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Civil War

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The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex problems of slavery, expansion, sectionalism, parties, and politics of the antebellum era. As territorial expansion forced the United States to confront the question of whether new areas of settlement were to be slave or free, as the power of the slaveholders in national politics waned, and as the North and the South developed starkly divergent economies and societies, the divisive issues of sectionalism catapulted the nation into the Civil War (1861-1865).

On the eve of the Civil War, the United States was a nation divided into four quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system and (in some areas) declining economic fortunes as well; and the Southwest, a booming frontier-like region with expanding cotton economy.

The starkly different levels of economic and social change across the nation's geographical regions - one based on free labor the other on slave labor - underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by 1860 in the North and in the South. But by the 1840s and 1850s sectional tensions would change in their nature and intensity.

With the emergence of the United States Republican Party as the nation's first major sectional political party, by the mid-1850, politics became the stage on which sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery in the West was played out. The acquisition of new lands in the 1840s catapulted the nation into civil war.

Before the Civil War, however, the Constitution provided the basis to define the terms in which debate over the future of government would continue, and had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. But many other factors had changed from 1820 to 1860 that would bring about civil war rather than the gentlemanly compromises of the Missouri Compromise or the Compromise of 1850, including the rise of mass democracy in the North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, and increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies.

Through the agency of the Republican Party (bolstered by the panic of 1857 and its skilled radical politicians and activists), the industrializing North was committed to the ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism, and the resolution of sectional conflict - culminating with the American Civil War - was perhaps the nation's principal social revolution, a watershed in the rise of modern industrial society in the United States.

Depression sharpened economic and class divides in a society undergoing both a sectional confrontation and an economic revolution. In other words, the realignment of cleavages and cooperation among geographical, social classes, and party affiliations in politics between the depression of 1857 and the election of 1860 led to the election of a president so objectionable to Southern slave-owing interests that it would trigger Southern secession, and consequently a war to save the integrity of the Union.

Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery

The rise of abolitionism

For details see the main article abolitionism.

 

Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan

The anti-slavery movement of the 1830s and 1840s could not have emerged without the transformation of Northern society. Undergoing the early stages of industrial development and urbanization, the era witnessed stark chance in American life. Anti-slavery movements gained momentum along with a fervor of reformism in the 1830s and 1840s. Often, the era's reformist impulse was one of nostalgia for a bygone era. However, it also inspired efforts to create or streamline new institutions of social order and control suited to the changing realities of a new era. For example, reform movements were the impetus for the prison- and asylum-building of the era.

To understand the rise of anti-slavery, it is important to get a sense of the how the "peculiar institution," as it was called, was perceived among most Northern activists at the time. The legacy of Second Great Awakening, which largely stressed the reform of individuals, was still relatively fresh in the American memory. Consequently, the principal reform movements in the North were tinged with the ethos of Yankee Protestantism. While composed of many types of oftenconflicting ideologies, the reformism of the second quarter of the nineteenth century largely focused on transforming the human personality by internalizing a sense of discipline, order, and restraint. Because of this, reformers of the era generally blamed poor Northern factory workers, alcoholics, and criminals for their own misery. If they were impoverished, it was because they wasted their meager salaries on alcohol (not because of their wages that were barely above subsistence levels) or failed to curb their sexual passions and bore too many children.

With the same mentality, most abolitionists - William Lloyd Garrison the most influential among them - urged internalized self-discipline. They condemned slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and the fruits of one's labor, but defined freedom as more than a simple lack of restraint. The truly free man, in the eyes of antebellum reformers, was one who imposed restraints upon himself.

The context of the changing structures of the American society and economy was noteworthy. The structural changes of the era included the rise of an integrated economic and political structure, the shift from labor-intensive toward capital-intensive production, and the spread of market-oriented capitalist relations. The socio-economic pressures reaching the surface required a value system viewing continuous social change as natural and desirable.

Social mobility was a key requisite to the era's economic development. For development to proceed, property rights, consumer goods, and laborers must be freed from traditional bonds and restraints, from aristocratic traditions, quasi-feudal arrangements, personalistic and other multi-bonded relations. It is thus interesting to note that in the 1830s and 1840s, the rise of the anti-slavery movement coincided with the height of Jacksonian democracy, feeding on the same "anti-aristocratic" and egalitarian ethos. Anti-slavery men exalted "free labor," meaning labor working because of incentive instead of coercion, labor with education, skill, the desire for advancement, and also the freedom to move from job to job according to the changing demands of the marketplace. Behind such expectations, the changing economic structures of the era helped to encourage the growing appeal of "free labor" ideals.

Consequently, most of the reform movements of the era focused attention in one way or another on a loose set of principles that attempted to transform the lifestyle and work habits of labor, helping workers respond to the new demands of an industrializing, capitalistic society. And mainstream abolitionists were among those helping wage laborer adjust to - rather than challenge - the demands of capitalism. For example, relations between the American Anti-Slavery Society - with its Yankee Protestant membership base - and the new, radical unions emerging in the North were by no means cordial during the 1830s and 1840s.

Only a minority of the era's reformers straddled both camps, such as radical English immigrant George Henry Evans (editor of the New York Workingman's Advocate), and the utopian socialists of the period. Small artisans - often subject to declining fortunes and hostile to big manufactures - played a central role in these groups. But prevailing abolitionist sentiment viewed those who advanced the concerns of working class toilers with harsh scorn. Mainstream Abolitionists despised slaveholders, but rarely voiced concerns with the often-cruel working conditions to which free laborers were subjected. From their standpoint, starving child laborers, for example, were merely less more fortunate in their pursuits, or less exalted in their situation.

Instead, mainstream abolitionists were more often cordial with reform movements with another vision of society, such as the creation of prisons and asylums, temperance, and relief for the "deserving poor" (with the caveat distinguishing them from the "undeserving poor"). According to most abolitionists and members of related crusades, this was to be done through the purification of society from sins such as drunkenness, prostitution, ignorance, and above all slavery.

It would also entail inculcating non-conformers to the ethos of middle class Yankee Protestantism (especially Southerners and the working class Irish in the North) in the Protestant ethos of industry, piety, sobriety, thrift, and self-improvement through self-discipline. In this sense, abolitionists shared the fervent enthusiasm for opportunity and "free labor" common among the country's rapidly growing bourgeoisie. To many believers in the free-labor ideal, the promise of upward social mobility (opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control one's own labor) was central to American democracy.

This whole section on the Civil War is from the Wikipedia Free Open source encyclopedia.

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