Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (review)

According to Huston, the Civil War was a struggle over the right to property in slaves. Accounting for 18 percent of the nation's wealth in the 1850s, more than railroads and manufacturing combined, slavery provided southern whites with greater per capita wealth than their counterparts in the North. To slaveholders, the Union was "a simple cost-benefit calculation" (57). Resisting any and every infringement on their rights of ownership, they reinterpreted the Constitution and states' rights to meet each exigency of the moment. When applied to the western territories, this aggressive defense threatened northerners, who were committed to a free-labor ideology dependent on cheap land and high wages. With the Wilmot Proviso, prohibiting slavery in lands acquired as a result of the Mexican War, the realignment of the political parties began. The vote on Wilmot, which passed in the House and was narrowly defeated in the Senate, was almost totally along sectional lines. An anxious and aroused Deep South threw out its Whigs and become a Democratic monolith. In the North, the Kansas-Nebraska bill and the doctrine of popular sovereignty destabilized parties already weakened by the rise of the Know-Nothings, opening the door for an anti-slavery Republican Party. In 1854, only seven of forty-four northern congressmen who voted for Kansas-Nebraska were returned to office. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, carrying every northern state, southerners went to war.

Virtually all antebellum historians, including those associated with the ethnocultural interpretation of the 1840s and 1850s, recognize that slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War. They will find few surprises in Calculating the Value of the Union, except for the special power that Huston assigns to one aspect of "the peculiar institution"—the right to property in slaves. Acknowledging in his preface (an exercise in methodological self-incrimination) that he began his research convinced that "the source of the conflict had to be economic" (xiii), Huston discounted as causally insignificant the moral, social, or cultural implications of slavery. He reached "the point of diminishing returns" early, but extra investigation "removed any lingering doubt" about the validity of his basic premises (xiv): "Economics drove the choice between slavery and nonslavery, and morality was hardly going to prevent an American from taking full advantage of the situation regardless of who got run over" (147-148). Property rights constitute an idée fixe for Huston, who adds an appendix speculating that all the political realignments in the history of the United States originated with the pressure to reformulate property rights!

The debate about slavery certainly did involve dramatically different definitions of "property rights," especially in the Dred Scott decision and the Lecompton Constitution. But if this theme was as dominant as Huston suggests, why must he use thought experiments, instead of contemporary evidence, to suggest that the transportation and market revolutions heightened fears that slaves might stay in the South but compete with northern workers making the same products; or that, as the price of cotton declined, slaves might move to the North? More important, few Americans in the North or South isolated property rights in slavery from other characteristics of "the peculiar institution." James Hammond's "Mud-Sill" speech and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), for example, assessed slavery in moral, social, cultural, and economic terms. The "heavy reliance" in the Lincoln-Douglas debates on popular sovereignty and the morality of slavery may have been anything but an "anomaly" (225). Moreover, references to property rights in slavery throughout the personal correspondence that Huston examined were rare not because "letters took so much time to write," or because Americans used "code words (like slave power) to sum up large and intricate arguments" (xvi), but because in calculating the value of the Union they were not driven only and always by the bottom...