Author: beirne

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“They Ought to Deceive No One”: Lysander Spooner and the Civil War
David A. Beirne
The primary document that best encapsulates my study of the role of economics in the American Civil War is the pamphlet “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,” written by lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist Lysander Spooner and published in 1870, five years after the war. Though Spooner was fervently anti-slavery and hailed from Massachusetts, he brutally criticized the wartime president, the Republican Party for furthering in an unprecedented manner what he considered to be a dangerous consolidation of governmental, military and, apropos this paper, economic power.

 

Spooner hailed from a family of abolitionists, by 1845 already having written The Unconstitutionality of Slavery that argued that not only was slavery contrary to natural law, but never expressly sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution. Spooner wrote that the founding document “not only does not recognize or sanction slavery, as a legal institution, but that, on the contrary, it presumes all men to be free; that it positively denies the right of property in man; and that it, of itself, makes it impossible for slavery to have a legal existence in any of the United States.” Spooner was even involved in efforts to try and free John Brown. (Barnett 980)

 

By 1870, he seemed to believe that the slaves had gained their freedom at the expense of the freedom of the American states and, accordingly, the populace at large. “[P]residents, senators, and representatives . . . are really only the agents of a secret band of robbers and murderers, whom they themselves do not know, and have no means of knowing, individually.” (Spooner 52) He continued, “And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals—if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.” (Spooner 53)

Lysander, though fighting his entire life for the abolition of slaves, posited that his government’s rhetoric and selective actions were not aligned with its wider ambitions and abuses. Slavery, in Spooner’s mind, was merely a pretense by which the aims of power were wrought. “All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” of establishing a “government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.” “In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand . . . in return for the money lent for the war.”

“In short, the North said to the slaveholders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you. (Spooner 54-55) “On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.” (Spooner 55)

Spooner concludes that “The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay “National Debts,” so-called,—that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated plundered, enslaved, and murdered—so long as there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection.” This viewpoint regarding the Civil War is often overlooked, even though Spooner’s case shows that it was not unique and crossed ideological boundaries that made more sense in the mid-nineteenth century than now.

 

 
Bibliography
Barnett, Randy E. “Was Slavery Unconstitutional Before the Thirteenth Amendment? Lysander Spooner’s Theory of Interpretation.” 28 Pacific L.J. 977-1014 (1997).

Johnson, Reinhard O. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States. Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Spooner, Lysander, “No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority,” in The University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, 1870) 52-53.

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Review of Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship

David A. Beirne

 

 

The Progressive Era was largely a backlash to the widespread private-public avarice represented in The Gilded Age, as named after Twain’s 1873 book. The economic and cultural realities of the time can be identified in an incident in Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship (2016) that a judge refers to as representing an “an overdose of ‘BUSINESS EFFICIENCY.'” (Remes 109) On the flip-side, progressive reformers have often over-espoused the virtues of the capacity of the state to solve problems. When the state says it wants to help its citizens or others, in particular providing them something for free, it is sometimes hard to see the downside from a purely theoretical sense.

Conservatives, apparently since Edmund Burke, have at least partially agreed with Reagan’s assessment that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Conservative questioning the state’s use of power to give and take resources is often perceived as simply mean-spirited and reactionary. Remes cites anarchist analyst Colin Ward in the book’s conclusion, in which he said that a “society which organizes itself without authority is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state.” (Remes 190) In a paper I wrote for Dr. McLain, Burke was a voice that decried what he understood to be a capricious use of power by the British state in India, in the name of benefit to all largely for this reason: communities have individual histories that can all too easily be overlooked by a distant governmental regime.

