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Economics and the US Civil War
This paper will examine the importance of the national economy, ideologically and practically, in the origins and four years of perpetuation of the US Civil War. The South’s secession over the likely trumped-up threat of Lincoln’s presidency to the instituion of slavery, the lynchpin of the region’s economic system, was simultaneously a political, economic, moral, and Constitutional. I hold, along with Russell McClintock in Lincoln and His Decision for War (2008), that slavery was resolved through military means by choice; one that claimed upward of 600,000 lives. Furthermore, economics played a role in this decision, as decades of interdependence and resultant political compromise between the northern free and southern slave economics gave way to a new reality of lost resources direct competition. While there were sectional differences enough to prompt Southern claims to independence, both Northern Southern understandings of patriotism and common culture developed, with the South understanding the North as an attack on their culture and economic lifeline while Northern emotions were spurred on in opposition to a collective bloc of millions of traitors. Melinda Lawson’s Patriot Fires (2002) discusses the new form of patriotism and Union identity, propelled by the newspaper industry and other business interests, that helped gather momentum for war amidst considerable uncertainty. This appears an update to the fervor of Manifest Destiny on display a decade prior in the US War with Mexico, a controversial military offensive this paper will look at for any similarities who provided supporting arguments and resources to fund the effort. As Richard Franklin Bensel writes in Yankee Leviathan (1990), the business interests that were benefited by the war did not follow through in supporting Reconstruction efforts pushed by Radical Republicans.
The South also had a particular vision for a slave-based economic system that reached as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s”empire of liberty.” However, the Old South in the final decades before the Civil War was no longer the small yeoman farmer, but a Cotton Kingdom based large-scale farming with a strict racial hierarchy where it was essentially assumed blacks were enslaved unless proven otherwise. Recent work like Slavery’s Capitalism (2016), edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013) argue for slavery’s centrality to increasing economic behemoth that was the nineteenth century US. These works have shown that the South was no backward place in spite of its now apparent backward practices, but part of an intertwined economy with the North; the absence of which would have been a significant loss to the country. The South, in its high export of cotton, paid a heavy share of taxes from federal tariffs. Gene Kizer, Jr., in Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States (2014), references a post-secession North’s economy was in a tailspin with mass unemployment and popular unrest. Immediately after secession, the high Morrill Tariff made matters worse, according to Kizer, increasing international trade into the South at the expense. There has been great historical debate over slavery’s relation to free trade, with economics Thomas J. DiLorenzo and author of the classic revisionist history The Real Lincoln (2002) viewing the South as constitutive of true free trade while the North pushed high tariffs and attempts deprive state independence everyone from the Founders and Andrew Jackson had recognized. Marc Egnal argues that economic factors, in particular, caused the Civil War, and not the righteousness emancipation or even preserving the union, while James L. Huston looks at slavery with regard to the law of property, and how the institution threatened free labor and dominated much of the Constitutional discussion.
Finally, this paper will examine broader US economic histories like Michael Lind’s Land of Promise (2012) and John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth (2004) to understand how the country’s political economy was transformed by reunion. Lincoln’s centralization of power has been posited as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists’ heir, as Bensel posits. Lincoln’s political career in favor of central banks, tariffs and internal improvement evidenced in Henry Clay’s “American System” gives credence to Lincoln’s understanding of the economic role of government. It is relatively well-known that one of, if not the most, important factors in Lincoln’s decision-making was his pure desire to preserve the Union. The expansion of slavery was something he was against, but Lincoln, from his Inaugural Address to his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, Jr., made it clear that keeping the country together was paramount to everything, even if it meant preserving slavery. Examined herein will be perspectives on Lincoln’s adherence to “American System”-type policies. Both River of Dark Dreams and John Majewski’s Modernizing a Slave Economy (2009) reveal that the Confederacy had a particular vision a state that could compete on a global scale, with Majewski highlighting the CSA dream of an active state in the realm of infrastructure and commerce. Could the Union, with all its population and industry, ever have hoped to become the international economic powerhouse it became without rejoining with the South, albeit without the old slave economy? Bringing together a variety of historiographies surrounding secession, Lincoln, the Civil War and the birthing of modern American capitalism will help bring a unique narrative about the commonly overlooked economic angle of America’s most bloody and personal battle.
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