical works of this period and is testimony to their popular influence, characterized President James Buchanan as ‘The… last of these weak Presidents that brought on the Civil War, that at the very least allowed it to happen.… He [Buchanan] couldn’t make a decision to save his soul in hell’. He summed up the unedifying list of chief executives with the critical comment:
But there you are, five men. Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan, not counting Harrison and Taylor, and the five of them coming one after the other made the Civil War inevitable. Not that I’m saying that it might not have happened if we’d had strong men in office, but there’s a chance that it wouldn’t.12
Mr Truman’s casual remarks capped the efforts of historians, given point by a stimulating essay by the Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl. Was the Civil War inevitable? Were the forces unleashed by political fanatics and sordid financiers bent on the transformation of the economic landscape, ineptly resisted by presidents who floundered and blundered, unstoppable? Historians and non-historians alike seemed to think that the war was inevitable.
Whether events are inevitable or not is a question bound to stimulate the imagination of historians. It also depends on the perspective adopted. The further one stands back in time from a sequence of events the less inevitable they appear. The alternatives are more clear cut, and an alternative sequence of events seems to beckon. The nearer one gets to the eye of a combustible chain of events the more inevitable appears the result, as harassed, tired and fallible statesmen struggle against the odds, against accident and the unintended, to control their actions and the actions of others. The sharper the focus on a crisis, especially as day follows day, the more intractable human affairs appear. This whole equation of perspective and accident is complicated in the American case by the truncated time scale. Marcus Cunliffe has best pictured this in the years 1789–1837. He writes of the ‘speed of change’, the ‘compression of the American time scale’, and observes of the Founding Fathers who worked merely eighty years before the outbreak of the Civil War:
In the American time scale, logarithmic in range at the formative stages, the Declaration of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787 tended to be represented as closer to, say, the Magna Carta of 1215 than to the actual events of the decade after 1787. The documents, being of eternal significance, were in a sense out of time altogether.13
Americans refer habitually to the ‘Age’ of Jackson – a mere eight years, two complete presidential terms. The ‘Age’ of Elizabeth I covered nearly half a century, that of Louis XIV almost three-quarters of a century. The hectic, frenetic pace of American political life, in a much reduced time scale than in Europe or East Asia, should not be forgotten when assessing the reasons for the outbreak of the Civil War.
The approach to resolving the conundrum of ‘inevitability’ adopted in this study (which reflects the confidence of the 1990s that the debate is already over) is best conveyed by the novelist Simon Raven. In his novel, The Survivors (1976, the tenth volume in the ‘Alms to Oblivion’ sequence), Leonard Percival, the shadowy, omniscient, ‘cloak and dagger man’ observes that ‘things are as they are. One must accept everything… as having come about in the natural and logical continuation of prior events – any one of which might have been different, given a split second here or there, but wasn’t’. It is pointless to speculate about whether another course of action would have ensued if events had been different, or been altered by another course of action. These events did not happen. Historians can take account of pivotal events which mark out a certain course rather than another; but we cannot explain that which did not happen. Events happen because they do; obviously great cataclysmic events alter our perspective on the mundane. Perhaps we give them too much prominence, but we can hardly ignore them. What we may be sure of is that if one event had happened differently, then all the successive events that followed would have turned out anew. Then the process of historical change analysed by historians would be quite different. They should devote their energies to explaining their significance and not frittering them away in a fruitless search after an alternative version of no significance.14
There was one slightly unexpected by-product of these various interpretations advanced by the Progressive historians. It produced a strong southern bias in American historical writing. If slavery was not worth a war, then the moral indictment of the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ was rather less pressing. An alibi could be found exculpating southern behaviour by reference to her desire for political independence. Indeed, who could blame the South for wishing to break bonds of affection which had been so cruelly exploited and debased by a group of blood-thirsty fanatics, many of whom could be found in the ranks of the Republican Party? That fanaticism could be found of just as alarming and combustible a kind in the South was a fact given rather less emphasis in many accounts. Books continued to appear well into the 1950s purveying a strong southern bias, notably those of Avery O. Craven. Such works, moreover, continued to focus attention on the political and economic sources of civil war in the United States because they were keen to advance a special, sectional case as to who was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war – and it was not the South – within the existing framework of analysis. G. M. Trevelyan, in a most stimulating essay on bias in historical writing, warns of the dangers of ‘perpetual aloofness’ in historians. We should occasionally, he avers, ‘go down among the men and women of the past’ and treat them ‘like human beings just like ourselves’. He develops this point by suggesting that
Clio should not always be cold, aloof, impartial. Sometimes the maid should come down yonder mountain height, the Judge descend from the judgment seat, and the historian share the passions of the past, provided they are the real passions of the past and not a false reflection of some modern dogma or prejudice.