Disaster Citizenship reveals the positive good that state aid can have, but also the typically unintended consequences of accumulation of power in a state that does not always recognize what is truly best for local traditions and understandings. The ‘citizenship’ aspect of the title references the changing outlook on just what, exactly the state, armed with public resources, is supposed to do. Knowledge production is created to support this expansion and control, as Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathogens (2006) made evident. Community bonds, “organization without any organization,” and varying definitions of public and private responsibilities permeate different places. (Remes 22) In spite of often unhelpful interference, “everyday forms of solidarity” arose that provided different meanings to citizenship, and reflected in differing responses to disasters that ranged from policies to displays of “identity and empathy.” (Remes 10)

The work uses a transnational perspective comparing the two early twentieth century disasters at 1914 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and 1917 in Salem, Massachusetts, one that is highly reminiscent of the borderland perspective employed by Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Borderlands (2006). I appreciated Ms. yaremenkolena’s reference to Halifax disaster, where “the local order that allowed families to save their possessions was lost, and all that remained was confusion.” (yaremenkolena) Here, it was not so much citizen versus military that was critical to the effectiveness of relief as it was local versus distant, framing the debate over who was to have the civic power to react. Disasters additionally “exposed the economic value of labor that before had gone unremarked,” an argument feminists have long made about traditionally women’s household labor. (Remes 115) Rahm Emanuel had a great line in a 2008 Wall Street Journal conference that, when it comes to the state, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” and Disaster Citizenship shows how crises “do more than take a snapshot of a moment; they alter the direction of historical change.” Thus, these events can transform the way we look at what the state, as ‘the people,’ is supposed to be responsible for, as well as what is left to, well, the people to figure out. (Seib; Remes 5)

 

 

Bibliography

Remes, Jacob A. C. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2016.

Seib, Gerald F. “In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama.” November 21, 2008. Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122721278056345271. Accessed November 28, 2016.

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Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies looks at the example of the American colonial experience in the Philippines to highlight the intersection of race and medicine. (Anderson 1) After the U.S. defeated the Spanish in the colony in 1898, the victor instituted policies that continued America’s nineteenth-century liberal reforming national identity. (Ibid) Scientific advancements were understood not only as a means to sanitize the natives, but to provide them with a chance to reach civilized status. The dangers of colonialism were not so much in the geography as in the people, where disease became an element of racialization of Filipinos and disease (Ibid 2) While there was never formal segregation in the Philippines, the viewpoint of Filipinos as part innocent child and dangerously backward permitted demarcation between colonized and colonizer. (Ibid 4, 108) White male bodies could also descend to the level of the native, giving them a personal stake in civilizing process. These experiments in the Philippines provided a microcosm of society at large in which the minds of the West could experiment and take notes. (Ibid 6)

 

 

 

The insights provided by Anderson reminds me of Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop, where the U.S. imperial experience in Latin America gave it the strategies it used for larger-scale warfare in later periods. As Michael Adas of Rutgers University notes in his review, “American interventions in Cuba, Panama, and other Caribbean locals shared the same military genesis, motivations, and modes of organization.” (Adas) Anderson also argues that the “racializing of liberal governmentally” turned the formerly private lives of native people into the collective realms of public discourse, where military personnel became hygiene inspectors as evidenced in the “clean-up weeks.” (Ibid 2-4, 117) I also reminisced about Bernard S. Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, where knowledge was a significant contributor to the Western colonial encounter. I appreciated that Mr. highbeejonathan mentioned the most controversial aspect of Anderson’s book; namely, that many people benefited from this imperialistic excursions as sanitation improvements did, in fact, occur in the Philippines and techniques were developed and brought back to the U.S. (higbeejonathan; Anderson 3-4) A shortcoming in Colonial Pathologies, as noted by Laurence Monnais of the University of Montreal, is that the “the Filipino body makes itself “heard” in Anderson’s volume more than the “voices” of Filipinos. (Monnais) This is due to the dearth of resources maintained by the colonized, themselves, which renders a work focused on the goals and prejudices of colonizers. Still, this is a great lesson in how nineteenth-century imperialistic impulse both formed and was influenced by the science and technology of the emerging twentieth-century.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Adas, Michael. Review of Colonial Pathologies. American Historical Review (Dec. 2007).

 

Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

 

Monnais, Laurence. Review of Colonial Pathologies. American Ethnologist, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 3059-3062 (2008).

 

 

 

 

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1. Chávez, Ernesto, ed. The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

 

I am going to use this handy book for over fifty primary sources related to the war that took place a decade prior to the Civil War to see if there’s any economic or expansionist themes I can use to make my case that the Civil War fits into the general mindset of the times.
2. Finkelman, Paul, ed. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

 

Another book in the great Bedford/St.Martin’s series of collections of commentary and primary resources, this time pertaining to those in the North and South who defended slavery, including for economic reasons.

