Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T08:21:39.312Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Cultural Analysis of the Role of Abolitionists in the Coming of the Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Richard Ellis
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Aaron Wildavsky
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

Extract

“Any basic interpretation of American history,” one prominent historian contends, “will have to account for…the coming of the Civil War.” Yet the two basic interpretations that have dominated the study of American politics, the progressive and consensus paradigms, have spawned partial and unsatisfactory explanations for what is arguably the most central event in the American past. After briefly analyzing the insights and limitations of these approaches to the Civil War, we propose an alternative perspective: cultural theory.

Type
The Culture of Politics
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Berthoff, Rowland, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 510Google Scholar. Similarly, Willie Lee Rose suggests that any new sweeping interpretation of … United States political history must account in a satisfactory way for the coming of the Civil War (Comments,” American Historical Review, 82:3 [06 1977], 577–82).Google ScholarPubMed

2 Huntington, Samuel P., “Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many,” Political Science Quarterly, 89:1 (03 1974), 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927), chs. 17, 18.Google Scholar

4 Moore, Barrington, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 141.Google Scholar

5 Genovese, Eugene D., The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 34.Google Scholar

6 Glickstein, Jonathon A., “‘Poverty is Not Slavery’: American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, Perry, Lewis and Fellman, Michael, eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 198.Google Scholar

7 Genovese, Eugene D., The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Vintage, 1969), 225.Google Scholar

8 Consensus theory, as articulated by Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin, stressed American uniqueness, distinguishing American consensus from the ideological class conflict of European nations. In this paper, however, the consensus paradigm is intended to designate all analyses which begin with an assumption that the United States is characterized by a basic consensus on values, regardless of whether this makes America unique from—or similar to—other nations. By this expanded definition, those Civil War historians usually IL eled “revisionists,” such as Avery Craven, Roy Nichols, and J. G. Randall fall within the consensus paradigm.

9 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), 250.Google Scholar

10 Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953), 100.Google Scholar

11 Although extremism is the critical variable, it is the Northern extremists, the abolitionists, who have bore the brunt of criticism generated within this paradigm. See Pressly, Thomas, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1962), 316Google Scholar; and Stampp, Kenneth M., The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 219–20.Google Scholar

12 Craven, Avery, “The 1840s and the Democratic Process,” extracted in The Causes of the Civil War, Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 154–7.Google Scholar

13 We recognize that what we label as “culture” is not everyone's idea of culture. If the reader feels that our use of the term is presumptuous, he or she should feel free to substitute the more precise if less felicitous phrase, “grid-group theory.”

14 The entrepreneurial character of the American farmer has been noted by many observers. See, for example, Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1969), 554Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 3846.Google Scholar

15 Douglas, Mary, “Cultural Bias,” in In the Active Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), especially 190–2.Google Scholar

16 Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 140.Google Scholar

17 Donald, David, “An Excess of Democracy,” in Causes of the Civil War, Stampp, Kenneth M., ed. 9197; at 92.Google Scholar

18 See Duberman, Martin, “The Abolitionists and Psychology,” The Journal of Negro History (07 1962), 183–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Donald, David, “Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists,” in Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, Donald, David, ed. (New York: Random House, 1956), 1936Google Scholar; Wolf, Hazel Catherine, On Freedom's Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952).Google Scholar

20 Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), esp. 1112; World the Slaveholders Made, pt. 2; Political Economy of Slavery.Google Scholar

21 Friedman, Lawrence J., Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 197.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., especially 63–67.

23 Charles Folien, quoted in ibid., 44.

24 Douglas, , “Cultural Bias,” 206.Google Scholar

25 Bames, Gilbert Hobbes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1933).Google Scholar

26 Thomas, John L., The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 457.Google Scholar

27 Douglas, , Natural Symbols, 119.Google Scholar

28 See, for example, John Thomas' conclusion that Garrison's “view of the world as a vast arena for the struggle between God and the devil … disclosed the longings of an authoritarian mind” (The Liberator, 457).

29 Douglas, , Natural Symbols, 107124; and “Cultural Bias,” 206.Google Scholar

30 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 1Google Scholar; Kraditor, Aileen S., Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 8Google Scholar. The distinction between abolitionism and market antislavery is forcefully argued in Duberman, Martin, “The Northern Response to Slavery,” in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, Duberman, Martin, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 395413.Google Scholar

31 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 1.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 232.

33 Ibid., 226, 234, 237, 241.

34 Ibid., 236.

35 Ibid., 115–9, 235–7. See also Perry, Lewis, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 158–87.Google Scholar

36 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 44Google Scholar. Also see Kraditor, , Means and Ends, passim.Google Scholar

37 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 230, 237–9.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 234, 244.

39 Ibid., 230. The abolitionists' antipathy to authority is brought out most clearly in Lewis Perry's excellent study, Radical Abolitionism. By labeling abolitionist thought as anarchism, however, Perry obscures the heavy emphasis placed by abolitionists on community. “Egalitarian collectivism” is a more accurate designation, we believe, because it captures both the abolitionists' hostility to authority and their commitment to group life.