The problem was that southern historians, or those overly influenced by southern views, were still preoccupied with the passions of the 1850s and 1860s, not that they were projecting backwards the preoccupations of the 1950s. Thus much discussion still revolved around old sectional controversies as their main point of departure.15
Thus by 1950 an immensely impressive synthesis on the outbreak of the Civil War was in place, reinforced by the publication of James G. Randall’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1947. In its confidence in the destiny of the United States and awareness of tragedy resolved, so that she emerged renewed and even stronger from her trials, this synthesis resembles the ‘Whig’ interpretation of British history in the seventeenth century. Like this formula (under which the historical process moves inexorably towards the heights of prosperity and liberty represented by the present), the ‘revisionist’/Beard interpretation has undergone formidable criticism since the mid-1950s, often led by former students of Randall, with David Donald very much in their van. That grand, imposing, elegant edifice lies in ruins, like the remains of a long-buried Sumerian city dug out of the earth. Indeed its assumptions and arguments appear equally ancient. Its implicit southern bias has been discredited. The issue of slavery and race has been placed at the heart of discussion where it belongs – it cannot be ignored or hidden. And out of this debris created by the pneumatic drills of ‘cliometrics’, the employment of computer data and methods to analyse economic trends, first brought to bear on the economics of slavery, have sprung, newly fertilized, green shoots of the historical plant: urban studies, mobility studies, women’s history, and so on. Each new area of study fragmenting grand political processes so confidently handled by historians of Randall’s generation.
Historians had indeed taken Trevelyan’s advice and ‘got down among the men and women of the past’ with a vengeance. The social factor gained prominence, and the immense outpouring of books on slavery is a testimony to the success of this endeavour. But no new synthesis, a replacement of the old view, has emerged. Ironically, historians’ view of Reconstruction, which has experienced a more thorough-going demolition than the origins of the Civil War, is a good deal more coherent, and it must be said, ambitious and sweeping. One of the reasons for this is the increasing tendentiousness of American historical writing, which is apt to fall victim to fads; and the tiresome and remorseless repetition of certain tags and phrases, which, once they fall out of favour, are immediately replaced by a new set. All this has left the study of the origins of the American Civil War in a state of limbo. The literature is enormous, and of a high quality but variegated. Indeed as long ago as 1960 David Donald was of the view that the life had been stamped out of the subject as a serious area of study and debate. As Eric Foner has written more recently, ‘Historians’ methodologies and value judgments have changed considerably, but the questions historians have asked of their data have remained relatively static’. What is needed to rejuvenate the subject is a new approach. ‘Historians of the Civil War era seem to be in greater need of new models of interpretation and new questions than an additional accumulation of data.’16
The standard interpretation of the Civil War and its outbreak is, in large measure, the reversal of the old view. Southern special pleading on the race issue is ruled out of court. Race relations was, and remains, the dominant issue of American history. Slavery was the root cause of the war because it more than any other factor – as the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ (a most significant generic term) – shaped southern consciousness, governed southern economic development, and determined southern social attitudes and racial phobias vis-à-vis the North. The subject of slavery has been the subject of immense scholarly labour since the mid-1960s, and produced writing of the very highest quality. The old southern bias (which was still evident in Avery O. Craven, Civil War in the Making, 1815–1860)17 has been dismantled. The study of the North’s political attitudes and realignments has borne much stimulating comment and fresh perspectives on the changing appeal of political parties, not least of the Republican Party.
