Adam I.P Smith 'The American Civil War': section one notes - nationalism, democracy, and republicanism

Chapter One: Slavery and the American Republic

"In the final analysis, the story of how Lincoln and Davis ended up as opposing leaders in one of the most savage wars in modern history is not the story of two men from different cultures coming into irrepressible conflict but that of how the issue of slavery came to overshadow what they shared" (fundamentalist viewpoint). 

Nationalism, Democracy, and Republicanism 

Hindsight is the stock in trade of the historian, but it is a tool which must be used with great caution. The knowledge that, in 1861, north and south went to war has tended to colour the way in which historians have viewed the first half of the 19th century. Even the term scholars give to this period, "the antebellum era", defines it in terms of what came next. This is especially true of discussions of state-building and nationalism in the early republic. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the collapse of the Union in the 1860's, historians have dwelt on the decentralised and limited government, the strength of regional and local identities, and the centrifugal forces (centrifugal definition: moving/tending to move away from a centre) built into American institutions. 

It is certainly true that secession was often mooted and long predicted. Never before had a republican form of government been tried on so extensive a scale - George Washington called the new USA the "grand experiment". If Americans of the generation of the founding fathers had looked into a crystal ball and seen fratricidal warfare, they would have been dismayed but not entirely surprised. It was a risk inherent in a polity founded on the principle of de-centralisation. After all, if there was one political impulse that united the colonists in the struggle against the British government, it was a dread of centralised power. For Revolutionary-era Americans, the best government was assumed to be the most minimal that good order and freedom required. Liberty and power, argued the founding fathers of the American Republic, were opposing forces that it was the purpose of constitutions to balance. 

The instability of American society in the first half of the 19th century is it's defining feature. In the years between the birth of Lincoln and Davis in 1809 and the firing of the first shots of the civil war in 1861, the population of the USA grew from under 6 million to over 40 million (with 4 million of these people being foreign-born migrants by 1861). In the same period, the USA was transformed from a cluster of Atlantic ex-colonies still heavily dependent on trade with the former colonial power into a largely self-sufficent exporter of agricultural and industrial products which already, by the 1850's, was in some respects exceeding British productivity rates. The "American System" of manufactures, whereby component parts of articles like clocks, guns, boots and clothing were produced at standard sizes so that they were interchangeable, enabled mass production of goods. By 1860, the USA boasted vastly more railroad mileage than any other country in the world (the north had 2x as much railroad as the south). 

This did not mean that the USA had fully industrialised. By the time of the Civil War, less than 25% of the working population was involved in industrial activity of any kind. The vast majority still worked the land, and almost all American politicians assumed that industrial and commercial activity would only ever be supplementary to agricultural production.

Nevertheless, the basis for future industrial expansion was firmly in place in the Northeast by the time of the Civil War.  By 1860, NYC had become a teeming, bawdy, multi-ethnic city of over a million people. Immigration from Europe accounted for some of this growth. In the immediate antebellum decades, the most visible immigrants were Irish Catholics (the American party, commonly known as the 'know-nothing' party was formed in 1849 on the basis of opposition to immigrants and followers of the Catholic church). Wherever there was industrial activity, there was immigrants - not only in the urban metropolises of New York, Philadelphia and Boston but also in the mining areas of Pennsylvania and wherever railroads were being built. The presence of an alien Catholic population seemed threatening in a Protestant nation that thought of itself as having a divinely ordained place in human history. Moreover, this new urban proletariat seemed a harbinger of Old World class conflict. But though poor Irish immigrants worried wealthy established elites, they also provided the labour that was essential for industrial development. 18th century republicans had assumed that responsible citizens had to be self-reliant farmers or artisans, the owners of productive property. As immigration stepped up a pace in the 1850's, the proportion of Americans who were wage-earners increased dramatically; a threat, or so seemed, to the republican spirit of the nation (growth of northern capitalism/free-market wage earners).

The sense of boundless and uncontrolled growth was most visible in the territorial expansion of the nation and the gradual westward migration of the population. In 1803, the Louisiana purchase resulted in the US gaining a vast expanse of land west of the original US borders, which at a stroke doubled the size of the size of the American republic. 
In the 1820;s, hopeful southern farmers struck by 'Alabama fever' moved west to plant cotton, a crop that seemingly guaranteed ever-greater profits. At the same time, new canals, improved roads, and eventually railroads began to connect farmers in New England and the midwest to growing urban markets in the eastern cities. In recent years, historians have followed Charles Sellers in grouping the multiple technological, economic and social changes of the early 19th century under the heading "the Market Revolution". 

The spread of capitalist relations altered the way in which localities and regions interacted with one another, as independent regional economies were integrated into a truly national market. The South became largely devoted to, and defined by, its output of staple crops (especially cotton), the Northeast by its greater industrial growth, and the West by its production of food. 

