•Martin Crawford CHAPTER

CHAPTER
Capitalism and the Civil War
JOHN ASHWORTH
Without doubt the Civil War stands as the severest political crisis, the primary single event in the history of the American Republic. Of equal importance, nevertheless, was along and slow process which was occurring over the entire nineteenth century the growth of the American economy to a position of world leadership. The frail and internationally insignificant economy of 1800 had by 1900 become the greatest economic power the world had yet seen. In the midst of this process, however, the United
States had been convulsed by sectional agitation, the secession of the
Southern states, war on an unprecedented scale, and the emancipation of million slaves—a sequence of events that occurred with bewildering rapidity. An obvious question thus arises What was the relationship between the process and the events, between the economic transformation and the political cataclysms, in short between American capitalism and the Civil
War?
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Although apparently simple, this question is in reality complex and subtle. Several sets of problems should be noted at the outset. First, it is important to determine which years and which parts of the country are being considered. Is it claimed that the war years themselves witnessed a transformation of the national economy Or rather that they set in motion or continued trends which, over many years, would more gradually alter the trajectory of American capitalism And is it the economic effects upon the
North, the South, or the nation as a whole which are to be measured Clearly there is no reason to assume that the impact of the war was geographically uniform.
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Even more fundamentally, it is not clear what is meant by American capitalism. Are we concerned merely with the economy in a narrow sense?
Such an approach has the attraction of (relative) simplicity but in actuality the war’s impact was much larger. For the struggle had major political consequences in that a class of slaveholders, dominant in the antebellum republic, saw its national power shattered the economic consequences would be of some significance. Similarly the war years generated a set of ideological changes or shifts which, although frequently ignored by economic historians,
also had an impact upon the American economy. It is therefore appropriate,
in considering the war’s effects upon the economy, to separate them into the more narrowly or directly economic and the political/ideological, recognizing that a capitalist economy necessarily has an ideological underpinning as well as apolitical superstructure. At the same time, however, we should remain alert to the complex and, it is safe to say, not fully understood processes of interaction between politics, economics, and ideology.
An even more basic problem concerns the very term capitalism itself the subject of much controversy and debate. While it is not necessary hereto consider all the competing definitions, three must be noted. Many historians, economists, and social scientists in effect equate capitalism with commerce. On this view production for the market is the key feature of a capitalist economy. This definition has huge implications for our understanding of the United States in the nineteenth century and in particular for the analysis of slavery in the Old South. For it is immediately obvious that plantation slavery in the South was irreducibly commercial. Production of cotton, by far the most important crop in the final antebellum decades,
was almost entirely for distant and primarily for international markets. The entire slave system was fueled by the demand for raw cotton and other crops,
and the commodification of slaves themselves was an essential feature of the system. In these respects, therefore, the South was at least as “capitalist”
as the North.
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An alternative definition, however, casts doubt upon Southern capitalism.
Derived essentially from the Marxist tradition, this narrower, more restrictive definition requires the commodification of labor power, in effect the existence of wage labor on a large scale. On this view the antebellum South, many of whose spokesmen trumpeted forth their hostility to what was polemically termed wage slavery had a commercial but scarcely a capitalist economy.
While some southerners did, of coursework for wages, by almost any criterion wage work on the land came a poor third to slavery and the various forms of farming carried out either by family farmers or tenants. It is true that in the cities and in the manufacturing establishments of the South wage labor was more prominent than on the land or in agriculture but one of the striking features of the Southern economy was its inability to urbanize or industrialize on a significant scale.
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It is not necessary hereto determine the relative merits of these definitions. Indeed, since the postbellum South was a region in which the wages system was similarly eclipsed—this time primarily by sharecropping and tenant farming—it might seem as though the definitional problem is of little consequence. As we shall see, such is not the case. Instead it is necessary to keep in mind the distinction between capitalism-as-commerce and capitalism-as-wage-labor.
A third definition features most prominently in the work of Charles and
Mary Beard and their followers, perhaps the leading advocates of the view that the Civil War promoted American capitalism. Here capitalism is in effect industrialism. This definition also has major implications for our understanding of the Civil War and its economic impact. Before the war both sections were primarily agricultural, although parts of the North could reasonably be described as industrial. In the postbellum decades, although the South continued to lag behind in this process, the nation became an industrial giant, indeed the foremost industrial power on the face of the earth. The Beards themselves argued that the war played a crucial role in this process for them it facilitated the transformation from agrarianism to industrialism. Alongside capitalism-as-commerce and capitalism-as-wage- labor we must therefore place capitalism-as-industrialism.
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