The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions (1974 Reprint)

In 1960, as Americans prepared to observe the centennial of the Civil War, one of the foremost historians of that conflict published a brief article entitled, “American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War.”¹ Most readers probably expected another survey of the changing course of civil war interpretation. Instead the author announced that as a subject of serious historical analysis, Civil War causation was “dead.” Looking back over the decade and a half since David Donald wrote, it would appear that he somewhat exaggerated the death of this field of inquiry. In the 1950’s, historians were concerned with investigating periods of consensus in America’s past. But in the 1960’s, as the issues of race and war came to the forefront of national life, earlier times of civil strife in American history attracted renewed attention.

The 1960’s, for example, witnessed a renascence of the study of slavery. It is now no longer possible to view the peculiar institution as some kind of accident or aberration, existing outside the mainstream of national development. Rather, slavery was absolutely central to the American experience, intimately bound up with the settlement of the western hemisphere, the American Revolution and industrial expansion. It was what defined the Old South and drew southern society along a path of development which set it increasingly apart from the rest of the nation.²

At the same time, a striking reversal of interpretations of the abolitionists took place.³ In fact, there was a paradoxical double reversal. On the one hand the abolitionists, previously castigated as fanatics and agitators, suddenly emerged as the conscience of a sinning nation—much as the Garrisons and Welds had portrayed themselves a century earlier. At the same time, a number of writers argued that not only were the friends of the slave not immune from racism, but, far from being truly “radical,” they seemed to accept the middle-class values of northern society.⁴

The flood of studies of slavery, abolitionism, and the race issue does not seem, however, to have brought historians much closer to a generally accepted interpretation of the coming of the Civil War than they were fifteen years ago. As the late David Potter pointed out, the irony is that disagreements of interpretation persist in the face of a greatly increased body of historical knowledge.⁵ This is partially because the Civil War raised so many still unresolved issues. Perhaps, however, there is another reason. Historians’ methodologies and value judgments have changed considerably over the past fifteen years, but the questions historians have asked of their data have remained relatively static. Like the debate over slavery before the appearance of Stanley Elkins’ study in 1959, discussion of the causes of the Civil War continues to be locked into an antiquated interpretive framework. Historians of the Civil War era seem to be in greater need of new models of interpretation and new questions than of an additional accumulation of data.

There have, however, been a number of works in the past fifteen years which have attempted to develop entirely new ways of looking at ante-bellum America and the origins of the Civil War. One of the most striking developments of these years has been the emergence of the “new political historians,” who have attempted to recast our understanding of ante-bellum political alignments. They have de-emphasized “national” issues like slavery and the tariff, and substituted ethno-cultural conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between pietistic and ritualistic religious groups, as the major determinants of voting behavior. These works have broadened our understanding of antebellum political culture, and demonstrated the inevitable failure of any “monistic interpretation” of political conflict. And they should force historians to abandon whatever economic determinism still persists in the writing of political history. Perhaps most important, they have demonstrated the virtues of viewing voters not as isolated individuals, but as men and women embedded in a complex network of social and cultural relationships.⁶

The “new political history” involves both a new methodology—the statistical analysis of quantitative...