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Why Did the South (Excluding the Border States) Secede?
Contributing teacher:
Bruce Baskind
Time period: 1860–61
Point
Eric Foner argues that Abraham Lincoln's (1809–65) election in 1860 proved devastating to any hopes that the South might stay within the Union. It showed that the Republican Party, committed to halting the expansion of slavery, could dominate national politics and capture the White House, despite solid opposition from the South. Indeed, the free-labor ideology of the Republicans maintained that if the slave system were allowed to expand, it would put free white workers and farmers in peril. Southern secessionists were convinced that the only way for the South to remain within the Union would be to expand, particularly into new states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and land acquired as a result of the Mexican-American War (1846–48). Lincoln's promise not to interfere with slavery where it presently existed was seen as an essentially antislavery position that threatened the future of the institution. Given the grim reality that remaining within the Union might mean the end of slavery, the South quit, attempting to "secure" slavery within its own new, proslavery nation. Foner, therefore, considers slavery and the issue of its expansion as the central cause of the Civil War (1861–65).
Counterpoint
The cause of the Civil War is hotly debated and contested by historians. Some disagree with Foner's thesis and assign to slavery a lesser role in causing the Civil War. Two interpretations that predate Foner are worth mentioning: the economic one, put forth by Charles and Mary Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927); and the political one, proposed by Avery Craven in The Repressible Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939) and James G. Randall in Lincoln: The Liberal Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), that the war was caused by a "blundering generation" of 1850s leaders, who missed the opportunity to compromise.
The Beards argue that the development of an industrial, capitalist North came into conflict with an agrarian South. These inherently antagonistic economic systems battled each other over countless issues throughout the nineteenth century, such as states' rights and the tariff problem. Finally, with Lincoln's election in 1860, the South came to see that their only hope to stave off domination by Northern capitalism was to secede. To the Beards, the Northern victory in the war represents the triumph of capitalism and constitutes a "second American Revolution." The main disagreement between the Beards and Foner is not in the inevitability of different economic systems coming into conflict, but in the role of slavery in that conflict. Charles Beard is supposed to have said that slavery hardly merited a footnote in Civil War history.
Often referred to as the "revisionists," Randall and Craven argue that slavery had little chance of surviving much beyond the 1850s. As a result, the North and the South really did not have differences that were irreconcilable. However, with the passing in 1852 of both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, skillful politicians who had engineered compromises between the North and the South in 1833 and again in 1850, the nation was left with leaders incapable of averting disaster. With their focus on the war as a political failure, the revisionists do not assign to slavery much of a role in causing the Civil War.
Foner also has contemporaries who take issue with his thesis, the most notable among these being Michael Holt, in The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978); William Gienapp, in The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).
Holt sees no central role for slavery as a cause of the war, as his emphasis is on the collapse of the second party system, which made political compromise between the North and the South problematic. This is not the "blundering generation" argument, as the culprits here are not simply incompetent politicians but rather an entire political structure rendered incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis.
Gienapp challenges Foner's notion of a Republican Party united under a free-labor ideology and opposed to the expansion of slavery. Gienapp argues that Republicans were more concerned with issues revolving around immigration, even temperance, and that the rise of the Republican Party had more to do with an attempt to capture the powerful nativist vote, primarily from the Know-Nothing Party, than with the issue of slavery.
Hummel has great respect for Foner, particularly for Foner's description of the role that slaves played in harming the institution of slavery during the war. Hummel agrees with Foner on the two basic questions of Civil War causation: What caused the South to secede, and why did the North fight to bring it back? Hummel basically agrees with Foner's answer to the first question but takes issue with Foner's stance on the second; Hummel's thesis is that Lincoln should have allowed the states of the Deep South to secede. Unlike Foner, Hummel believes that slavery was moribund and that emancipation would have occurred in due course, even in a seceded South. Hummel categorizes Foner as a "nationalist," placing him among those historians who unquestioningly accept Lincoln's decision to reunify the nation.
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