 

 

3. Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1991.

 

This is a classic work that contains a number of primary sources pertaining to the myriad of causes of the Civil War, including economic ones.

 

 

4. Vorenberg, Michael, ed. Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

 

Primary sources pertaining to one of the defining documents of the Civil War, one that changed the military and moral course of the war. I am going to employ this primary source compilation to understand prevailing sentiments right smack-dab in the middle of the war, picking up on any references to economics and labor system ideology.

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On October 24, 1871, after one white life was lost in the crossfire of Chinese gang warfare in Chinatown, Los Angeles, a riot of 500 white Los Angelenos murdered eighteen Chinese, seventeen of whom were entirely innocent. The madness was partly swift angry vengeance, but mostly an act of brutality that, Zesch argues “seemed like fun. They thought they could get away with it because their victims were people who didn’t matter.” (Zesch 219) Decades of pent-up racial resentment against the influx of Chinese immigrants caused such acting out as a celebratory trip to saloons after victims had been hung, mutilated, or shot. Chinese immigrated to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles thoughout the middle of the nineteenth-century, where businesses sprang up and internecine Chinese turf war was common. The massacre, Zesch argues, was inspired by the local Los Angeles press’s longtime stories about the prostitution and violence engaged in by the immigrant community, and seeing a fellow white caught in the crossfire fit well into this narrative. Furthermore, the press highlighted the dangers posed to white male labor with the influx of migrants. Small businesses, a lynchpin in the Chinese immigrant experience, were looted as well as local communities in the outbreak.

Zesch is not a full-time academic, and his background as a historical novelist comes through strongly in The Chinatown War. It is interesting that the book was called The Chinatown War instead of The Chinatown Massacre; this is because Zesch paints the landscape in the decade-plus leading up to the main event as a drawn-out struggle of which October 24 was a boiling point. Nothing happens in a vacuum, but without the full scope of violence and lawlessness that plagued this part of the old American West, Los Angeles, a place not for the weak of heart, the event in question would not be so informative to historians. The general lawlessness of the times is on display, where vigilance committees, sometimes featuring officials themselves, took the place of structured law. Only twenty-five men were indicted, and eight were given short sentences for manslaughter. While this result was obviously not indicative of justice at work, Zesch earlier in the book points out that justice and cosmopolitanism was served more often than we might think in the Los Angels , with many Chinese Americans becoming recognized members of the community and bringing their cases to court, with the exception of testifying against whites.

Although one reviewer from the University of Nevada noted that Zesch’s lack of specialty Asian-American comes into play, the Chinatown War does an excellent job of making use of sources available to us, particular court records from the Huntington Library and newspapers. Another reviewer says that the dearth of sources on early Chinese immigrants was not as bad as Zesch made it out to be. As one of our classmates noted, the book bears a great similarity to A Misplaced Massacre, not only in its depiction of racially-based mob violence but in how it brings its narrative into the present. (yaremenkolena) Both are little known today; marked by plaques but not widely known. Zesch’s work is also reminiscent of Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes in its analysis of how different groups interact within limited space with what was, at best, an emerging system of law and justice. Who remembers remembers events and how reveals much about a nation’s framework for understanding itself. The question is: what IS the meaning of this event? Scott Zesch refers to it as “The Riot That Didn’t Change a Damned Thing.” (Zesch 213) The press and law simply went back to their normalized sensationalist routines. Zesch attempts to connect the event to modern day hate crimes as well. It is also important to remember what happens when mob mentality reigns, particularly when there are complicated histories of entirely different groups attempting to occupy the same space.