40 Foner, , Free Soil, 92Google Scholar. Also see Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 230–1.Google Scholar

41 Foner, , Free Sod, 52, 56.Google Scholar

42 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 102, 112.Google Scholar

43 Walters, Ronald G., The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 148.Google Scholar

44 Hersch, Blanche Glassman, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), vii.Google Scholar

45 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 142, and ch. 5 passim.Google Scholar

46 Hersch, , Slavery of Sex, 234.Google Scholar

47 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 93.Google Scholar

48 Quoted in Perry, , Radical Abolitionism, 230Google Scholar. See also Hersch, , Slavery of Sex, 232.Google Scholar

49 Hersch, , Slavery of Sex, ch. 7.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 225, 236.

51 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 72.Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 37.

53 Ibid., 41, 43, 44; Perry, , Radical Abolitionism, 106.Google Scholar

54 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 47Google Scholar; Perry, , Radical Abolitionism, 105.Google Scholar

55 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 48,Google Scholar 45–46; Perry, , Radical Abolitionism, 57.Google Scholar

56 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 43.Google Scholar

57 See, for example, Genovese, Eugene D.,“‘very Ordained of God’: The Southern Slaveholders' View of Biblical History and Modern Politics,” Twenty-Fourth Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Lecture (Gettysburg College, 1985)Google Scholar; and Purifoy, Lewis M., “The Southern Methodist Church and the Proslavery Argument,” Journal of Southern History, 32:3 (08 1966), 325–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Walters, , Antislavery Appeal, 113.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 111–2.

60 Ibid. 148.

61 Douglas, Mary and Wildaysky, Aaron, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 139.Google Scholar

62 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 69.Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 3, 66–67.

64 Ibid., 63–64, 27.

65 Thomas, John L., Slavery Attacked The Abolitionist Crusade (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 79; emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

66 Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 2135.Google Scholar

67 The best known statement of this view is Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939). This “moral progressivism,” articulated by Dumond as well as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (“The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review, 16 (October 1949), 969–81), substitutes a bipolar struggle between North and South over the morality of slavery for the Beardian clash between the economic interests of Northern capitalists and Southern planters.Google Scholar

68 Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 1719.Google Scholar

69 Fredrickson, George M., White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 159–60, 318.Google Scholar

70 Freehling, William W., Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 327–8.Google Scholar

71 Senator Barnwell, Robert W., quoted in Channing, Stephen A., Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 66.Google Scholar

72 This effect has been noted by a number of historians, See, for example, Potter, David M., The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 460Google Scholar; and Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 43, 46, 48.Google Scholar

73 Green quoted in Freehling, , Prelude to Civil War, 328.Google Scholar

74 Foner, Eric, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 41.Google Scholar

75 Perry, , Radical Abolitionism, 106–7, 233.Google Scholar

76 Wildaysky, Aaron, “Change in Political Culture,” Politics, the Journal of the Australasian Political Studies Association, 20:2 (11, 1985), 95102, esp. 99–100.Google Scholar

77 Dodd, William E., The Cotton Kingdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 61.Google Scholar

78 Greenberg, Kenneth S., “Revolutionary Ideology and the Proslavery Argument: The Abolition of Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History, 42:3 (08 1976), 365–84; at 384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

79 Hughes, Henry, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (1854, rpt. New York: Negro University Press, 1968), 83.Google Scholar

80 Wiley, Calvin and Grundy, R. G., quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 167, 162.Google Scholar

81 Reverend Warren, E. W., paraphrased in Genovese, “Slavery Ordained of God,” 19.Google Scholar

82 Reverend Frederick A. Ross, quoted in Ibid., 18–19.

83 Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 165Google Scholar; Genovese, , Roll, Jordan, Roll, 73.Google Scholar

84 Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 15.Google Scholar

85 Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 166.Google Scholar

86 Genovese, , Roll, Jordan, Roll, 7086Google Scholar. Also see Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 161.Google Scholar

87 Freehling, , Prelude to Civil War, 329: Genovese, “Slavery Ordained of God,” 15, 17.Google Scholar

88 Nye, Russel B., Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 18301860, rev. ed. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1963), 303.Google Scholar

89 Freehling, , Prelude to Civil War, 329Google Scholar; Faust, Drew Gilpin, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 120Google Scholar. Also see Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 18.Google Scholar

90 Douglas, , “Cultural Bias,” 225.Google Scholar

91 Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 178Google Scholar; Channing, , Crisis of Fear, 70Google Scholar; Stampp, , Imperiled Union, 204Google Scholar. See also Eaton, Clement, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev, . ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 161.Google Scholar

92 Eaton, , Freedom-of-Thought, 89117, 194.Google Scholar

93 Potter, , Impending Crisis, 454.Google Scholar

94 Edmund Ruffin and Albert Bledsoe, quoted in Davis, David Brion, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 37.Google Scholar

