The Origins of the American Civil War

Brian Holden Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317871934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

The American Civil War (1861-65) was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century and its impact continues to be felt today. It, and its origins have been studied more intensively than any other period in American history, yet it remains profoundly controversial. Brian Holden Reid's formidable volume is a major contribution to this ongoing historical debate. Based on a wealth of primary research, it examines every aspect of the origins of the conflict and addresses key questions such as was it an avoidable tragedy, or a necessary catharsis for a divided nation? How far was slavery the central issue? Why should the conflict have errupted into violence and why did it not escalate into world war?

CHAPTER ONE

An American Experiment in Democracy

He that will apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

FRANCIS BACON¹

The rise of the United States to occupy a continental hegemony in North America is the greatest development of the nineteenth century. The immense development of resources, the construction of towns and cities in such a short period of time, and the setting in place of durable and workable political and judicial institutions were staggering achievements. The forging of a democracy over great distances, over widely varying terrain, and amid environmental contrast, was novel and unprecedented. And the longer the system was able to mature, the firmer and stronger it became. ‘The gentle but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces…. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence’, wrote the historian of the Roman Empire, and his words are equally apposite of the United States in the 1820s.²

This new nation-state had managed to exert a continental hegemony over the virgin territory of North America and had frustrated the efforts of European states to restrict its expansion to that of a coastal client hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains.³ Yet though the security of the United States was reasonably secure by 1796, with penetration into territories which became Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, and a northern frontier resting on the Great Lakes, that security encountered a formidable challenge, and American prestige was bruised by the war of 1812 with Great Britain (which the belated victory at New Orleans in 1815 only partly rectified). Yet her great distance from the focal point of the European balance of power virtually guaranteed American security. American preoccupations were invariably of marginal interest to the European great powers; in 1812–14 Great Britain gave a higher priority to her struggle with Napoleon. And the great space of the North American continent frustrated any predatory European invader rash enough to attack the United States. It was immensely difficult for any state, however powerful, to achieve a rapid and decisive victory in any war fought on American soil. ‘All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined’, declared the young Abraham Lincoln in his first substantial public address in January 1838, ‘with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years’.⁴ Geographic and strategic isolation was not only a preferred American policy stance but also an ineluctable reality: ‘since history and experience prove’, George Washington reminded his listeners during the Farewell Address in 1796, ‘that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government’. He urged that the United States concentrate on internal development so that it would muster its own vast latent potential. The United States enjoyed such an advantageous position that foreign states ‘will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by our justice shall counsel’. This policy was based on a sure-footed strategic calculation of the greater strength of the parts of the continental state vis-à-vis smaller states:

‘While then every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union’, Washington continued:

all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resources, proportionately greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighbouring countries, not tied together by the same government; while their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments and intrigues would stimulate and imbitter.⁵

A sense of the indivisibility and accumulation of power compared with other polities is central to American identity and the evolution of the Republic. So long as the American experiment is nurtured and protected then ultimately the wealth and power of the United States would surpass that of her enemies. Nonetheless, many Americans were afflicted by short-term worries as to whether they could resist external threats. Yet long-term confidence is given explicit recognition in the Constitution of the United States. The drafters in 1787 were prevailed upon to substitute ‘the United States’ for ‘national’. In unity arose security and potential power; in disunity lurked the calamities of vulnerability and European intervention in American affairs. The experiment in North America thus rested not just on the introduction of a novel form of republican government but on an acute appreciation of the cumulative effects of power. They were indivisible. This did not prevent substantial opposition to unifying tendencies in large sections of the republic in 1787–88. But as this was overcome, the realization developed in the early nineteenth century that democracy demanded absolute security from the threat of European intervention to prosper, and such security demanded the absolute banishment of the European balance of power from North America. A policy had to be found which would reduce the danger of intervention – especially from Great Britain, but after 1798 from France as well – from states which, even in the western hemisphere, were infinitely more powerful than the United States.⁶ In unity, therefore, was invested not only the prosperity of the present but also soaring hopes for the future. As the opening declaration of the Constitution opines:

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.⁷

Growing Pains

But given the enormous extent of the United States – even on independence in 1783 – in practice the assumption of cultural and ethnic uniformity made by the Constitution would not work itself out without difficulty. The United States has escaped some of the intractable and enduring problems of the Latin American countries. Since their independence they have been crippled by tensions between the urban coastal centres and the more remote hinterland, the iron grip of reactionary oligarchies based on landed wealth, and the alienation of the bulk of the population because of rigid class (and sometimes racial) barriers, all accentuated by great geographical obstacles and poor communications, which foster provincialism, and the rise of local, private armies mustered by and loyal to the caudillo. The rule of law was not always self-evident in these countries.⁸ In many Latin American countries urban and industrial development has been restricted to narrow coastal plains hemmed in by great mountain ranges. In the United States, penetration of the areas beyond the Appalachian Mountains was not difficult. Here could be found an immense fertile plain over which towns and cities spread, all nourished by a comparatively efficient communications network of waterways and railways. Along these travelled with the settlers a common set of values and ideals and a universally accepted legal system that enforced American mores. Nonetheless, though this developing society enjoyed a measure of homogeneity, clearly the spread of United States civilization was greatly influenced by the geographical contrasts which marked its great expanse. Geography, and an understanding of geography, is central to our understanding of any nation-state, however strong or weak. Social organization determines political activity, and social organization is dependent on the resources available to be exploited by any community; in turn, these are the product of geological deposits and physiographic elements, including the weather, which influence the demographic spread. And in the United States, a grand historical vision of American development based on exploiting and opening up the frontier was linked to the spread of democracy across the heartland to the Pacific. It fired the imagination of politicians and animated their speeches. This nationalistic, ideological, republican vision has been termed correctly a ‘secular religion’.