Even in this area, the renewed interest in party politics and the social sources of electoral behaviour has added to the fragmentation of the subject rather than detracted from it. Attempts to find new and different interpretations have led to an increased emphasis on local, rather than national, issues. Certainly, explaining why voters acted in a certain way, does not provide a convincing explanation of why, let alone how, war came when it did, and not before. There is a tremendous gap between casting a vote and taking a shot at a uniformed enemy. The historians of political parties and voter behaviour manipulate their tables and draw up their columns and charts with dizzying exactitude. Yet in terms of developing an all-embracing synthesis of the outbreak of war, as opposed to explaining the political culture and behaviour of ante-bellum America, so much of this tremendous, fertile, outpouring of scholarship has proved rather disappointing. Indeed some historians of voter behaviour, immersed in intricate detail of turn-out and swings of opinion, neatly tabulated, have attempted to write the coming of the Civil War out of the political history of this period. Of course, it is correct to stress the importance of local issues; if the magnifying glass is applied to regional matters, then patently local controversy will loom up powerfully and in vivid colours. Interdivisibility in political life – when small matters block out great questions – should never be underestimated in history as in physical geography. But this should not mean that the great, national issue is unimportant. Increasingly, therefore, the attention focused by historians since 1918 on political and social sources of civil war in the United States has not changed – although the perspective by which these are viewed has been altered dramatically. The main historiographical consequences of this change of approach has been fragmentation of the study of the Civil War.18
An opportunity has thus been offered to attempt a fresh overview of this welter of research and attempt to look at these much studied matters from a slightly different perspective. It is not the intention of this book to suggest that all previous works have been wrong or to challenge the value of so much able research (indeed its fruits have been utilized to the full in the pages that follow). Clearly to attempt a massive reinterpretation on a huge scale is the task of a lifetime and beyond the scope of this book. But it will suggest that our thoughts on the origins and outbreak of the Civil War require some readjustment. Previous works have been too preoccupied with political and social questions, and have treated them in too narrow a fashion. Sections of a country do not hurl themselves into a civil war just because the populace votes in a certain way, or their respective politicians stop talking to one another. The breakdown of a political system does not provide by itself sufficient cause for the outbreak of war; though clearly the unique investment that nineteenth-century Americans made in its operation is a cause for reflection. These questions must be viewed within the broader context of an American penchant for violence and violent solutions to political disputes. As Marcus Cunliffe once observed, for a supposedly peace-loving people, ‘The problem was that warfare was a basic ingredient of American patriotism’.19
The influence of violence and views about its use cannot be written out of accounts of the origins of the American Civil War, in the same way as the Negro was in the accounts of the 1930s. The political, economic and social factors must be given due prominence, but so too should geopolitics, the relationship between the evolving American polity and other countries in the Western hemisphere, and indeed with the geographical environment in North America. The domination of the United States of North America could not be taken for granted in 1861, though it most certainly could by 1865. It is very striking that the great majority of United States historians of this subject interpret it within the parameters of exclusively American concerns. They rarely bother to ask why the war did not spread in 1861–62? This is almost as important a question to ask as finding a solution to the query as to why civil war broke out in Charleston harbour in April 1861. By attempting to answer this question, the account offered here does not stop at the firing of the first shots at Fort Sumter, as is customary.
Of course, the political, economic and social factors must be given due prominence in any historical analysis. The study of the causes of any war can never consist solely in the tracing of violent events, with the politics, social controversies and economics left out, though many previous accounts have detailed these in full and left the violence out. All of these features of ante-bellum society must be drawn into a close relationship and related moreover to the geopolitical, strategical questions raised by the necessity of enforcing a fiat or policy on one section by another. Military calculations, and the means available on either side to enforce their policy cannot be ignored – even though contemporaries were rarely able to express themselves in strategic language. Nevertheless these calculations were present in 1860–61. Consequently, we need to understand the significance of escalation in political and strategic discussion in any war, but especially in a civil war. The questions posed by historians must include how a political issue has come to assume the significance attached to it by decision-makers, as well as why it reached a level of importance. Without such an equation filling the gap between intention and action becomes inexplicable. The process of war causation, in other words, does not stop simply because shots have been fired. The question of what kind of conflict has been envisaged by contemporaries embarking on a war must be raised and thus discussions of war aims come to the fore. Such discussions reveal the readiness of politicians to resort to force and what they expected to attain by employing it. This is almost as important a question as why they chose to go to war in the first place; indeed these matters are interconnected to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, new synthetic ideas on the war’s coming are slowly emerging, especially the notion of a domestic conflict.
Southerners had been threatening to secede from the Union for thirty years prior to 1860–61. Few in the North believed them and adjusted their reaction to such threats accordingly. Yet the South did take this grave step and prepared, with remarkable rapidity, to support its action with military preparations. Delineating the change in outlook which resulted in such a precipitate and ultimately catastrophic decision is just as important as explaining, with a wealth of political detail, why secession took place. But was the decision of a state, like South Carolina, by itself sufficient cause to explain the outbreak of organized violence between the sections? Or should we also seek to explain why it arrived at the decision to secede, and assess the manner in which South Carolina pursued its objectives? At any rate, this book will attempt to consider these questions. It will trace the increasing political antagonisms of the sections in narrative form and then pause on two occasions to take stock. This brace of thematic, analytical chapters will assess how contemporaries viewed themselves and their sections vis-à-vis one another: in 1858–60 during the tumult over the admission of Kansas as a slave state and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; and again in 1861 during the Sumter crisis, the final confrontation which resulted in war.
