HIS 310: Antebellum America December 17, 2013 Final exam paper

Did the Civil War happen because the South and North were increasingly similar or increasingly different?

Long before the fatal clash that began when the Republican slate won the election of 1860, the North and South were traveling along far different paths. The North was moving toward the creation of a modern semi-capitalistic economy based on moderately free trade and minimal regulation. Taxes were low and the western border was open to adventurous and entrepreneurial types who abhorred regimentation. Immigrants, particularly Germans, provided a ready and growing workforce. The South, on the other hand, remained locked into a societal straitjacket based on slavery and a rigid class structure in which wealthy slaveholders, although a numerical minority, dominated politics and government. Secession of the South was clearly an event that arose because the South and North were increasingly different. The Civil War, as we know it, was not an inevitable consequence of secession. Of course it can be argued that military conflict could have arisen somewhat later if, for example, the North and South had clashed over the western territories. Several historians have argued convincingly that expansion was necessary to the survival of the slave-oriented society of the South. Genovese (1965) lists these arguments and then takes the idea a step farther by arguing that slavery could have evolved into a system that supported many economic activities beyond the cotton-based plantation system. He cites California gold mining as an example. Even if Lincoln had not initiated the bloody Civil War, it is hard to imagine Southern slaveholders moving, slaves and all, into the California gold fields without a war. But,

of course, both secession and the Civil War are historical facts, so it is reasonable to ask what led up to this unfortunate state of affairs with its legacy of a century of Jim Crow laws and racial conflicts that trouble the region (as well as the North) right up to the present day. There are a number of factors that contribute to the explanation of the growing differences between North and South. First is geography. As we travel further and further to the North, growing seasons become shorter and crops requiring much sunlight and lengthy growing seasons are less and less practical. Rocky soil and cold winters do not create the best environment for amber waves of grain. Some special grades of tobacco have grown successfully in Connecticut. But nowhere in the North of the antebellum period were regions hospitable to the farming of cotton, tobacco, or sugar, whether beets or cane. Northern farmers addressed the problems of soil depletion and harsh growing conditions by moving west. This alternative was not available to Southern planters in the face of strong Republican opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories. There were slaves in the North but their numbers declined over the antebellum period. In the North, agriculture is necessarily a seasonal business. What would a Northern farmer do with his field slaves in a long winter? It is not a coincidence that abolitionism grew in the North. Principles are hard to maintain when they clash with ones livelihood. In both North and South, the earth was worked to the point of exhaustion. In the North the problem was ameliorated as agricultural activity moved west and was replaced in the east with industrial growth. But the market revolution that created manufacturing jobs in the North bypassed the South. There are a great many reasons for this. One factor was the early pattern of growing lucrative cash crops with slave labor. It began with tobacco in the coastal region. When the coastal soils became depleted, Southern culture and prosperity was threatened. But the invention of the cotton gin, a simple mechanical device that separated cotton from its seeds, gave new life to Southern agriculture and the slave system. Those Southern planters, who owned good land and many slaves became extremely wealthy and soon dominated political power in the South. Southern political power also had a disproportionate

influence in the North. The constitutional compromise that counted slaves as 3/5 of a person meant that a planter with 100 slaves indirectly controlled as much Congressional representation as 61 Northerners without slaves, no matter how much land or wealth the Northerners commanded. Understandably, Southerners not only valued this disproportionate influence, but firmly believed they deserved it. It is well documented that slaveholders typically believed that their status and that of their human chattels were part of Gods plan. How is this even possible? Unfortunately it is not only possible but commonplace in human history that one class is thought of as the chattel of another. At the time of the antebellum period alone, Russians had their serfs, Indians their untouchables, Koreans the inferior class of butchers, and the British, bearers of the white mans burden, had wogs all over the empire. Southern slaveholders flogged disobedient slaves to death, while the British shot captured Sepoy rebels from cannon. The surprising thing was that there were so many in both North and South that were willing, at risk to themselves, to help slaves to escape their bonds by reaching sanctuaries in the North. Even slaves that reached points as far north as New York City were not safe. The fugitive slave law gave owners and slave hunters the right to forcibly remove escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Only the fortunate few who managed to reach Canada could feel relatively safe. The fact that many slaves were captured in places as far north as Detroit and New York or even places friendly to abolitionists like Philadelphia gives proof that belief in the inferiority of black people was not a Southern monopoly. Although the majority of Northerners opposed slavery, more than a few were ready to assist slave hunters for a reward or bounty. Nor was abhorrence of slavery a Northern monopoly. In 1828, when James Pembroke was still in Maryland, a slave state, a young white man warned him of slave patrols nearby and tried to help him (Bordewich 2005). But, whether for or against slavery, there were few in either North or South that were prepared to accept those of sub-Saharan African descent as equals. Nowhere were blacks given the vote and nowhere