‘The influence of geographical conditions upon human activities’, wrote Sir Halford Mackinder, ‘has depended, however, not merely on the realities as we now know them to be and to have been, but in even greater degree on what men imagined in regard to them’.⁹ The expansion of American power and ideals, based on an exuberant confidence in their Constitution, a cult worshipping at the shrine of George Washington and other of the founding fathers, and an efficient judicial organization which seemed to set the need for military power at naught – this confidence in a superior political structure and phenomenal economic dynamism – what would later be termed the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the United States – in the short term made unprecedented progress. But it contained within itself severe contradictions and tensions, and these, in large part, sprang from geography. The United States was less of a prisoner of her colonial heritage than the Latin American republics (though her republican heritage was divided, or confused, as to whether centralization or decentralization would prevail), but once she had escaped from the shackles of her colonial master, she declined to make a completely fresh start and abolish all colonial institutions. The spectre which would return to haunt her, like Banquo’s ghost, was involuntary servitude.

One way in which regionalism was expressed was in the kind of labour force that was employed in a specific environment. The nature of the work-force determined not just the crops that were grown, and therefore the local economy, but the relations between the labourers and their masters. In colonial America much labour was unfree, and the relations between white indentured servants and black slaves were close to a degree that would have surprised their nineteenth-century descendants. Much of the prosperity of the American colonies before the 1760s was due to the importation of indentured servants. These were Englishmen or women who, for whatever reason, paid for their passage across the Atlantic by contracting for a period of bondage terminated by a certain date, usually seven years; this act was not always voluntary. Perhaps 50 per cent of all colonists in the eighteenth century consisted of indentured servants, redemptioneers or convicts. Involuntary servitude was therefore an important feature of American life before Negro slavery became a pressing issue. ‘The planters’ fortunes here’, a governor of Maryland happily observed in 1755 ‘consist in the number of their servants (who are purchased at high rates) much as the estates of an English farmer do in the multitudes of cattle’.¹⁰ The tropical conditions prevailing in the southern states, the swamps, diseases and humidity increasing in both number and effect as the settlers advanced southward, favoured the spread of plantation agriculture. This required the clearing of inhospitable areas and required labour in which the involuntary aspect had to be increased, mainly because of the reluctance and general unsuitability of white labourers for this kind of work and the withering of the indentured labour system – although it did not finally die until the nineteenth century.

An alternative source of labour well suited (according to the conventional wisdom of the day) for working under the sweltering southern sun and clouds of mosquitos was slaves transported from Africa. The booming markets for southern plantation crops, rice, tobacco and later cotton, led to a considerable expansion of the Negro population; not just to work on the existing plantations, but because of wasteful methods and the rapid exhaustion of the soil, to open up new, virgin lands for exploitation. This process occurred remarkably quickly. In 1700 the Negro population in America has been estimated at 28,000; that is to say, something in the order of 11 per cent of the entire population. In 1770 this proportion had increased to 21.8 per cent. In the course of almost three-quarters of a century the percentage of the slaves transported from Africa had doubled, and their total number can be estimated at 459,000.¹¹

Resistance among blacks sometimes occurred. These were desperate and forlorn insurrections. In New York City in 1712, for instance, some two dozen slaves deluded themselves into thinking that they would be rendered invulnerable by magic spells, and they set fire to a building and attacked those who sought to extinguish it. They were suppressed with extreme brutality. ‘Some were burnt,’ the Governor assured his masters in London, ‘others were hanged, one broken on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town, so that there has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could possibly be thought of. In the same city in 1741 there occurred a number of unaccountable fires which excited anxiety that they presaged a massive slave revolt. In 1793 Albany experienced another bout of arson, which resulted in the execution of three slaves. Such action was usually covert – it was aimed against oppressive owners or overseers – and organized by small bands ranging from three or four slaves to groups of up to a dozen. Whites feared ‘Horrid Murder’ committed by poisoning. In Virginia in the years 1783–1814 owners of 434 executed slaves received compensation after their execution by the state authorities for such offences – a rate of about 14 per annum. Consequently, the spread of slavery can be associated with the spread of coercive, para-military force to enforce the peace (although perhaps it should be added that American democratic display has a military character, with a penchant for honorific military titles; fire brigades, police forces, and even sports teams all delighted in para-military overtones). These measures were the more severe where slaves wer...