As print became cheaper and more widely disseminated, early-19th-century Americans became ever more closely connected by common reading habits. A shared sense of themselves as a distinctive nation and a characteristic Victorian faith in progress and destiny was inculcated by such literary hits as Mason Lock Weems's 'life of Washington', a patriotic morality tale for children in which readers learned that Washington "could not tell a lie" and were encouraged to emulate his selfless virtues in order to preserve the blessings of free government. In comparison to Europe, Americans of the early 19th century may have had an absurdly brief national history, but they more than made the most of what they had. The founding fathers, and especially Washington, were revered as demigods, and tales told of their christian and republican virtue. 

The fact that the federal government was small by European standards was a source of pride for Americans: it certainly did not in itself diminish the loyalty that Americans felt towards it. In fact, the locally constituted nature of 19th-century  government gave American nationality an anchor in the real lives of its citizens. To a truly remarkable degree, Americans felt ownership of their government because their government meant their community (section B essays: points to the argument that secession did not make war inevitable due to the fact that there was no sense of 'southern nationalism' prior to 1861, only local/state nationalism), leaders they knew, had voted for, could speak or write to, heckle and jostle if they wished. The post office was the federal institution that most antebellum citizens were most likely to encounter in their daily lives. Antebellum citizens might also encounter the federal government if they wanted to purchase land in the west at bargain prices. In the 1850's, the amount of land sold in the west by the federal government was equivalent to the acreage of the entire state of New York. 

Religion was an important component of American national identity. There was a growing strength of evangelical protestant christianity. The values of hard work, self-discipline, and personal salvation were fused into an American creed that was simultaneously religious and nationalistic. 

Race was also common foundation of American nationhood that transcended class, gender, and religion. Antebellum Americans boasted of their free institutions, their common inheritance from the revolution and of the blessings of liberty, but this 'civic' component to their national identity was limited by racial (and also gendered) assumptions about who was eligible to enjoy the benefits of American freedom. 
Black people accounted for 15% of the population by the time of the civil war, but only a minority of them - around 450,000 - were free, concentrated in the upper south with a smattering in northern cities. Almost without thinking about it, the vast majority of white Americans assumed that theirs was, and would remain, a white man's republic. They believed that one of the things that set the USA apart from the other republics of the new world was the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over the "mongrel" peoples of Mexico and South America. The 1790 naturalisation law excluded only two groups of people from the possibility of US citizenship - aristocrats who refused to renounce their title, and nonwhite people. Both groups were assumed not to have the capacity for self-government necessary for republican citizenship. Catholic Irish and other non-Anglo immigrants were legally entitled to citizenship, but for much of the 19th century they existed in a shifting middle ground between 'whiteness' and something else. 

National identity - like other forms of identity, including race - is malleable and historically contingent. Antebellum American nationalism usually reinforced, rather than undermined local, state, and regional identities. "The south" certainly conceived of itself as a separate entity long before the civil war, and slavery was evidently crucial to that process of self-definition. In truth, there were many souths, not one. The Appalachian region which straddled western North Carolina, northeastern Alabama, east Tennessee and western Virginia was a distinctive geographical region, as was the swampy coastal region of the Florida panhandle, or the Mississippi River Valley, or the plains of Texas. The upcountry and mountainous parts of the south had a very distinctive culture and social structure - a land with comparatively few slaves, less productive land, and fiercely independent and self-sufficient farmers who regarded with suspicion and even hostility the more hierarchal and lowland and piedmont regions of their states where the slaveholding class built their elegant mansions. Even so, the legal status of slavery (fundamentalist viewpoint), and the shared suspicion of the Yankee North (cultural argument), gave this region a sense of commonality, and from that developed ever more elaborate ideas about a distinctive southern "civilisation". 

In retrospect, it is easy to identify the ways in which the antebellum political system made war possible. De-centralised government interwove free institutions into the fabric of local communities, making an abstract entity like the nation not only tangible, but also subject to multiple local and regional interpretations. In constitutional terms, the power of state governments created an inbuilt source of potential opposition to the federal government (states rights argument!). 

But in the final analysis, Americans did not go to war between 1861 and 1865 because they lacked national institutions or a fervent sense of nationhood. Instead, it was the corrosive impact of the slavery issue which led to secession and civil war (fundamentalist argument). 
It was slavery, for example, that split apart the churches in the late 1840's, creating a schism in national bodies that anticipated the national split to come (the split in the democratic party, for example in the 1861 election, or the demise of the whigs, could also be used as an example for this). In the end it was northern and southern identities - rather than ethnic conflict, or competition between the frontier west and the urbanising east, or the tensions between non-slaveholding whites and the rich planters in the south - that turned out to be the subnational line of division that mattered. And although many factors were involved in the articulation of sectional identities in the decades preceding war, all were subsidiary to the one compelling problem of slavery.

