In the beginning slavery was no great problem. It had existed all across colonial America, it died out in the North simply because it did not pay, and at the turn of the nineteenth century most Americans, North and South alike considered that eventually it would go out of existence everywhere. But in 1793, Yankee Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple device that made it possible for textile mills to use the short-staple cotton, which the Southern states could grow so abundantly. In a very short time the South had become a cotton empire, nearly four million slaves were employed and slavery looked like an absolutely essential element in Southern prosperity. The market value of the South’s slaves in 1860 was an estimated $3 billion, which was more than the value of land or cotton. The cotton industry in the South was booming because of this slave labour. Cotton exports alone constituted 50-60% of the value of the nation’s total exports.
The Southerners can be blamed for the outbreak of the American Civil War mainly because of their strong hold on the institution of slavery. Slavery was the sole institution that was not shared by the North and South and it is believed that if the South had not held on to this ‘peculiar institution’ then there would not have been any war. The political leaders of the South, such as Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina and William Lowndes Yauncey of Alabama, the “Fire-Eaters”, and Robert Toombs of Georgia, recognised that if the South lost her slaves (i.e. had to pay slaves wages similar to those paid to white labourers), her entire socio-economic system would probably collapse. However, this slavery fastened a backward, inefficient agrarian economy on the South and thus they did not experience the urban and industrial growth that took place in the North. Slavery was a means of maintaining racial control and white supremacy, which was more important to the Southerners as 95% of the nation’s black population was in the South. Hence any political action that took place that threatened the slavery system of the South received the undivided attention of the South’s political leaders, many of whom were themselves slave owners. Many Northerners of the time would support the view that it was the Southern ‘hot-headedness’ that led to the outbreak of war. An example of this was shown on the Senate floor itself. In reaction to Senator Charles Sumner’s (an abolitionist from Massachusetts) speech on “the crime against Kansas”, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned him unconscious on the Senate floor a few days after. “Fire-eaters” like Rhett and Yauncey were willing to make war to guarantee the propagation of their “right” to own slaves and argued hotly that the South would never find happiness except by leaving the Union and setting up an independent nation.
Modern historians, such as Alan Farmer, support the view that the Southerners were to blame for the outbreak of the Civil War. In his opinion, “Southerners were mainly to blame for the crisis”, this is attributed to several factors. Farmer feels that it was the issue of slavery expansion that really split the Union and it was the South who acted irrationally by seceding from the Union over this matter and led ultimately to a civil war between the Northerners states the Southern states. Farmer believes that it was these irrational acts made by the South began the war by firing the first shots at Fort Sumter and thus aggravating the quarrel between the North and the South. Alan Farmer’s view is that the South over-exaggerated the extent of the threats the North made on the ‘peculiar institution’. Instead, Farmer claims, that Lincoln could not do much to threaten slavery immediately and that he was intending to be fairly accommodating to the South’s needs.
James Ford Rhodes, a prominent critic of the Civil War in 1913 also supports the view that the Southern hold on slavery was to blame for the outbreak of the Civil War. He remarked, “of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery.”. It was this interest in expanding slavery into the newer states that Rhodes felt drove the South to place the Union under tension.
On the other hand, it has been argued in many ways that the Northerners could equally be held responsible for the American Civil War. The Southerners were on the defensive, as had been shown long before the abolitionists appeared on the scene in 1819-20, during the Missouri Crisis, when the North and South argued whether slavery should be permitted in the land acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. It is widely believed that the Southern states genuinely did feel threatened by Northern aggression, that a wild North would destroy the Old South. The South felt dominated in the Union by the Northern states, especially since the arrival of a new political party, the Republican Party. The old Whig party split between the ‘Conscience Whigs’ (who leaned towards the abolitionists) and the ‘Cotton Whigs’ (who leaned towards the South). This was electorally disastrous for the Union as it gave the Democrats an unmanageable majority. The Democratic Party was also showing signs of breaking into sectional wings. In the North there had risen the new Republican Party, an amalgamation of former Whigs, free-soilers, business leaders who wanted a central government that would protect industry and some Northern Democrats, whose compromise leader was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was against the spread of slavery into the new territories but was not an abolitionist, coming from a humble upbringing in Kentucky. The Republican Party was the first political party to come open with a definite antislavery platform, which the Southerners found very threatening. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, attempted to demonstrate to the South, in his own terms, that slavery was safe under a Republican administration and that therefore secession was unnecessary. Lincoln tried to minimise the gap between North and South as best he could saying it was no more than a dispute as to whether or not slavery was extended; he even pledged the Republicans to leave slavery alone. However, Lincoln could not quite hide his feeling that secession was not only wrong but also frivolous.
The Southerners were severely threatened by the extreme actions of some Northern abolitionists. In New England the fanatic William Lloyd Garrison opened a crusade, denouncing slavery as a sin and slave owners as sinners. More effective work to organise antislavery sentiment was probably done by such Westerners as James G. Birney and Theodore Weld, but Garrison made the most noise and, making it, helped to arouse most intense resentment in the South. By 1860 slave property was worth at least $3 billion, and the abolitionists who insisted that property be outlawed were not especially helpful in showing how this could be done without collapsing the whole Southern economy. Partly from economic pressure and partly in response to the harsh outcries of men like Garrison, the South bound itself to slavery. The North also sent down certain free-lance fanatics, among them a certain named John Brown. In retaliation to an attack on the free-soil town of Lawrence, John Brown and his followers murdered five Southern settlers near Pottawatomie Creek. A couple of years later, Brown undertook to seize the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and with the weapons thus obtained to start a slave uprising in the South. He failed and was quickly tried and hung for treason. To the people of the South, it seemed that Brown confirmed their worse fears.
