Introduction to Causes of the American Civil War

Causes of Civil War Course Text1

Introduction to “Causes of the American Civil War”

The causes of the Civil War are complex and layered, needing to be studied in detail using numerous primary sources before even a basic understanding comes into focus. These causes are crucial to the understanding and appreciation, by both interpreters and visitors, of the long ranging effects the war has had and continues to have on American society. Today we live with the fruits of the American Civil War, in a nation changed fundamentally by the war's outcomes. Understanding and acknowledging the causes of that war can help us as a people to better appreciate the choices our nation has made in the subsequent 150 years.

The study of the coming of the war, for public interpreters of the past, also needs to understand the evolution of historical memory of the war, particularly that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Lost Cause interpretation. Perhaps the most contested aspect of popular American history today is related to the causes of the American Civil War. As the Civil War Sesquicentennial approaches, National Park Service interpreters will have to be prepared to help visitors appreciate why a defense of slavery, and not states’ rights, was at the core of Southern unrest. They will equally need to be prepared to explain that the objective of the United States in 1861 was not the abolition of slavery, but the reunification of the Union.

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Understand the nuances of the causes of the American Civil War.
• Identify the “Lost Cause” school of Civil War interpretation and understand its place in the evolution toward modern scholarship.
• Effectively and respectfully convey the causes of the war to visitors of varying knowledge levels and backgrounds.

Prologue: Interpreting the Civil War – New Scholarship and Old Battles

The American Civil War, and particularly its causes, is one of the most controversial topics which interpreters face at Cultural and Historic sites today. When visitors approach with questions and challenges to the meaning of the Civil War, often times the interpreter is left fumbling for words.

[Interp. Video – Interviews: Interpretive Anecdotes]

Much of the misconception of the causes of the Civil War grow from the memory making period which immediately followed the war’s end, as two sides sought to come together and reconstruct not only the American South, but the memory of the war itself. As an interpreter, you face the tough challenge of combining evolving scholarship, primary evidence and your resource to help visitors better understand the complexities underlying the American Civil War. By returning to the root documents and words of the men and women who brought about the war, we can come to a richer understanding of why conflict erupted, and for what reason 600,000 American lost their lives.

Chapter 1: The Long Road to War – 1840s

The American Civil War has a long lineage of causes. This course could return to the Missouri Compromise (1820) to track the course of slavery's expansion. It could just as easily delve further back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Three-Fifths Compromise or even the Declaration of Independence. The American Civil War, and its root cause of slavery, is deeply embedded in the intellectual and political fabric of the United States itself. For the sake of brevity, however, this study will begin with the Annexation of Texas following the Mexican War. Still, it is important to keep in mind that your specific site may have deeper, older connections to the Civil War's causes than those which grew from the 1840s.

Chapter 1: The Long Road to War – 1840s (Continued)

[Political Tab]

“The contest in which we are now engaged is not a new one. It is of twelve or fifteen years’ standing. It assumed new proportions when we acquired Texas. Texas, under the laws of Mexico, was then free. We insisted that slavery should not be recognized there. You claimed that it should–that slavery should go into all the common Territories of the Union. You succeeded. You procured what you claim is a decision of the court in your favor. But the people would not give the question up. The issue was formed–Slavery or Freedom; and on that issue we went into the [1860] election.”

David Wilmot, February 22, 1861, Washington Peace Conference

The outcome of the Texas War of Independence in 1836, with the American settlers of the region gaining independence from the Mexican government, all but ensured that the United States would be poised to fight a war with Mexico over territorial rights. The western border of the now-free Republic of Texas was not determined at the war's end. The Treaties of Velasco, ending the Texas War of Independence, was never ratified by the Mexican Government and, indeed, Mexico never acknowledged Texan sovereignty. In 1845, as the United States prepared to annex Texas, Mexican authorities claimed that President James K. Polk was attempting to steal Mexican Territory. Through his desire for western lands, Polk provoked a war with Mexico.

Slavery quickly became an important issue in the Mexican-American War. David Wilmot, a Democratic member of the House of Representative from north-eastern Pennsylvania, made himself the center of the debate. In August of 1846, Wilmot proposed an amendment to a war appropriations bill, later called the Wilmot Proviso, designed to prevent slavery in any territories acquired from Mexico. From Wilmot's action in 1846 until the outbreak of civil war in 1861, the subject of slavery in the western territories formed the core of sectional unrest.