95 William Drayton, quoted in Ibid., 38; Channing, , Crisis of Fear, 3842.Google Scholar

96 Davis, , Slave Power Conspiracy, 3536.Google Scholar

97 Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 163Google Scholar; Chaffing, , Crisis of Fear, 59.Google Scholar

98 Channing, , Crisis of Fear, 3233.Google Scholar

99 Davis, , Slave Power Conspiracy, 37; the Calhoun quotation is from a speech delivered in 1836.Google Scholar

100 Elliott, William, quoted in Channing, Crisis of Fear, 71.Google Scholar

1 O1 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 283Google Scholar; Eaton, , Freedom-of-Thought, 194Google Scholar; Dumond, , Antislavery Origins, 116Google Scholar; Potter, , Impending Crisis, 454.Google Scholar

102 The phrase is Garrison's. See Richards, Leonard L., “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

103 Middleton, Henry, William Gilmore Simms, and Calhoun, quoted in Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology,” 369–70.Google Scholar

104 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 315. Fitzhugh's two major “defenses” of slavery, Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857), are devoted primarily to attacking capitalism.Google Scholar

105 Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 19.Google Scholar

106 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 304Google Scholar; Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 17.Google Scholar

107 Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 18Google Scholar; Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 304.Google Scholar

108 Dew, Thomas R., quoted in Faust, Sacred Circle, 128Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), 88.Google Scholar

109 Fitzhugh, , quoted in Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made, 184.Google Scholar

110 See Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Yankee Saints, esp. ch. 7, “Honor and Secession.” Also see Potter, , Impending Crisis, 457.Google Scholar

111 Genovese, , World the Slaveholders Made, 186.Google Scholar

112 For a contrary position arguing that a market defense of slavery was not only possible but dominant in the South, see Oakes, James, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982).Google Scholar

113 Nye, Fettered Freedom.

114 Stampp, , Imperiled Union, 236–7Google Scholar; Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 4185.Google Scholar

115 Stampp, , Imperiled Union, 237Google Scholar; Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 257–81.Google Scholar

116 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, esp. 246, 285–6Google Scholar; Fredrickson, , White Supremacy, 154Google Scholar. Also relevant is Wyatt-Brown, , Yankee Saints, 214–7.Google Scholar

117 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 282315Google Scholar; Fredrickson, , White Supremacy, 156–8.Google Scholar

118 Nye, , Fettered Freedom, 247–52, 302–15.Google Scholar

119 Lincoln was a regular subscriber to the Richmond Enquirer and the Charlestown Mercury, two of the South's most fervently proslavery newspapers. For Lincoln's familiarity with proslav-ery writings, see Wish, Harvey, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), 150–7.Google Scholar

120 Genovese, , “Slavery Ordained of God,” 8, 18, 29Google Scholar; Roark, James L., Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1977), 16.Google Scholar

121 Foner, , Free Soil, esp. 1139.Google Scholar

122 Ibid., 16, 30.

123 Douglas, and Wildaysky, , Risk and Culture, 178.Google Scholar

124 Foner, , Free Soil, 2335; at 24.Google Scholar

125 Ibid., 15, 40.

126 Ibid., 39.

127 Eulogy on Clay, Henry, July 6, 1852, Speeches, 3538Google Scholar; and Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 272, 292Google Scholar. In contrast, insurgent abolitionists attacked colonization for being an establishment ploy “supported by a formidable array of great names, of judges, governors, and members on Congress,” designed to “dupe the benevolent” (Friedman, , Gregarious Saints, 2425).Google Scholar

128 Eulogy on Clay, Speeches, 36.

129 Speech at Peoria, , Speeches, 56.Google Scholar

130 Genovese, , Political Economy of Slavery, 250.Google Scholar

131 Eulogy on Clay, , Speeches, 36.Google Scholar

132 From Lincoln's famous “lost speech” at the Bloomington convention on May 29, 1856 quoted in Don Fehrenbacher, E., Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 182.Google Scholar

133 Quoted in Wish, George Fitzhugh, 153–4.

134 Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society at Milwaukee, September 30, 1859, Speeches, 115–7.

135 Speech at Springfield, Illinois, accepting the Republican senatorial nomination, Speeches, 76.

136 Although the editorial was unsigned (leading Lincoln to erroneously attribute authorship to the paper's chief editor), subsequent scholarship has shown Fitzhugh to be the author (Wish, George Fitzhugh, 150–2).

137 Dwight Dumond describes Stephen Douglas as a “master of ambiguity” (Antislavery Origins, 101). For Douglas' use (and defense) of ambiguity, see Johannsen, Robert, Douglas, Stephen A. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. 427 and 440. Lincoln's insistence on shifting attention from the policy aspects of the slavery question to issues of principle is pointed out in Potter, Impending Crisis, 338–9.Google Scholar

138 Chaffing, Crisis of Fear, esp. 77–82. Statements such as the one by Wendell Phillips that “Lincoln is in place, Garrison in power,” could only reinforce Southern fears (quoted in Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 149).

139 Davis, , Slave Power Conspiracy, 39.Google Scholar

140 Potter, , Impending Crisis, 454.Google Scholar