It will become apparent in the chapters that follow that the author does not share the widely held view that the South was a distinct cultural entity, although it entertained a certain loose, self-conscious sense of geographical contiguity. Consequently, although terms like ‘escalation’ are employed as tools of analysis, the author does not believe that the Civil War was the outgrowth of a ‘Cold War’ between the sections, motivated by ideological and cultural hostility. Decision-makers will take decisions under pressure quite unaware that they are acting as the instrument of any great social forces. It may be, on both sides, that politicians took decisions in isolation from the real sentiment of their constituents. It is perhaps the tragedy of the modern world that the results of violence galvanize mass involvement and precipitate bloodshed and destruction that was wholly unexpected when the strife began. This was certainly the experience of the men, often highly educated and schooled in the law as well as in politics, who took the decisions which resulted in war in 1861; men who were unaware of the kind of conflict they were unleashing on the American people.
There is one final matter that should be made clear at the outset. Increasingly in recent years historians have come under pressure to embrace the charms of ‘theory’. This has come from two main sources. The first – and much the most pernicious – are those who have studied the past as part of the recent penchant for multi-disciplinary approaches, especially ‘cultural studies’. This has drawn from the so-called ‘human sciences’.20 Through these have percolated the preoccupations of literary criticism – decon-structionism, post-structuralism and post-modernism. The value of such insights is reduced by the convoluted and clotted style in which they are expressed. The sentences of many of the practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ are as long and complicated, as Gore Vidal once observed, as their ideas are simple. Such ideas have become so influential in the United States (and have had a major influence on the teaching of American Studies in Britain) because of an obsessive desire to seek out some kind of formula. Long years of observation of the United States have reinforced my view that formulae have become so pervading in American life that the search for one – in the absence of a strong left-wing political tradition – has begun to affect the ‘structure’ of the intellectual process itself; such an issue transcends mere discussion of so-called ‘political correctness’.
The most alarming feature of these approaches is their increasing tendentiousness. To use the language of its practitioners, a ‘sub-text’ seems to lurk behind this new preoccupation with ‘theory’ and an especial favourite term, ‘discourse’. This is transparent in some recent contributions, even though their authors do their best to conceal quite simple arguments with jargon and elaborate syntax. The result is a bewildering panorama, ‘a preprogrammed circuit of objectified simulacra’.21 This notwithstanding, the perspective on the American past adopted by such writers is not difficult to grasp: they seek to replace ‘the tautologies of exceptionalism with the transnational categories of gender, class and race’, to quote the literary historian, Sacvan Bercovitch.22 Such a post-Marxist formulation offers a breath-takingly reductionist approach, and a simplistic stress on social factors as the central core of historical explanation, which I utterly and unhesitatingly reject.
The approach adopted in this book at least shares a scepticism about American exceptionalism and the rhetoric too often resorted to by United States historians. Yet the ‘cultural studies’ approach, and its naked and crude assumptions, is, in my view, in great danger of raising up a ‘Whig interpretation of history’ in reverse. The old Whig historians wrote history from the biased angle of ‘practical judgements and purely personal appreciations’, in Sir Herbert Butterfield’s words, and how far the past contributed to the present state of ‘progress’ they had congratulated themselves on reaching. This process has now been inverted. There is a growing tendency to study history ‘with direct and perpetual reference to the present’. Given the rigid, self-imposed categories these ‘new’ historians have imposed – gender, class and race – the past is raked over in a disillusioned, often bitter spirit, to explain a lack of progress in these areas. Some of these issues are, of course, no less worthy in their own right than the concerns of earlier historians, but like the Whigs, they come from ‘the transference into the past of an enthusiasm for something in the present’, and condemnation or praise of the past by reference to our current (and swiftly changing) anxieties, not only is crude, but also hardly advances the level of historical explanation; on the contrary, it is not only simplistic but also downright dangerous and actually corrosive of history as history. As for American history, it still lacks perspective because under the pressures of this approach the United States is transformed from a uniquely good and progressive society, to a uniquely bad one, and thus remains exceptional.23
The second source of pressure to adopt ‘theory’ is less modish than it once was, or compared with the enthusiasm for ‘discourse’, but still deserves some attention. This is the assumption that history will become more ‘scientific’ if it makes more effective use of statistics, mathematical techniques, computers, and rigorous quantitative methodology. This enshrines ‘data’ as the historical lexicon and disapproves of argument by analogy or worse, by impressions drawn from a handful of documents.24 We can concede the importance of examining aggregate data to test various propositions. Of course, this concern with ‘theory’ and ‘scientific’ history is hardly new, it has a long and respectable pedigree in historiography, but such quests have never succeeded or endured.
