The Civil War

I - Causes

There are different ways you can look at this issue:

1. You can analyse the underlying, structural issues which set the two sides at odds.  Historians' suggestions differ in the details, but they are substantially similar. 

2. You can build a timeline of key events, seeing how each one added to the tension until the whole thing exploded into civil war. 

3. You can see what historians in the past have said, and let their insights inform your opinion. 

Underlying Causes of the American Civil War [STEPS]

    (Click on the u orange arrows to reveal more information)

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

A teachit Card Sort and Causes Grid suggests causes with accompanying exercises (pdf)

Interesting teachit resource on Interpretations of Lincoln (pdf)

YouTube

What caused the Civil War: - 1-minute summary

What caused the Civil War: - Pete Jackson

1860 Election & the Road to Disunion: - Crash Course US History (really good, but watch it AFTER your have studied this page)

• Sectionalism: North v South

  ‘Sectionalism’ is putting your region before any other. 

  • By 1861, North and South USA had grown into very different places. 
  • The North was much more populated, more urban, more industrial – it had as many factories as the South had factory-workers.  Its model citizen was the free-born farmer, and its workers: ‘free labor’.  There were strong reform movements for temperance, public education and the abolition of slavery. 
  • The South had fewer people and no large cities.  80% of the population worked on the land, and the economy was based mainy on the slave cotton plantation.  Although only a quarter of the people owned enslaved people, slavery was vital for Southern society because poor whites could value themselves as better than the enslaved.  At the same time, white Southerners were terrified of an uprising by enslaved people. 
  • Both were mainly Protestant, both believed in the Constitution and that they best represented the Constitution, and both believed that the other was trying to ‘do them down’.  The hatred was mutual; Professor Gary Gallagher comments: “By 1859, a great many people, both North and South, had worked themselves into such a state that compromise would be very difficult if a great crisis arose”. 

• Tariffs, Nullification and State’s Rights

  Clashes between Northern and Southern interests led South Carolina to claim the right to opt out of federal laws. 

  • The South’s wealth depended on huge exports of Cotton; the plantation-owners wanted international free trade.  The North’s growing industries wanted high tariffs (customs duties), to protect them against Europe’s much-more-powerful industries. 
  • In 1828, Congress agreed what became known as the 'Tariff of Abominations' – a raft of very high tariffs at 30-50%. 
  • The state of South Carolina did not agree, passed an Ordinance of Nullification declaring the tariffs null and void in South Carolina, and threatened to secede (leave the Union) if President Jackson tried to enforce them.  The State argued that, in a federal republic, the states had the right to overrule federal law if they wanted. 
  • President Jackson prepared the Federal Army for war, but Congress greatly reduced the tariffs, and both sides backed down.  The crisis was averted … but the North couldn't help but notice that the South had 'got one over on them'. 
  • Although many Southern politicians later claimed that they seceded to protect States' rights, the Confederacy's Constitution forbade its states to secede!

• Expansion into the West

  As the United State expanded westwards, there was intense disagreement about whether the new states should be ‘slave states’ or ‘free states’. 

  • A compromise was agreed in 1820 (the ‘Missouri Compromise’) and another in 1850, but in 1854 a minor civil war broke out in Kansas (‘Bleeding Kansas’) between pro-and anti-slavery campaigners. 
  • A confrontation developed over the Homestead Act, which Southern politicians hated – they saw it as a trick to fill the West with the same kind of small-scale free-born farmers  that lived in the North.
  • There was also anger in the South when the first transcontinental railroads went through northern states; they said it was another example of northern sectionalism.
  • The key problem was that the continuous opening up of the west, and the creation of new states, destablised the delicate balance of politics in the Senate. 

• Power and Politics

  People don’t go to war, politicians do.  And – although, to get public support, they claim they are acting on principles – it is usually about power. 

  • Up to the 1840s, the Southern States held the power in the Senate.  Sometimes a President came from the North (e.g.  James Buchanan) but they were usually ‘dough faces’ – who so depended on the support of Southern Senators that they did as the South told them. 
  • As you can guess, this angered the politicians from the North, especially as they dominated the House of Representatives. 
  • After the 1840s, the balance of power swung away from the South, as the population of the North, and the numbers of Northern politicians in Congress, grew.  The Southern politicians could see the way the wind was blowing – it made them super-sensitive of their position … which was interpreted by northerners as unfair privilege. 