[Map of West Circa 1845-46] [Wilmot Proviso Text][Portrait of David Wilmot]

As the war with Mexico drew to a close in 1848, American political discourse was creeping toward Civil War. With the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the United States acquired the territory now comprising the American Southwest. General Zachary Taylor, riding high on his status as war hero, unseated Democratic control of the White House. The Whigs now held the highest office in the land. Taylor would face opposition on Capitol Hill from a Democratic congress. Most foreboding for the Whig party was their losses in the House of Representatives. A new third party, flying the banner of “Free Soil,” seized upon the fissures created by David Wilmot’s Proviso to win nine seats on the floor of the House. By the end of the 1840s, Slavery, and its extension into the new territories, was poised to be the central point of controversy on Capitol Hill.

[Smoke Him Out at P&P, LOC]

Further Reading:

Joel H. Sibley, StormOver Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2005)

Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (2004)

Mark J. Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, & the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute & Sectional Crisis (1996)

[Social Tab]

By the 1840s, New Orleans emerged as one of the most prominent cities of the American south. It boasted a population of over 100,000 citizens. Using the natural corridor of the Mississippi River, New Orleans’ merchants helped ship cotton and other raw materials from the interior south to markets in New England and abroad. By the next decade, New Orleans would see over 150 million dollars worth of goods from the inner south pass through its ports. New Orleans also became a hub for the burgeoning internal slave trade, sporting the south’s largest collection of slave markets. Elsewhere in the South, rail lines and turnpikes were fashioned in a radial pattern to maximize the South’s ability to distribute its slave produced raw materials to costal ports for shipments to manufacturing facilities worldwide.

On March 9th, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled on a landmark case in the evolution of Abolitionism in America. Two years before, 57 slaves aboard the Cuban ship “La Amistad” escaped their captivity and held the crew of the ship hostage, demanding return to Africa. The ship was eventually seized by the United States Navy, and the vessel and its cargo (slaves included) claimed as salvage. Spain demanded the slaves’ return as stolen cargo, but the Supreme Court, after arguments headed by former President John Quincy Adams, upheld the decision that the Africans were, “unlawfully kidnapped, and forcibly and wrongfully carried on board,” the Amistad, and that Spain had no rights to claim them as property.

When the Home Mission Society was met with the request of James E. Reeve, a Georgia Baptist and slave owner who wished to operate as a missionary among Native Americans, it was not immediately apparent just how consequential their response would prove. The Society refused to ordain Reeve, their sole reason his complicity in slavery. Within months, the Baptist church in America split along the biblical implications and interpretations of slavery. The Triennial Convention dominated northern Baptist theology, and preached a doctrine of the Bible’s condemnation of slavery. The new splinter group, the Southern Baptist Convention, preached a doctrine of biblical support for America’s “Peculiar Institution.” Over the next two decades, these schisms would help to divide religious and social spheres along increasingly sectional lines.

Further Reading:

Gospel of disunion: religion and separatism in the antebellum South

By Mitchell Snay

[Response Question]

See what others have said, and post your own response at the forums. [Link to Forum thread for this discussion question]

Chapter 2: Compromises and Concessions – 1850s

[Political Tab]

“I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion.”

John C. Calhoun, March 4, 1850, U.S. Senate

By 1850, Congress continued to hash out the details of what new states and territories could enter the union and, most importantly,whether those states would be slave or free. Compromise came, but not without flaring tempers, including Senators brandishing revolvers on the floor of Congress. While the Compromise of 1850 did settlethe issue of Texas’ western boundary,the admission of California as a free state upset the delicate balance of power in the U.S. Senate. This political threat to the South, which nearly resulted in secession at the Nashville Convention, was metwith a social threat to the North. The Compromise also had the effect of strengthening and extending fugitive slave legislations.