Bibliography

Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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The World the Civil War makes clear that the period broadly understood as Reconstruction was even more complicated than widely recognized. Rather than simply the Republican-led attempt to remake the South, a historical view that is tinted with the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the authors contained herein show that the post-Civil War period can only be really understood by looking at the United States across regions, ethnicities and borders. (Downs 5) It is easy to view Reconstruction through the filter of the behemoth the US became in the twentieth-century, but these essays reveal that US centralized power, for all its growth in support of the war effort, may not live up to its ‘Yankee Leviathan’ reputation. In spite of the intentions of the state to liberalize all within its reach, the West, South, Native Americans and others were not always willing participants. Divergent opinions within Republican party itself, eventually causing Reconstruction efforts to gradually dissipate, was just one example of a force that was fragile to begin with. Yet it was a moment of where great internal improvement measures were realized, heralded evidenced by those like Henry Carey, also featured in Slavery’s Capitalism. Economic solutions would be the best way to solve societal problems, with an American system to create a “harmony of interests” among classes that class-conflict socialism never could (312)

 

 

 

There is even an transnational perspective on the evolution of the American economic system, where “the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem” according to. (304) As I am writing my paper on economics in the Civil War, I was especially grateful for related discussions. While some see economic elites with an expansionist vision getting a stranglehold on national power through the Civil War, Karl Marx saw the Civil War as a revolution in line with his understanding of class overthrow, and his opinions were directly at odds with Carey’s (312). Andrew Zimmerman’s essay states that the Civil War, to many contemporaries proved that revolution could be accomplished through social rather than governmental or economic change. This understanding rendered the South as essentially the bourgeois power on the run. The Civil War was also more of a “redefinition” of American ideals as opposed to a “repetition” of revolution, according to Zimmerman (304).

 

 
The Civil War also asked how much government should power versus the states, as well as what did true freedom and equality really mean. I agree with sbremer that K. Stephen’s Prince’s “The Burnt District” was a fantastic chapter for revealing “how the North viewed these ruined cities as their opportunity to rebuild the south in its image.” Furthermore, the collection shows that liberalism in thought or rhetoric does not always equate with reality on the ground. The sense that very different cultures would voluntarily surrender a way of life and be remade was a common mistake in Western expansionist mindset. The talk about liberalism reminded me of Liberalism and Empire by Uday Singh Mehta that I have read for Dr. McLain’s exam, revealing how high-minded notions of bringing civility to those that need is often blinded to its own biases, not to mention violent means by which they can be accomplished. For instance, while blacks were to be incorporated into the free-labor system, they were not necessarily desired in the expansion westward, and Indian Americans received a mixture containment and forced integration policies. We also cannot take rhetoric or even the of law for granted, as Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur note that post-war America was “perhaps a nation ruled by violence interrupted by flashes of rights.” (13) This collection effectively moves us toward a more all-encompassing “Greater Reconstruction,” as Elliott West phrased it. (4)

 

 

 

Bibliography

Downs, Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds. The World the Civil War Made Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2015.

 

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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.

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Roseville: Random House, 2002.

Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

Finkelman, Paul. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Gordon, John Steele. An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2013.

Johnson, Ludwell H. North Against South: The American Iliad, 1848-1877. Columbia: The Foundation for American Education, 1993.

Kizer, Jr., Gene. Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument. Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014.

Lawson, Melinda. Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.

Leigh, Philip. Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy During the American Civil War. Yardley: Westholme, 2014.

Lind, Michael. Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. New York: Harper-Collins, 2012.

Majewski, John. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

McClintock, Russell. Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

Stampp, Kenneth M. And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1800-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. The Causes of the Civil War: Key Documents by Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass and Many More, 3rd revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Thornton Mark and Robert B. Ekelund Jr. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2004.

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The Economic Causes of the Civil War
David A. Beirne

 

1. Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

*Featuring some of the most up-to-date interpretations of slavery’s importance to the economics of North and South, I look to employ the variety of research to see if the North’s interest in the slavery economy at the time of secession had anything to do with the war.

 

2. Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

*This work analyzes the divergent developments of the relationships between the state and economies that existed in the North and South.

 

3. Chavez, Ernesto. The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

*I am going to use this handy book for over fifty primary sources related to the war that took place a decade prior to the Civil War to see if there’s any economic or expansionist themes I can use to make my case that the Civil War fits into the general mindset of the times.

 

4. Collier, Paul. “On Economic Causes and Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers 50 (1998), 563-573.

*This is a paper about civil wars and their economic factors, generally, so I will see if any frameworks work for understanding the the U.S. Civil War, where one side thought they were leaving the Union and the other side thought they were rebelling.

