The Return of the Beards

After assessing the costs of the Civil War, Charles and Mary Beard quoted Virgil, "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas," or "happy is s/he who can understand the causes of things." Happy indeed! For generations Northerners blamed slavery for the conflict, while Southerners insisted they fought for states' rights. Neither explanation satisfied the Beards. For them, "the core of the vortex lay elsewhere," in statistics and laws "which show that the so-called civil war was in reality a Second American Revolution and in a strict sense, the First." The war precipitated the decline of Southern aristocracy and the rise of Northern capitalists and western farmers. By seceding to escape this fate, planters hastened their inevitable ruin, making it violent and "more complete" than the fall of French nobility during their Revolution. The price for this mistake was immeasurable, but for the Beards one fact was certain: "the monetary cost of the conflict far exceeded the value of the slaves."¹

The Beards' revisionism received acclaim during the 1920s and '30s and derision thereafter. Their two-volume The Rise of American Civilization struck a chord with readers disillusioned after World War I and cynical during the Depression. In those years warfare resolved nothing and economic forces reigned supreme. Then history turned against the Beards. After World War II military conflict seemed necessary and productive. Cold War consensus historians thought ideals were more than a veneer for base, economic motives. During the civil rights movement, scholars reasserted slavery as the cause of the war and censured earlier works tainted by racism. Because the Beards maintained that African Americans "made no striking development in intelligence" while in bondage and preferred slavery to freedom, historians banished The Rise of American Civilization.² Recent scholarly emphasis on agency and contingency further marginalized the Beards for writing about impersonal forces and inevitability. It seemed the Beards were gone for good. Then history turned their way again. Americans are disillusioned by war, an economic crisis rivals the Depression, and the Beards have returned, sort of.

In Clash of Extremes, Marc Egnal argues that the Beards were more correct than their critics. According to Egnal, economic factors caused the Civil War, and scholars who focus on abolitionism and slavery promote an idealistic myth. The critical and popular success of James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom suggests that Americans want to believe their ancestors killed each other over different definitions of freedom.³ If Unionists defended the republican experiment, while Confederates fought for independence, and African Americans sought emancipation, descendants from every side share a portion of pride. This emphasis on slavery, however, fails to resolve three historical problems for Egnal. First, the slavery thesis does not explain the timing of the conflict because Americans disagreed about the institution for generations before secession. Second, the focus on slavery neglects substantial populations in both sections that opposed the radical extremes of secession and abolition. Third, by stressing antislavery, historians cannot reconcile the idealistic image of Republicans before the war with the corrupt, economic portrait of these same politicians during the Gilded Age. Egnal insists that economic history can resolve these inconsistencies. Like the Beards, he believes America's economy caused the war when it evolved into two sectional extremes during the antebellum period. Unlike the Beards, Egnal argues that factors beyond the economy, including ideologies about slavery, religion, local politics, and individual actions, also triggered the conflict. This admission permits a more thorough study of agency and causation. In the Rise of American Civilization, people resemble homo oeconomicus. Egnal assures the reader that "few people chose sides in the sectional conflict simply to put dollars in their purses" (p. 16). With this approach in mind, Egnal provides an economic interpretation that addresses the three shortcomings he identifies in the slavery thesis, namely "the sequence of events leading up to the war, the divisions within the North and South, and the goals and evolution of the...