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".