 

5. Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Causes of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

*This book makes the case that economics caused the Civil War. While studies address how the North and South grew apart in the decades leading up to war, Egnal’s study examines how decades of economic connections between the North and South began to disintegrate, with the result being secession.

 

6. Finkelman, Paul. Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

*Another book in the great Bedford/St.Martin’s series of collections of commentary and primary resources, this time pertaining to those in the North and South who defended slavery, including for economic reasons.

 

7. Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

*Another foundational book for my study, this book looks at the economic origins of the civil war from the perspective of the law and financial implications of the institution of slavery.

 

8. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013.

*This book really paints a vibrant picture of the economic powerhouse that was the Old South, in addition to the interconnectedness with Northern interests.

 

9. Lawson, Melinda. Patriot Fires: Forgin a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North.

*Nationalism and economic expansionism sometimes gave a mutual dependency, so Lawson’s book may indicate how the interests of the federal government business communities contributed to redefining American identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.

 

10. Majewski, John. Modernizing a Slaver Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

*Majewski is an author I found in Slavery’s Capitalism, and like that edited book and Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, I will use it to paint a picture of what the South’s ideal vision of its economic future looked like to understand why secession made sense.

 

11. Montgomery, David. Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

*I am using this book to understand the vision that the Republican Party and labor organizations had prior to the Civil War, and how the war and its aftermath may have been supported and shaped with some of these goals in mind.

 

12. Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1991.

*This is a classic work that contains a number of primary sources pertaining to the myriad of causes of the Civil War, including economic ones.

 

13. Thornton, Mark and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2004.

*Thornton and Ekelund Jr.’s work discusses how Northern government and industry united to fight the Civil War, research I will examine to see what interests were at play during the war that may have also contributed to its lead-up.

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I am admittedly not a fan of dense environmental or geographic descriptions, be it in nonfiction or any other. The less directly human quandaries are involved, the less likely I am to really be engaged with the material. Samuel Truett’s Fugtive Landscapes makes the argument that historical explorations of human affairs and the physical environment should become inseparable queries, particularly regarding inherently in-flux frontiers and borderlands. The European expansionist mindset, at times alongside equally opportunistic voices from Mexico City, saw the borderlands as essentially unclaimed space to be molded for national and business purposes. Ms. 20perez2016 recognized Truett’s argument that the U.S.-Mexico frontier acted as a “crossroads” for movement of peoples, resources and ideas between societies near and far. (Treat 60, 106). The ‘fugitive’ element of the book’s title addresses how, in spite of the best institutional intentions, the people and geography of the Arizona-Sonora border remained impossible to  pin down, entirely. Historical memory of these peoples and spaces, likewise, is equally transient and divergent in nature.

The historiography that Truett builds upon stem chiefly from environmental, local, and economic studies. William Cronon, Truett’s advisor for the Ph.D. thesis from which this work derives, is an environmental historian and author of Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which has been noted by Publishers Weekly for its multitude of linkages between frontier and urban landscapes. (ix; 186 f. 5) This is what Truett also tries to accomplish, expressing how metropolis elites failed to “domesticate” (a word the author uses a lot, in addition to “spaces, “spatial,” “landscape,” etc.) these domains that simultaneously lived within and without their respective states. Also leaned on is historians Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel’s article “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” for lessons on how borderlands both unite and divide states on either side. (186, f. 11)

Truth’s Fugitive Landscapes is a workman-like that reads like the dissertation it began as. Every paragraph is a huge block on tightly-packed information, with a single obligatory footnote appearing like clockwork that sometimes contained many references in yet another block of text. The obvious amount of research that Truett conducted make this a wonderful resource and springboard for further projects, but the thesis becomes stretched and the structure questionable. While there were great primary sources of businessmen and missionaries, it is not enough to save the work from the overbearing detail of geographic minutia. The lack of clear chronology, the pounding-home of spatial references, and, ironically for a work focused on a particular occasion, the jumping around to different locations made for more than a little retreading to figure out what was going on.