[Link to Compromise of 1850 map] [News Article, Compromise of 1850, Northern and Southern Newspaper] [Image: Scene in Uncle Sam’s Senate, P&P, LOC] [

On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed a crowd in Rochester, NY. The noted orator and abolitionist had been invited by a citizen’s group to speak on the nation’s 76th birthday. But Douglass, an African-American and former slave, saw the great irony in their choice: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” Douglass’ speech, a scathing condemnation of America’s continued tolerance of slavery, struck at the heart of the question of Slavery, politically and socially:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852, Rochester, NY

By 1854, as pressure from Southern Congressmen to open the Kansas Territory to slavery was mounting, Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In order to placate the South, the act allowed for the extension of slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line established in 1820. The new states of Kansas and Nebraska, instead of having their status decided upon the floor of congress, would be admitted under a doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty.” A flood of settlers, supporting slavery and abolition, rushed to the territories to sway the decision, quickly leading to a shooting war in the Kansas Territory between pro- and anti-slavery forces.

[Link to Kansas-Nebraska interactive map]

In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the violence it sparked, the Whig party began to splinter completely. The sectional nature of the slavery debate drove a wedge between northern and southern Whigs. The result was the formation of the Republican Party, an amalgam of remaining northern Whigs who joined together with the Free Soil Party, around opposition of the extension of slavery into the territories.

[Further Reading: John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How it Changed the Course of American History (2003)]

[Further Reading: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970)]

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As Congress drafted and passed the Compromise of 1850, Northern abolitionists seethed with anger. The newly enhanced and expanded Fugitive Slave Act was viewed as a travesty. Instead of simply providing for the recapture of runaways who had crossed into the north, the bill also included a clause which stated that, at the request of a U.S. Marshal, any citizen could be impressed into a slave catcher’s aid. In spite of their moral convictions, anyone on the street, abolitionist or not, was required by law to assist in the capture of an escaped slave. The law met heavy resistance. In February of 1851, the Boston Vigilance Committee liberated Shadrach Minkins, a captured fugitive slave, from the custody of U.S. Marshals. A similar instance, the rescue of a black citizen of Syracuse, NY named “Jerry,” shocked and outraged the South. That September, in Southern Pennsylvania, a bloody firefight between abolitionists and a Posse of Maryland slave-owners further proved that the Fugitive Slave Act was odious to many, and nearly unenforceable in many northern communities.

In 1851 and 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a New England abolitionist from a family of outspoken ministers and activists, penned Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, a novel depicting the harsh conditions of slavery through the eyes of the human property who were dealt the blows. Stowe’s dark, sinister depiction of slaveholding whites drew particular ire from Southern leadership. Stowe, a minor abolitionist figure, was catapulted onto the main stage. Stowe received threats and stinging criticism for her work, even so far as one southerner mailing her a severed slave’s ear.

[Link - Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture at UVA

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As the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the west to popular sovereignty, settlers of both slavery and anti-slavery leanings flooded to the territory to influence its constitution. These settlers quickly came to blows, as the realization dawned that eliminating a vote for your opposition was as easy as pulling the trigger of a rifle. Radical zealots, both abolitionists and slavers, rose to the surface as violence increased. Men like John Brown, a failed businessman and strict Calvinist abolitionist, struck out with their families and formed militia groups to influence Kansas’ statehood through violence. Eastern powers added fuel to the fire of violence by sending aid, money and supplies to the warring factions in the west. Most famously, Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, himself an abolitionist minister, shipped Sharps rifles westward, in crates marked Bibles, to further the destruction of slavery. The New York Tribune remarked that Beecher saw that, “there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.”

[Response Question]

See what others have said, and post your own response at the forums. [Link to Forum thread for this discussion question]

Interlude: War Approaches – 1850s

As America marched closer to war throughout the 1850s, tempers had flared. The central issue of contention was the extension of slavery into the new lands in the West. This was the driving beat to which the rest of American political discourse marched.

[Interp. Video – Interviews: Reflecting on the 1850s]

Laying the proper framework upon which to build the story of the American Civil War is immensely important when interpreting the causes of the four year bloodletting. The 1840s and early 1850s laid the seeds of war, which would ultimately blossom into bitter fruit. For the interpreter, these years, and the primary documents they yielded, offer a wealth of evidence that the debate over the future of slavery was at the very core of the conflicts dividing the young American nation. Without this deep history, the breakneck paced events of 1855-1860 become nearly meaningless.