This is mainly because these recent efforts neglect subjects which do not fit the framework they have laid down. In short, they offer nothing to the historian of the origins of war. Indeed, by contributing to the process of fragmentation, they have set up further obstacles to our understanding. Furthermore, they downgrade the importance of cataclysmic events in history, which are so vital to an understanding of war causation25 – let alone the many other subject areas which are not conducive to the ‘gender, class and race’ categorization. In politics, as in war, it is the person who counts, and we can never ignore the role of the individual in crises pregnant with war. Individuals express the grandeur, as well as the pettiness and evil, of which the human spirit is capable.
If the reader is committed to the need for ‘theory’ in history, and expects to find in the following pages a ‘theory’ of the origins of the American Civil War, then this book is not for him or her. It is dedicated to the belief that the past is too complex – and demanding – to be placed within a narrow theoretical constraint; the past cannot be neatly poured into a much burnished casket with a trowel. Indeed, if we are to understand fully the place of violence in American society in the nineteenth century, we must rid ourselves of the recent penchant, remarked on by Eric Hobsbawm, for studying social forces in an atmosphere shaped by the odours of the seminar room – as if the world is one huge university.26 The United States in the nineteenth century was a world far removed from ‘discourse’, the scribble of ball-point pens and the sound of A4 leaves of paper being torn from their pads. ‘This nation has a strange indifference to life’, reported Carl Schurz, shortly after arriving in the United States in October 1852, ‘which manifests itself in its sports, its races, its wars and also its daily life’.27 It was a restless, competitive, callous if not brutal world, in which violence lay just beneath the surface. We should not underestimate the desire for danger, challenge and confronting the ultimate test of fulfilment – in war. William S. McFeely has reminded us that pacific societies do not always breed pacific citizens: T do think Americans should face the unattractive fact that whether it was fought to end slavery or to preserve the Union, that war was also an outlet for emotional – animal, if you will – energy, an outlet that the society otherwise failed to provide in sufficient measure’.28 What is even more extraordinary, looking at the world in which we live, and the problems it is attempting to surmount on the eve of the twenty-first century, is that academics need reminding of this omnipresent, harsh reality of our existence.
1. Henry Adams, Democracy (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 13.
2. James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (New York, 1896: Da Capo, 1992), p. xvi.
3. Quoted in Joseph Parks, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977), pp. 522–3.
4. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 16.
5. James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 854.
6. Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Oxford UP, 1966), p. 20.
7. Quoted in John White, Black Leadership in America: From Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1990), p. 29.
8. Speech, 3 Jan. 1867, in Congressional Globe, Thirty-Ninth Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 251–3, document 8 in John White, Reconstruction After the American Civil War (London: Longman, 1977), p. 66.
9. Traced with skill and objectivity in Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret their Civil War (Princeton UP, 1950).
10. Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), II pp. 38–42, 54, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), pp. 302–3.
11. Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), I, p. 64.
12. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: Conversations with Harry S. Truman (London: Gollancz, 1974), pp. 353–4.
13. Marcus Cunliffe, The Nation Takes Shape, 1789–1837 (Chicago UP, 1959), pp. 5, 127; Brian Holden Reid and John White, ‘Marcus Cunliffe: A Pastmaster’, in Reid and White (eds) American Studies: Essays in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 11–12.
14. Simon Raven, The Survivors (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), pp. 281–2.
15. G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Bias in History’, in Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longman, 1949), pp. 77, 78.
16. Eric Foner, ‘The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions’, in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford UP, 1981), pp. 15–16.
17. Avery O. Craven, Civil War in the Making, 1815–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1959).
18. See Joel Silbey, ‘The Civil War Synthesis in American Political History’, in Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), pp. 3–12.
19. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1863, 3rd edn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969; Gregg Revivals 1993, with a new preface by Brian Holden Reid), p. 68.
20. See Richard King, ‘Present at the Creation: Marcus Cunliffe and American Studies’, Journal of American Studies 26 (Aug. 1992), pp. 265–8, esp. p. 268.
21. See Paul Giles, ‘Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives’, Journal of American Studies 28 (Dec. 1994), p. 339.
22. Ibid., p. 342.
23. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931, 1963), pp. v-vi, 1–2, 4–5, 8, 11, 64–5, 96. The swift rise of a ‘post-revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians as a response to Nixon and Watergate in the 1970s is a striking, earlier example. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), pp. xxii-xxiv.
24. R. W. Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1983), pp. 50–1, 91–2.
25. Ibid., p. 77.
26. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 510.
27. Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. Frederic Bancroft (New York: Putnam’s, 1913), I, p. 4.
28. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1981), p. xiii.