The Difference Slavery Made
Stanley Engerman, noted that much of the scholarship Pessen reviewed examined only either the North or the South. Few works were explicitly comparative, testing the similarities and differences across the sections. Another participant, Thomas Alexander, concluded with a discouraging, if accurate, summary: “there is still little agreement on how all of these [factors] interacted to bring about an intersectional war, nor is there agreement on which of the similarities and differences are central to understanding antebellum life.” That statement remains true more than twenty years later. (Alexander, “Antebellum North and South,”)
I have taken many classes on American history throughout my life and always thought it was fairly simple and easy to understand. Reading this article almost (almost) makes me want to take another, more upper-level class so that I can find some answers for myself outside of the arguments I’ve just read. I had always known that slavery wasn’t the only cause of the civil war, though it was time and time again made clear to me that it was a major factor… but I had no idea it was so intwined with other parts that had a hand in its doing.
Political historians have tended to argue that the North and South went to war because their political system broke down. War, they argue, was not inevitable, nor was it a result of necessarily divergent economic or social paths. The war came from a critical political breakdown in the midst of the sectional crisis. The complex connections and loyalties among national parties, state parties, and individual voters, they argue, explain the breakdown. … Slavery’s effect on voting and political behavior remains surprisingly unclear. At the local level men divided into parties for reasons so subtle that we can hardly reconstruct them.
The most recent community-level study challenges the centrality of politics in American life on the eve of the Civil War. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin examined local political activity and institutions in eight nineteenth-century American communities and found a shockingly low level of participation and political activism in these places. Politics occupied a tenuous “space” within the lives of ordinary Americans, the authors suggested; instead, it competed for the attention of Americans who viewed parties as rude, base, self-aggrandizing institutions, far from the virtuous and altruistic presence in their lives of religion, civic duty, republicanism, and liberalism. White men in the nineteenth-century United States have a reputation among historians as enthusiastic partisans, voting in greater numbers and with greater zeal and commitment than ever in American history, but Altschuler and Blumin depicted a disaffected electorate, more interested in free booze than freedom, only vaguely aware of the candidates’ positions, and largely disdainful of the parties’ constant bickering. (Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic) At the local level, it is clear that communities presented a complex social geography of politics and of the social network in which politics took place.
-It doesn’t play too far from the election year in 2012 “more interested in free booze than freedom, only vaguely aware of the candidates’ positions, and largely disdainful of the parties’ constant bickering…” but that’s another argument altogether.-
It is important for people to remember that slavery was an important issue during the civil war, but that it was not the #1 driving force behind it. Although most issues voted on during that period could be somehow tied back to slavery and slave-owning, the issues also stood by themselves. The North could easily and happily move away from slavery because they were more industrialized and would benefit more from creating jobs to have more hands in the factories and other various industries, whereas in the South they felt they needed something to replace their laborers (since they were mostly of the farming business, had lots of land, and couldn’t do it all themselves) before they would really be willing to let go of it, and letting it go for a labor force they would have to pay an actual wage to I guess wasn’t overwhelmingly a good idea to them.
I found the links throughout the article to be very helpful. At first I had read through the article and then the “Point of Analysis” pages afterwards and it made it all a little less comprehensible. Then I realized that there were links to the various GIS maps and data tables throughout the article, which made the article a little easier to read as the related material was immediately available. The maps are great as there are smaller and larger versions available, and the tables presented make observing the various differences between Augusta and Franklin much easier.