I also question just how novel this approach is compared to traditional histories outside of the border realm. It seems like even those Barnes and Noble local histories would contain a variety of nuggets on different cultures, markets, and otherwise. To my suspicions, however, I believe Truett would respond that the focus has traditionally been telling the story from the state perspective. Although Truett does not elaborate on modern events throughout Fugitive Landscapes, the reader gets a sense that the author is skeptical of viewing borders strictly as governments want us to. By viewing the terra firma on its own terms, we can view those who grace its “crossroads” as equally critical actors both in historical understanding and, implicitly, in contemporary border politics.

Perhaps the best result of Truett’s approach and style is his ability to at once challenge conventional wisdom of history writing and popular understanding while coming across in a non-argumentative, methodical manner. Business leaders, Indian nations, missionaries, statesmen and explorers are given attention and agency, and while exploitation and violence are accounted for, Truett obviously does not bring an axe to grind. Focusing on the land and resources first, while not always enthralling to this reader, ultimately lends to a narrative that is both even-tempered and convincing.

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What were the economic causes of the Civil War?

Without a doubt, slavery and states’ rights, perhaps inseparable notions in nineteenth-century America, were the major impetuses to the country’s most bloody and personal war. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, the South seceded, removing 11 US states; leaving 23 states (along with 5 supporting border states) making up the opposing Union. While the war proved the South to be the smaller and weaker power, the Southern states, and thus the Confederacy, represented no slouch in their importance to US economic interests. This paper attempts to piece together the underlying economic causes of the Civil War, specifically within the context of a stronger nation (size, economically, morally, you-name-it) annexing a weaker nation that does not wish it.

A book directly related to the economic topic is Marc Egnal’s Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. Also, James L. Huston’s Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War should provide a head-on perspective regarding the central issue this paper will address, and of course continue to offer additional historiographic trajectories. Finally, Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr.’s, Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflaciton: The Economics of the Civil War will be employed to understand how the Civil War was, itself, funded, perhaps revealing the interests that funded or supported the Union’s war efforts. These books will also tell of the economics of the South’s decision to secede in the first place, a critical discussion in understanding why retaining the rebel states would be of significant financial interest.

It is work like Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman’s Slavery’s Capitalism, and the contribution of Modernizing a Slave Economy‘s John Majewski (also featured in Slavery’s Capitalism) that will lead my discussion regarding just how much of an economic powerhouse the South was at the time of secession. These selections provide evidence not only that the South was more than able to stand on its own, agriculturally and, Majewski argues, industrially, but that the North was a significant benefactor of the South’s unbelievable growth, largely through the mass continuation of slavery. As subsequent history would show, this power would not be enough to fend off being forcibly reintegrated back into the Union.

Realpolitik economic realities flow through near every major historical decision, and this paper will attempt to address some of these overlooked realities. The North had expanding industry and population, and the benefits of a century of international recognition, as per Gould. The loss of the Southern states would have a major economic impact on the Union’s position in this community, reaping not only major financial losses (not to mention ‘losing face’), but forcing the Union to compete abroad economically with the Confederacy. I would imagine that the loss of the South’s tax base would not have been a welcome development to the US federal government as well. Were Northern industrialists firmly behind the War’s causes, and how much was this community’s conversations over economics, as opposed to abolitionism or secession’s infringement on the Constitution, say?

Finally, I think it would be worthwhile to incorporate some historiography, or at least an understanding of Western expansion and annexation in the nineteenth-century, as it was a golden age of takeovers of sovereign (or claimed sovereign) territory. There were all sorts of moral reasons employed for these takeovers; concerns over the barbarities of conquered peoples and concerns for societies’ lack of ability to govern themselves. Slavery was the moral and political reason for the takeover of Southern territories, so much so that economic issues (not to mention the truly central states’ rights issue) are somewhat intellectually taboo. Slavery was a hot topic from the founding of the nation’s Constitution, and was one of, if not the most, intensely debated issues decade after decade leading up to the Civil War. Yet, I feel that a focus on the finances involved in the antebellum US, the damaging effects of secession, and the promise of reunion will proffer a unique insight into the motivating forces that cost 700,000 lives yet that is recognized to have liberated so many more. Building on the historiography of economics and the Civil War, with a dash of works on capitalism and expansion, I hope to offer some interesting and, most likely, entirely unexpected conclusions.