Themes of the American Civil War
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| Effects of the War Nevertheless, it is important to consider other factors. Among the chief effects of the war was, of course, the ending of slavery in the South. Its effects on the South have already been noted. But it has been argued that slavery was an impediment to Northern capitalism. On this view slavery blocked Northern development because it strangled the home market for industrial capital This effect was attributable to the relative self-sufficiency of the plantations as well as the difficulty that planters allegedly experienced when seeking to introduce laborsaving machinery. Slaves were considered unfit to use such machinery and they lacked the purchasing power to give a boost to the regional economy equivalent to that supplied by Northern free farmers. 21 Even if these constraints did operate, however, it is important not to exaggerate their importance. First, Southern slavery was, in some respects, beneficial to Northern capitalism. Exports of cotton and other staple crops obviously benefited Northern mercantile interests in the antebellum decades; Northern merchants themselves played a key part in the early stages of industrialization. Equally, Southern (as well as Northern) exports facilitated and underwrote loans into the North, which were then used for capital projects to improve the regional infrastructure. Even if by 1860 these advantages no longer offset the disadvantages entailed by Southern slavery (and this has not been demonstrated) Southern slavery was only a partial, rather than a total, liability to the North. In other words, we are dealing with a net rather than a gross loss. Second, and more important, it is abundantly clear that Northern capitalism had not come to a grinding halt in 1860, immobilized by the existence of Southern slavery. The experience of the s, probably the very decade when the North was progressing most rapidly, is the strongest possible evidence to the contrary. The Northern economy of 1860 in no sense faced crisis or stagnation. With a huge area of land open—including California—a growing population, and a favorable international environment, it did not need the South Atlantic states to expand into, still less the territory or states in the Southwest. Finally, and more generally, we must guard against an implicit functionalism, in which changes are assumed to be optimal for the dominant social order. At a practical level, it is surely clear that the postbellum South was Capitalism and the Civil War • 177 scarcely ideal for the development of capitalism in the South or the North. In other words, after the war one set of suboptimal conditions replaced another. 22 Yet one important possibility remains. It is still conceivable that the war and the elimination of slavery played a key role in the development of American capitalism, at least if capitalism entails wage labor. For the acceptance of wage labor was almost certainly facilitated by the war. This happened to some degree in the South in the obvious sense that some former slaves became wage earners, but more importantly, perhaps, in the North and in the nation as a whole, where an important ideological change or shift took place. This effect is normally overlooked or ignored by economic historians it therefore merits a closer look. What was the relationship between the wages system and the Civil War? More than anyone else it was Abraham Lincoln who took responsibility for presenting the war to the Northern electorate, and his views can betaken as representative of the Republican Party, now the dominant political force in the nation. As is well known, Lincoln announced that the war was a test of democracy not merely in the United States but the world over: And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in number to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, breakup their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask Is therein all republics this inherent and fatal weakness Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people or too weak to maintain its own existence? But for Lincoln democracy was not simply a form of government. Instead it was the political underpinning of asocial system. At the heart of this social system lay mobility: This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary 178 • John Ashworth departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend . . If democracy required social mobility then social mobility in turn required the wages system Lincoln explained the process by which mobility occurred: The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. Thus it is not too much to claim that Lincoln believed the Civil War was being fought in order to preserve the wages system. Ashe put it, this progress, by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account, and hire somebody else was “the great principle for which this government was really formed.” 23 At the end of the war the Union cause had received a tremendous boost. Now the ideals expressed by Lincoln and the Republicans had become dominant not merely in the North but in the nation as a whole. Indeed, the entire ideology of Americanism had been redefined so that it stressed mobility and growth with the wages system playing an essential role. Historians have generally ignored or underestimated this effect, perhaps because they have also underestimated the hostility to the wages system that existed in antebellum America, North as well as South. But by the end of the war the values of Lincoln and his Republican Party had become the values of the North, and of the nation as a whole. This is not to say that the South had been converted. It had not. But after the war the power of the South was so reduced that it could not prevent the nationalization, as it were, of Northern values. We should remind ourselves that this had not been possible before the war, where the South had wielded considerable power politically and where Southern thought had played a key role in the formulation and the formation of the American democratic tradition. How important was this for the future development of American capitalism Here, once again, it is difficult to be precise. A more willing acceptance of the wages system cannot be given a financial value one cannot quantify the effect upon per capita or national income and wealth. Instead, however, we may make several tentative observations. The United States since the Civil War has exhibited an extraordinary attachment to capitalist values. Across the political spectrum from right-wing Republicans to the liberal Capitalism and the Civil War • 179 reformers of the Progressive, New Deal and Great Society eras, the core values of popular capitalism have gone largely unchallenged. Within the political mainstream asocial democratic challenge has been rare, a socialist one nonexistent. It is as if the creed that was forged in the s by the Republican Party in opposition to slavery, and which acquired enormous prestige with the victory of the Union armies, has been powerful enough to withstand the challenges to the capitalist system that in many other countries proved fatal or at least highly damaging. Plainly many other factors have been present and it is not possible to establish the proposition firmly but there is still reason to believe that in this sense the war indeed played a major role in establishing and protecting capitalism in the United States. Notes 1. The classic view of the Civil War as a key stage in the growth of American capitalism is to be found in Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols (New York, esp. II, p. 54, 166, and Louis Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism (New York, esp. p. 339. This thesis stimulated a historiographical debate in which two of the major contributions were Thomas Cochran, Did the Civil War retard Industrialization Mississippi Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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