• Slavery

  The popular view of the cause of the Civil War is that the North fought to abolish slavery, the South to keep it.  That is not true. 

  • Most Northerners were racist.  There were many who wanted abolition, but the majority did not, and Black Americans faced segregation and violence in the north as well as the south (Lincoln was wishy-washy on slavery: he fought the 1860 election promising to allow slavery to continue in the Southern States, and issued the Proclamation of Emancipation as a military measure.)  Most Northerners did not oppose slavery … they opposed the Southern slavocracy (the powerful political plantation-owner vested interests) which they thought were damaging and holding back the North. 
  • The South, on the other hand, was fighting for much more than just being able to own slaves – they were defending their whole economic and social system, and 'slavery' was just the shorthand way of saying that. 
  • The importance of slavery was not so much that it caused the war, but that it was a trigger for every other cause:
  • •  'slave-or-free' was the underlying difference between the North and South’s economic and social differences. 
  • •  it was the cause of the Missouri Compromise, and the clash of rights between ‘State or Union’. 
  • •  it led to the acrimony of the conflict over the admission of new states. 
  • •  it underlay the political alliances – and was a cause of conflict – between North and South power-blocks in Congress
  • So – as President Lincoln said in 1865 – the issue of slavery "was somehow the cause of the war".  Although the war was clearly primarily a sectional power-struggle, slavery cropped up as an issue in almost every confrontation.  Which is why, when the Southern states seceded in 1861, almost every Southern politician said it was about slavery. 

Events Leading to the American Civil War

 

This map should help you understand some of the places mentioned in the text.

• 1820:Missouri Compromise

  Before 1820, Congress was evenly divided – 11 ‘free states’ and 11 ‘slave states’.  Missouri asked to join the union, and was expected to come in as a 'slave state'.  Senator Henry Clay brokered a compromise, by which Maine was also admitted as a free state, and it was agreed to outlaw slavery above the 36°30’ line of latitude. 

  • BOTH: This agreement held for 34 years.

Source A

This cartoon of 1861 satrises how Lincoln's Inaugural Speech was perceived in the North, and in the South.

• 1831:Nat Turner’s Insurrection

  Nat Turner was an enslaved preacher in Virginia.  On 21 Aug 1831 he and his followers first killed the family of Turner’s master, then rampaged through the neighbourhood killing and mutilating 55 white Virginians. 

  • SOUTH: People were terrified – this was their greatest fear.  Large number of Black people were lynched.  Turner was hanged, beheaded, dissected, flayed, and the skin used to make souvenir purses.  Laws were passed in a number of Southern states prohibiting: teaching Blacks to read; or possessing an abolitionist pamphlet. 
  • NORTH: A number of abolitionists praised Turner. 

• 1848:Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850

  Congressman David Wilmot tried to tag a proviso onto a finance bill, which would have banned slavery in territory captured in the Mexican-American War.  The Bill passed in the House of Representatives, but failed in the Senate.  Instead, Henry Clay brokered the Compromise of 1850, by which California was allowed to join the Union as a free state, but a Fugitive Slave Act committed the federal government to help return enslaved people who had run away. 

  • SOUTH: The admission of California swung the balance of power against them in the Senate, and they were convinced that the North was conspiring against slavery.
  • NORTH: Abolitionists were unhappy that the Proviso failed, and that they couldn’t help enslaved people who had run away. 

• 1852:Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  This novel about the evil of slavery became the second best-selling book behind the Bible. 

  • SOUTH: It was hated as a ‘fake’ and a number of books were written to counter it.
  • NORTH: It turned thousands of people into abolitionists.  Lincoln was said to have called Stowe: “the little lady who started this great war”.

• 1854:Kansas-Nebraska Act and ‘Bleeding Kansas’

  In 1854, Stephen Douglas hoped to build a transcontinental railroad through Nebraska.  Southern Senators said they would agree only if Nebraska became a 'slave state'.  Douglas’s Bill proposed that the inhabitants of new states should be allowed to choose for themselves – this overturned the Missouri Compromise and the 1850 Compromise.  A new state of Kansas was also proposed, which would have a better chance of deciding to be 'slave state'.   When abolitionist Charles Sumner criticised the Bill and denounced 'slave power', he was badly beaten up in Congress by slaveowner Preston Brooks.  The result in Kansas was 'Bleeding Kansas', a bloody mini-civil-war 1854-59.

  • SOUTH: Southern politicians were disappointed not to get the railroad, and angry that slavery was not imposed on Kansas.
  • NORTH: Northerners saw it as a trick to extend slavery all over the West.