Useful articles

Two useful articles for revision...

1) Did slavery make economic sense?http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economic-history-2

2) The nature of antebellum slavery
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html

Adam I.P Smith: The American Civil War/Preface notes

Firstly, I am so sorry that I haven't posted anything in so long; I have just been ridiculously busy with exams, mocks, deadlines etc and I kind of forgot to post for ages. However, I want to get back into posting on this blog for my revision as I do find it very useful for revision and hope it helps at least a couple of people reading it, so for the next 3 weeks until the exam expect a lot more posts on here. 

Secondly, onto what this post entails. I have found Adam I.P Smith's book 'The American Civil War' to be highly useful for my history revision. I know the exam is pretty soon now (argh) but I would still recommend this book, as chapters 1 and 2, and a few chapters on reconstruction at the end, provide an insightful, detailed, and evaluative study of events in the antebellum period and reconstruction. The middle part of the book concerns the war itself from 1861-65, which my sixth form does NOT study for the A2 course, but I would still suggest reading the relevant sections of this book. I have decided to type up and make notes on the preface and chapters 1 and 2 of this book: I will type the important bits of these chapters up, putting the especially import parts in bold, like so, and my own evaluations/notes/essay ideas will be in brackets. Here is the preface section (below). Hope it helps! 


19th Century America was a society convulsed with rapid change. The boundaries of the nation were continually expanding, the population - both free and slave - was growing at an exponential rate, and its economy was undergoing a series of interconnected revolutions that created, in often unpredictable ways, winners and losers. 

All of this happened in the context of a de-centralised political system, in which the world first mass political parties (Whig, Democrat, Republican) contested for power in robust, colourful elections and in which print culture (printed media; newspapers, magazines etc) connected Americans who had never met each other with shared ideas (abolitionists, pro-slave advocates, free-soil advocates, slave power conspiracists, republicans, democrats, whigs, anti-irish catholic advocates, etc etc). 19th Century America was a newspaper-reading society, and cheap and readily available print had done more than any other technological development to shape a national culture before the war. 

At the centre of the unfolding crisis that engulfed the American republic was slavery. 
White southerners struggled hard to maintain the unimpeded right to slaveholding within the Union, giving up on that crusade only when confronted with what seemed to them to be incontrovertible evidence of northern opposition (events of the 1850's, rise of republicans, and election of Lincoln). Thereafter they attempted to create a slave-holding republic in the south, enduring remarkable sacrifices in pursuit of that goal. 

In the final analysis, slavery caused the civil war. (You could use Adam I.P smith as a historian who advocates the fundamentalist argument in a part B question). But the relationship between slavery and the outbreak of war was not straightforward. The civil war did not come about because slavery was an intolerable violation of the nation's dedication to freedom. The vast majority of northerners did not go to war in 1861 to abolish slavery and the vast majority of confederate soldiers never owned a slave (75% of southerners did not own slaves). To say that slavery was fundamental to the causes and course of the war is, therefore, not to say that a moral contest over slavery led to the conflict, although in one sense the war certainly represented a moral crisis. The precise political meaning of slavery and its salience to the public consciousness was continually reframed by unpredictible events (Louisiana purchase, Mexican War, Kansas-Nebraska Act, bleeding Kansas, 1820 compromise, 1850 compromise, FSA, Ostend Manifesto, Wilmot Proviso, Calhoun doctrine, uncle tom's cabin, etc etc etc...), just as it interacted with fundamental structures and processes. 

The irony is that slavery would probably have survived long after 1865 had slaveholders not brought about a war. Secession turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation (points to secession as the short-term cause of war: you could include this in a part B essay that asks about the short-term causes of war - Lincoln's election, secession etc etc). But it was an understandable one: a gamble that could have paid off. 

If the US civil war has to be understood in relation to to particular characteristics of of this Anglo Slaveholding republic, the great crisis was also, of course, configured by the moment in world history in which it took place. North America was far from unique in the 19th century in experiencing violence and bloodshed over basic questions of national identity and state formation (Part B: issue of states rights vs federal government powers). The processes of economic development, as well as ideas of nationhood, state-building, progress, and 'modernity' transcended the borders of the USA. In these middle decades of the 19th century it became clear that nation-states, rather than empires or confederations, would dominate and define the political organisation of the world. The liberal nationalism which had animated the European revolutions of 1848 found its echo in Lincoln's faith that what was at stake in the preservation of the Union was no less than the future of democracy and liberty around the world. Northern politicians made a natural connection between their war to defeat the southern rebellion and a worldwide battle between liberal constitutionalism and autocracy in its many forms. Lincoln was a spokesman for many of his fellow country-people when he insisted that the war affected not just the future of the Union, but the "whole family of man".