did interracial couples have the right to marry. At the same time, there were a few extra-legal unions between light skinned African Americans and those considered white. The most famous, of course, was that between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Although interracial marriages were not protected by law, there was an advantage to the woman in such unions. A married woman effectively surrendered property rights to her husband, while one who was living in sin retained ownership of any and all property, real and personal, that she brought to the relationship. Of course, this did not apply to Sally Hemings who, as a slave, could not own property. Paradoxically, the theory of nullification, the belief that states had the right to nullify federal laws with which they disagreed, was widely accepted in both North and South. In 1820, Pennsylvania legislation nullified enforcement of the fugitive slave law in that state. Some four decades later, that same principle supported the Souths belief that secession was a right of every one of these United States. The respect in which the North was more advanced than the South was in the development of an economy based on free labor. The Northern economy is commonly thought of as capitalist but it conformed to principles of free trade only so long as those principles led to profits for the upper classes. Apologists for the South are quick to point out that Northern businesses and their stooges in government were responsible for tariffs that protected the manufacturing industries of the North while damaging the Southern planter class by forcing them to pay more for goods they need but were unable to produce in sufficient quantity or with sufficient quality. But the South also favored those tariffs that tipped the trade balance in their favor. Another major difference between North and South was in the way their elites developed. In the North, the wealthy classes tended to be highly educated. The best colleges in the country were in the North. The business class in the North had to be on their toes to stay on top; manufacturing and trade are risky enterprises. In the South, the planter class, at least those with large landholdings and many slaves,

needed only to make sure their managers and overseers were properly supervising the field slaves. For their part, the planters lived lives of leisure in large, well-furnished homes while the details of daily livingcooking, cleaning, and other household chores were handled by house slaves. Since no house slave wanted to end up in the field or, worse yet, sold down river to the lower South, house slaves worked hard to keep their positions. The result was the development of a ruling class that felt above the hoi polloi and, like European royalty, never considered the possibility of a change in their upper class status. Even so, it was not difficult to perceive a threat to their way of life on the election of Lincoln who was firmly committed to the principle of keeping slavery confined to the states in which it already existed. That seemed reasonable enough to opponents of slavery; there were plenty who wanted to take things much farther. But many in the South could see by midcentury that, to survive, slavery needed to expand. The monoculture of cotton (actually a duoculture, since corn to feed slaves and livestock was produced alongside cotton) was depleting the once fertile soil of the Deep South. Meanwhile, the upper South was undergoing an agricultural renaissance in the late antebellum period. Scientific agricultural practices were reviving the soil and the wave of the future could already be seen with the development of new machinery that reduced the need for human labor. Many farmers of the upper South were selling slaves to traders who were moving them in coffles to places like Louisiana where demand and prices were still high. The cash earned by slave sales could be used to buy modern machinery. But what was working for the upper South was anathema to the planter class of the lower South. Their culture and their way of life were inextricably bound to the slave system. What made the renaissance in the upper South even more unpalatable was that many of its successes were the achievement of Northern farmers. Because the soil of lands below the Mason-Dixon Line was worn and depleted, they were very cheap and could be picked up for just a few dollars an acre. Land-poor Northern farmers who were familiar with the latest methods in agriculture could buy lands cheaply in the upper South and, once they had restored their fertility and yield, could build a good life for themselves (Eaton 1961). Some might see this as a reward for sound

practices and hard work, but to the entrenched Southern planter class it appeared to be a Northern invasion. From the Southern point of view, the Republican victory was only the first step in a process that could only whittle away the major factors deemed central to Southern culture and society. Without expansion of slavery into the western territories, King Cotton would be dethroned. It was difficult if not impossible for the ruling class of the South to imagine life without their enormous slave population hard at work to maintain their royal lifestyle. Moreover, as Northern interests opposed to slavery acquired more and more territory, the Southern majority in Congress would shrink and eventually disappear. At that point it was likely that the more extreme abolitionist sentiments would take control. In the meantime, government policies with regard to tariffs would increasingly favor the manufacturing interests of the North. Unquestionably, North and South were on different paths and had been for the entire antebellum period. Where the North was traveling a more or less capitalistic path, the South spurned such activities as crass and unworthy of their status as cultured gentlemen. This Southern fantasy was not in the best interests of the South. The failure to develop urban markets meant that agricultural production other than cotton was impractical. Cotton was in demand by textile manufacturers in the North and overseas, but without urban markets in the local area there was no realistic way to profitably produce a range of consumer goods. These were produced in abundance by the North and absorbed what little cash Southern society could earn. Even under the pressures of war, the South failed to become an efficient producer of manufactured goods. They fought a bloody war with weapons produced in the North during the antebellum period. Other than that they manufactured few weapons of their own design. The Sharps breechloader was the most advanced battle rifle in use by the North. For the South there were only a few captured rifles and a relatively small number of copies. The battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor

comes to mind, but this had negligible impact on the war. Even manpower was in short supply. Corpses of Confederate soldiers as young as 14 littered the bloody landscape of Gettysburg. The South viewed slavery as their birthright and the basis of civilized society. In reality slavery was an anchor barring economic progress and condemning the vast majority of Southerners to a life far removed from the palatial mansions of large slaveholders. In the long run, even the slaveholders themselves were losers as their soil became increasingly depleted and their future more and more uncertain. Sources: Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: An Interracial Family in Early National and Antebellum, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 73-114 Gary B. Mills, Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum Anglo Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations, The Journal of American History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jun., 1981), pp. 16-34 Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan, New York: Harper Collins (2005) Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought; The Transformation of America 1815-1848. New York, Oxford University Press (2007) Genovese. Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery; Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press. (1989) Eaton, Clement. The Growth of Southern Civilization 1790-1860. New York, Harper & Brothers. (1961)