• 1856:Republican Party formed

  The old political parties fell apart over the issue of slavery.  The Whig Party disintegrated altogether.  The Democrats split, with the majority making it a pro-Slavery Party.  A new northern Party – the Republicans – was formed, as a pro-North sectional Party.

  • SOUTH: Southerners hated the Republican Party, whch they saw as proving what they had suspected all along – that th North was out to 'get one over' on the South.  this

• 1857:Dred Scott case

  Scott (and his family) were enslaved people whose owner had moved to the North – where slavery was illegal.  Seeking emancipation, he went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him, saying that African Americans were not citizens and that the Missouri Compromise was illegal.

  • NORTH: Northerners were furious at what they saw as the South saying what their laws should be.  Abolitionists decided that the courts were not going to abolished slavery – more was needed.

• 1859:John Brown tried to start a revolt of enslaved people

  John Brown was a radical abolitionist who had fought against slavery in Bleeding Kansas.  He believed that only violence would end slavery.  In October 1859 he raided a federal armoury at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, and tried to start a rebellion.  He was quickly defeated and executed.

  • SOUTH: Terrified, and now convinced that the North was actively trying to provoke a deadly uprising of enslaved people.  The Richmond Enquirer stated that the raid “revived, with tenfold strength the desire for a Southern Confederacy”.
  • NORTH: Many Northerners praised Brown.  The song John Brown’s Body was a popular song with Union soldiers during the Civil War.

• 1860:Lincoln elected President

  Lincoln was known the Republican candidate.  He had tried to stand on a moderate platform of economic growth and allowing slavery to remain in the South.  He was elected solely by a massive vote from the North – he was not even on the ballot paper in many Southern States.

  • SOUTH: By February 1861 – before he had even been inaugurated – seven Southern States seceded from the Union, and formed their own ‘Confederacy’ with their own Constitution.

• 1861:Fort Sumter Crisis

  Fort Sumter was a federal fort in seceded South Carolina.  When it began to run out of supplies, Lincoln announced that he was sending an unarmed ship with food.  Before it could get there, on 12 April 1861, Confederate forces bombarded the fort, which surrendered.

  • NORTH: Three days after the attack, Lincoln announced the formation of an army of 75,000 men. 
  • SOUTH: Four more States joined the Confederacy, which called for an army of 100,000.

Historiography of the Causes of the American Civil War

In the years after the Civil War, politicians in the South – who at the start of the war had to a man named slavery as the cause for which they were fighting – changed tack.  It was not about slavery, they said, but about the rights and freedoms of the States to live how they wanted to live; in this way, they portrayed the war as an attack by the federal government on their Liberty.  This theory is called the ‘Lost Cause’, and there are many people in the South who still believe it to this day. 

In 1917, James Ford Rhodes wrote first great history of the war.  For him, the war was fought to end slavery: it was “an uncompromisable moral issue” contested by two entrenched sides.  “In April, 1861”, he wrote, “war was undoubtedly inevitable… The irrepressible conflict had come to a head”.  This became known as the “inevitability thesis”. 

In 1927, Charles and Mary Beard suggested another theory.  The War, they said, was a conflict of economic interests – particularly, who was going to benefit from the huge territories being opened up in the west.  For them, the issue of ‘slave’ and ‘free’ in the West was actually a matter of ‘yours’ or ‘ours’. 

In 1941, Frank Owsley, a southern historian speaking to the Southern Historical Association, blamed sectionalism – especially the sectionalism of the north.  A ‘war psychosis’ had grown up in the South, he said, by which “the southern people felt it both abhorrent and dangerous to continue to live under the same government with the people of the North”.  This had been caused, he alleged, by a northern “Crusade against the South”. 

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s turned the argument back to slavery, though perhaps seeing ‘slavery’ as an economic, social and political system, rather than just the right of someone to own another person – “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” wrote Larry Gara in 1969. 

Writing in 2012, Michael Woods agreed that the “broad consensus” of historians had confirmed that “slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt”.  He did, however, acknowledge that modern historians are currently exploring different aspects of the question, e.g. pushing the start of tensions back into the 18th century (“Long Causation”), seeing the conflict in its international context, or studying the different-and-clashing economic systems of north and south. 

In the end, Woods seems to come round to my PoV that, at base, it was all about Power, and who would wield it:

“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.”

YouTube

Debunking the myth of the Lost Cause