The North can also be blamed for the outbreak of the Civil War as the North failed to take the threat of secession from the South seriously. The Southerners had been talking secession for many years, and most people in the North had come to look on such talk as an electioneering ploy. These events were really unexpected for the North. The Union of the American States was a profound commitment that it seemed improbable that American citizens could really mean to destroy it. Even after the event they could not quite take it in, and hoped that the unionist majority in the South would re-establish itself as it had in the past. If the North had regarded these threats as more serious and thus acted rather than ignored them then the Civil War could have perhaps been averted.
The North reacted thus badly to the secession. They tried to restore normality to the Union. Helplessly Buchanan allowed the secessionists to eliminate all Union presence from the Confederacy. If it were not for his Attorney General, Edwin Stanton, Buchanan would have allowed Fort Sumter to fall unresisting. However, Stanton insisted that Fort Sumter must be retained and if necessary be re-supplied and reinforced. It can be said that the North’s holdings of Fort Sumter triggered the war, but the view that war would have been inevitable is more widely accepted.
Many Northerners were angered by laws made by the Union, for example, the New Fugitive Slave Law that was re-amended in the Compromise of 1850. They saw it as an unbearable outrage to the rights of the Northern states and consciences of Northern men and women. Another controversial law for the Northerners was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The 1850 Compromise would theoretically permit slavery in the whole area. The antislavery men denounced the bill because it implicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise; the South however denounced it because it did not do so explicitly. The Republican Party held the view that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was part of a plot to enable the slave-holders to control the government, to introduce Southern aristocracy to the democratic North, to burden the economy of the territories with the peculiar institution and that at all costs the plot must be resisted. This frenzy really began to alarm the South.
There was also a sense of nationalism for the North, even though this was not as strong as in the South. Most Northerners were not prepared to simply let the Southern states go. The alternative was that they felt that they had to fight. Most Northerners did not go to war to end slavery, but instead believed that the war was in essence about saving the Union. They are thus equally to blame for the outbreak of the war.
It is agreed by many historians that the Southerners felt threatened into seceding from the Union by the North. In many cases the Southerners have been proved to misjudge these threats but nevertheless the Southerners were put under pressure by the industrialising North and especially since the arrival of the antislavery Republican Party. So it cannot therefore be denied that the Northern states had some role in the outbreak of the Civil War. In a way they triggered the events by pushing the South into secession and then reacting badly to it. Many Southerners support the view that the conflict was a war between Northern aggression and Southern rights. Many ‘revisionist’ historians, like Avery Craven and James Randall, tend to criticise the anti-slavery Northern radicals who preached about the evils of slavery and who were keen to get rid of Slave Power. They agree that it was these men who motivated the South into the defensive reaction that finally caused the Southern states to secede. There is also evidence to say that Northern ladies like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the notable controversial antislavery novel ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, undoubtedly increased tensions between the two halves of the Union. It cannot be denied that the antics of John Brown heightened the hatred the Southerners had been developing for the Northern attitude towards slavery. It was an outrageous hope, highlighting Brown’s eccentricity and the abolitionists’ ignorance of the South. The impression made on the South was too deep. The Southerners perceived the exposed and clear abolitionist appeal to the slaves to rebel as their nightmare. John Brown’s Raid, therefore, marks to the South the beginning of the war between the Northerners and the Southerners.
Secession did not inevitably mean war. If the new Lincoln government and the Northern people had been willing to accept secession, the two halves of the former United States might have coexisted in an uneasy peace. But most Northerners, like abolitionists such as John Brown and Henry Ward Beecher, were not willing to tolerate the dismemberment of the United States and were prepared to make war in order to put an immediate end to the degrading institution of slavery. These leaders, through either words or actions, were able to convince the majority that it was necessary to go to war, a and in order to convince them they justified the war with arguments that only indirectly referred to the subject of slavery. Conflicts of interest were present between the farming South and the industrialising North, but issues like tariffs, banks and land grants divided parties and interest groups more than they did North and South. Southern politicians convinced their majority that the North was threatening their way of life and their culture. Northern politicians convinced their majority that the South would seriously damage democratic government if they were allowed to secede. But it was not only about slavery. It was also about the constitutional argument of antebellum Southern culture. Although the majority of Southerners had a little interest in slaves, slavery was the primary interest of Southern politicians and consequently the underlying causes of the South’s desire to seek independence and slave rights.
In conclusion, both sides can be held responsible for the outbreak of the Civil War. Both sections misunderstood the motives and threats of the other, which held to heightened emotions where there need not be. Underlying everything was slavery, however, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War, but it was unquestionably the one cause without which the war would not have taken place.
Bibliography
H. Brogan; The Penguin History of the USA; Penguin Books; 2001 London
B. Catton; The Civil War; Houghton Mifflin; 1987 New York
A. Farmer; Access to History: The Causes of the American Civil War; London
B. Wyatt-Brown; Southern Honour Ethics and Behaviour in the Old South; Oxford University Press, New York; 1982
Civil War:Causes and Results
The Causes of the Civil War; Alan Farmer
Cited in The Causes of the Civil War; Alan Farmer
