Teaching the American Civil War

One of the most frustrating things about the Civil War is simply trying to understand its many causes. As long as historians exist, there will be a multitudinous cacophony of answers to this perplexing question. I’ve been wrestling with these questions for nearly a quarter of a century. Let me offer several causes.

I’ve had the great and grand pleasure of teaching H303, Sectionalism and the Civil War, since 1999 at Hillsdale College. The course ostensibly covers the years 1848 through 1877—that is, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo through Reconstruction. For better or worse, however, I also reach back to 1776 (the Declaration), 1787 (the debates over slavery in the Constitution), 1820 (the Missouri Compromise), 1822 (Denmark Vesey’s rebellion), 1832 (Nat Turner’s rebellion and the Nullification Crisis), 1836 (the Texas Revolution), and 1846 (The Mexican War). Phew, a lot to cover, especially where there is still 1848 through 1877 to cover!

Founded in 1844 by radical abolitionists, Hillsdale College sent more than five hundred soldiers to the Union army, many of them serving in the famed 2^nd, 4^th, and 24^th Michigan regiments. As you enter our campus, you’re welcomed by a statue of a Civil War soldier, a bowing Abraham Lincoln, and a mighty Frederick Douglass. The town’s Protestant cemetery, Oak Grove, just north of campus, inters more than three hundred Civil War veterans as well as such early Republican party luminaries as Ransom Dunn, a professor of history as well as a doctor of divinity. In fact, I can see Dunn’s tombstone from my driveway. It’s all rather inspiring and intimate.

One of the most frustrating things about the Civil War is simply trying to understand its many causes. As long as historians exist, there will be a multitudinous cacophony of answers to this perplexing question. I’ve been wrestling with these questions for nearly a quarter of a century. Let me offer several causes.

First, and fundamental to the war, was the issue of slavery. Yet, to what degree? When the Union waged war on the South, it did not, immediately, do so because of slavery. Yet, as Abraham Lincoln put it, slavery was SOMEHOW the cause of the war. To quote the sixteenth president at length:

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Second, though, and perhaps equally important, was the vying of northern and southern visions of nationalism and the purpose of the nation-state. While this involved, understandably, the issue of slavery, it also dealt with agrarianism, industrialization, state’s rights, and national authority. One of the strangest myths of the Civil War is that the South favored state’s rights and the North opposed them, desiring only centralization. It was the South, after all, that wanted a federal police force (Slave Commissioners) and the North which passed Personal Liberty Laws, denying federal use of state property or personnel in the capturing of black Americans. This is not to suggest that the North somehow only favored state’s rights.  When it came to the waging of the Civil War itself, both the North (the Yankee Leviathan) and the South (Confederate War Socialism) used the mechanism of the nation-state to achieve their objectives.

It must also be noted, that each section, the North and the South, held a deep republican streak as well. The Northerners felt their republicanism to be more Greek (think of Lincoln’s very Periclean Gettysburg Address), and the Southerners thought of their republicanism as far more Roman (imagine John C. Calhoun as a modern Cato the Elder).

Third, the North and South were also waging a cultural war. The North “was established by witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics, who implanted in the North the standard of Torquemada, and breathed in the nostrils of their newly-born colonies all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rapid intolerance of the Inquisition,” a South Carolinian stated, shortly after the bombardment of Robert Anderson’s band of Union men at Fort Sumter. Confusing its own bigotry with Christianity, Puritanism had birthed “impurity of mind among men” and “unchastity in women,” the South Carolinian continued, conspiratorially. Evil, corrupt, and dark, Northerners might very well “know how to read and write, but they don’t know how to think, and they are the easy victims of the wretched imposters on all the ‘ologies and ‘isms who swarm over the region.”

Ex-president Franklin Pierce, a northern Doughface, expressed this fear most articulately, claiming that Lincoln was merely the culmination of twelve years of northern abuse. “By letters, by speeches, in private conversation, I have uttered for more than twelve years words of warning against the heresies which have swept over the North and culminated in the enactment of laws which are directly in the teeth of the clear provisions of the Constitution, in eleven states,” Pierce wrote from New Hampshire.

But when you ask me to interpose, then comes this paralyzing fact that if I were in their [Southerners’] places, after so many years of unrelenting agression [sic], I should probably be doing what they are doing. It is not the election of Mr. Lincoln, per se, which has caused this emphatic movement at the South. That election in beyond all doubt Constitutional, but the people of the Southern States look beyond it to see, if they can, what it implies. They see the great and powerful state of Massachusetts electing by 35,000 majority a man who justified the armed invasion of Virginia last year; and they believe that the people of Massachusetts are acting deliberately. They see Mr. Lincoln elected and they take his election as an endorsement of his opinion that we cannot go on as we are, but must in the end be all free or all slave states. Foolish, absurd and groundless as this view is and will always stand, the South takes his election as an endorsement of resistance to the law for the return of fugitives from service of 1851, and of the other heresy broadly promulgated by him and Mr. Seward, referred to above, of an ‘irrepressible conflict.’

Pierce never sent the letter, but he assured his imaginary reader that though he was a Union man, he also argued that “If our fathers were mistaken when they formed the Constitution, if time has proved it, the sooner we are apart the better.”

Finally, fourth, the Civil War was a religious struggle, deeply rooted in the colonial conflict of Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia. One southern theologian, James Henley Thornwell, described the two sides in almost Manichean terms:

The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slave-holders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground, Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity is at stake.

Indeed, this was an intensely religious conflict. Some scholars, such as Richard Rollins, have argued that the Army of Northern Virginia was the most religious army since Cromwell’s army of Roundheads in the English Civil War or any of the armies of the eight Crusades. Robert E. Lee, too, saw the struggle as a deeply religious one. Of course, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis did, too.

It’s going to be a bewilderingly wonderful semester, full of intense investigation and tragic nobility…

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The featured image is “Prisoners from the Front” (1866) by Winslow Homer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.