Causes of American Civil War | History Optional for UPSC (Notes) PDF Download

Why the American Civil War

The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial since the war began. Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s.

Slavery:

• The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system compatible with and protected by the Constitution. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. Slavery was being phased out of existence in the North, where coloured men had in some cases been granted the franchise or even served as representatives; it was fading in the border states and urban areas, but was expanding in highly profitable cotton districts of the south.
• Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave state in 1820, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845, the status of slavery in western territories won as a result of the Mexican–American War and the resulting Compromise of 1850. Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude slavery from conquered territories; although it passed the House, it failed in the Senate.

Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors of slavery:

• as described in the novel and play Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery split the Democratic Party between North and South, while the new Republican Party angered slavery interests by demanding a definite end to its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and 1858.
• Meanwhile, the South in the 1850s saw an increasing number of slaves leave the border states through sale, manumission and escape which increased Southern fears that slavery was threatened with rapid extinction in this area. With tobacco and cotton wearing out the soil, the South believed it needed to expand slavery. Some advocates for the Southern states argued in favour of reopening the international slave trade to populate territory that was to be newly opened to slavery. To settle the dispute over slavery expansion, Abolitionists and proslavery elements sent their partisans into Kansas, both using ballots and bullets.
• In the 1850s, a miniature civil war in Bleeding Kansas led pro-South Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan to attempt a forced admission of Kansas as a slave state through vote fraud. Eventually, however, anti-slavery settlers outnumbered pro-slavery settlers and a new constitution was drawn up. On January 29, 1861, just before the start of the Civil War, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state.
• In 1857 the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision ended the Congressional compromise for Popular Sovereignty in Kansas.
  According to the court, slavery in the territories was a property right of any settler. The decision overturned the Missouri Compromise. Republicans denounced the Dred Scott decision and promised to overturn it. Abraham Lincoln warned that the next Dred Scott decision could threaten the Northern states with slavery.

Anti-slavery Northerners mobilized in 1860 behind moderate Abraham Lincoln:

• because he was most likely to carry the doubtful western states. The Republican party platform called slavery “a national evil”, and Lincoln believed it would die a natural death if it were contained. The Democrat Presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas argued that Congress could not decide either for or against slavery before a territory was settled.
• Most 1850 political battles followed the arguments of Lincoln and Douglas, focusing on the issue of slavery expansion in the territories. Lincoln’s assessment of the political issue for the 1860 elections was that, “This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present.”
• In a historical context with multidimensional political, social and economic variables, several causes united in the moment by a consolidating nationalism. A social movement that was individualist, egalitarian and perfectionist grew to a political democratic majority attacking slavery, and slavery’s defense in the Southern pre-industrial traditional society brought the two sides to war.

Other Factors in Slavery

Social Structure and Racism in the South:

• The South's social structure, based on plantation slavery, was more stratified and patriarchal compared to the North.
• Small free farmers in the South often embraced racism, making them unlikely proponents of internal democratic reforms.
• White supremacy was a widely accepted principle among all white southerners, rendering slavery legitimate, natural, and essential for a civilized society.
• Official systems of repression, such as "slave codes," sustained white racism by enforcing codes of speech, behavior, and social practices that subordinated blacks to whites.

Economic Links and Dependency:

• Many small farmers with few or no slaves were economically linked to elite planters through the market economy.
• Small farmers depended on local planter elites for essential goods and services like access to cotton gins, markets, feed, livestock, and loans, as the banking system in the South was underdeveloped.
• Southern tradesmen often relied on the wealthiest planters for steady work, deterring many white non-slaveholders from engaging in political activities that did not align with the interests of large slaveholders.

Kinship Networks and Inheritance:

• Whites of varying social classes, including poor whites working outside or on the periphery of the market economy, might be linked to elite planters through extensive kinship networks.
• Due to inequitable inheritance practices in the South, it was common for poor whites to be related to wealthy plantation owners, sharing a militant support for slavery despite their economic differences.

Slavery as an Economic Institution:

• Slavery was fundamentally an economic institution, with the cotton gin significantly increasing the efficiency of cotton harvesting.
• This technological advancement contributed to the consolidation of "King Cotton" as the backbone of the Deep South's economy and entrenched the system of slave labor critical for the cotton plantation economy.

King Cotton:

• King Cotton was a slogan used by the Confederacy during the American Civil War, advocating the idea that control over cotton exports would ensure the economic prosperity of an independent Confederacy.
• The Confederacy believed that this control would undermine the New England textile industry and compel Great Britain and possibly France to support the Confederacy militarily due to their reliance on Southern cotton.

States' Rights:

• There was a consensus that states had certain rights, but a key debate was whether these rights extended to citizens who left their state.
• The Southern position argued that citizens had the right to take their property, including slaves, anywhere in the U.S. without it being taken away.
• Northerners opposed this view, asserting that free states had the right to outlaw slavery within their borders.
• Republicans, committed to ending the expansion of slavery, were particularly opposed to the idea of bringing slaves into free states and territories.
• The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 supported the Southern position regarding territories.
• Additionally, the South asserted that each state had the right to secede from the Union at any time, viewing the Constitution as an agreement among the states.
• Northerners rejected this interpretation, believing it contradicted the Founding Fathers' intention of establishing a "perpetual union."

Sectionalism:

• Sectionalism refers to the differences in economies, social structures, customs, and political values between the North and South.
• Between 1800 and 1860, sectionalism increased as the North industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms while phasing out slavery.
• In contrast, the deep South focused on plantation agriculture based on slave labor and expanded into new lands in the Southwest, from Alabama to Texas.
• Slavery declined in the border states and struggled to survive in cities and industrial areas, leading to a rural and non-industrial South.
• Despite this, the demand for cotton drove up the price of slaves.
• Historians debated whether economic differences between the industrial Northeast and the agricultural South caused the war.
• Most now emphasize that the Northern and Southern economies were complementary and benefited each other, despite their social differences.
• Fears of slave revolts and abolitionist propaganda made the South hostile to abolitionism.
• Southerners perceived the North as changing while they remained true to the republican values of the Founding Fathers, many of whom were slave owners.
• Lincoln argued that Republicans were upholding the framers' tradition by preventing the expansion of slavery.
• In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of slavery acceptance split major religious denominations into Northern and Southern factions.
• Industrialization led to the settlement of seven out of eight European immigrants in the North.
• The migration of whites from the South to the North contributed to the South's defensive and aggressive political behavior.

Protectionism:

• Historically, southern slave-holding states, due to their low-cost manual labor, had little need for mechanization and supported the right to sell cotton and purchase manufactured goods from any nation.
• Northern states, heavily invested in their emerging manufacturing sector, could not compete with European industries in offering high prices for cotton and low prices for manufactured goods.
• As a result, northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism, while southern planters demanded free trade.
• Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, gradually reducing rates until 1857, when rates were the lowest since 1816.
• This angered Northern industrialists and factory workers, who demanded protection for their growing iron industry.
• The Whigs and Republicans favored high tariffs to stimulate industrial growth, with Republicans calling for increased tariffs in the 1860 election.
• These increases were finally enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress.
• While the tariff issue was significant, it was not as central to southerners as the preservation of slavery.

Slave Power and Free Soil:

• Antislavery forces in the North identified the "Slave Power" as a direct threat to republican values, arguing that wealthy slave owners were using political power to dominate the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, thereby threatening the rights of Northern citizens.
• "Free soil" was a Northern demand that new lands opening up in the West be available to independent yeoman farmers instead of being bought out by rich slave owners who would work the best land with slaves, pushing white farmers onto marginal lands.
• This concept was central to the Free Soil Party of 1848 and a major theme of the Republican Party.
• Free Soilers and Republicans advocated for a homestead law to give government land to settlers, but this was defeated by Southerners who feared it would attract European immigrants and poor Southern whites to the West.

Territorial Crisis

• Between 1803 and 1854, the United States expanded its territory significantly through purchase, negotiation, and conquest.
• All states carved out of these territories by 1845 entered the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, along with the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi.
• These were balanced by new free states created within the U.S.' original boundaries, such as Iowa in 1846.
• With the conquest of northern Mexico, including California in 1848, slave-holding interests anticipated the flourishing of slavery in much of this land.
• Northern free soil interests sought to limit the expansion of slave soil, leading to clashes between proslavery and antislavery forces over territorial disputes.
• The Compromise of 1850 attempted to address the contentious issue of California's status and sought a political settlement on these matters.
• While the existence of slavery in the southern states was less politically divisive, the question of its territorial expansion was highly polarizing.
• Americans recognized that slave states had autonomy over slavery within their boundaries, and the domestic slave trade was immune to federal interference.
• The most viable strategy against slavery was to restrict its expansion into new territories.
• Both South and North agreed that controlling the question of slavery in the territories was crucial for determining the future of slavery itself.
• By 1860, various doctrines emerged to address federal control in the territories, all claiming constitutional sanction, either implicitly or explicitly.

Doctrine of Congressional Preeminence

• Championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party.
• Insisted that the Constitution did not require a balance regarding slavery in territories.
• Argued that Congress could exclude slavery from a territory, as long as the Fifth Amendment's due process clause was respected.
• Proposed to prohibit slavery in territories acquired after the Mexican War (1846-48).
• Although blocked in the Senate, this idea deepened the sectional divide.

Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty:

• Proclaimed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
• Stated that settlers in a territory had the same rights as states to decide on the establishment or abolition of slavery.
• Argued that Congress should not interfere in domestic matters of territories, preserving the tradition of self-government.
• Legislated through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

Doctrine of State Sovereignty:

• Empowered states to expand slavery within the Federal Union under the US Constitution.
• Claimed that all authority over slavery in territories belonged to individual states.
• Positioned the federal government as a facilitator of state laws regarding slavery.

Nationalism and Honor:

• Grew from the American Revolution and intensified after the War of 1812.
• Americans began to see their country as a model of a national republic founded on political liberty and personal rights.
• In the 19th century, "freedom" encompassed both personal liberty and property rights, leading to unresolved tensions.
• Nationalism was a strong force, with figures like Andrew Jackson promoting it.
• While Northerners largely supported the Union, Southerners were divided between unionists and those prioritizing southern loyalty.
• The Republican platform of 1860 condemned disunion as treason.

Lincoln's Election

• Lincoln's election in November 1860 triggered fears in the South of slavery's expansion being curtailed and ultimately leading to its extinction.
• Slave states, already a minority in the House of Representatives, faced diminishing power in the Senate and Electoral College against a growing North.
• Before Lincoln's March 1861 inauguration, seven slave states had seceded and formed the Confederacy.

Lincoln’s House Divided Speech:

• Delivered on June 16, 1858, at the Illinois Republican State Convention.
• Lincoln, a lesser-known politician, was running against incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
• The speech highlighted the danger of disunion due to slavery and rallied Republicans.
• Famous for the line "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln argued the nation couldn't remain half slave and half free.
• Predicted the Union would become entirely one or the other: either free or slave.
• Criticized Douglas's idea of popular sovereignty, which allowed settlers to decide on slavery.
• Lincoln believed the Dred Scott decision opened the door for slavery's spread, leaving only the options of a fully slave or fully free nation.
• His speech suggested a clear choice between freedom and slavery, countering Douglas's more conciliatory approach.
• The phrase "house divided" was interpreted as a call for civil war, which Douglas used against Lincoln in the campaign.
• Though the speech hurt Lincoln in the 1858 election, it established him as a significant political figure.
• Lincoln's arguments from the campaign were spread further through the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
• The national recognition from the campaign led to Lincoln's Republican presidential nomination and subsequent election in 1860.
• Ironically, the "house divided" speech became prophetic as southern states seceded and war ensued.
• Lincoln's vision of ending slavery was realized in 1865, but only after a brutal civil war.