Into the seemingly endless parade of Civil War histories now troops Bruce Levine, editor of North and South and already author of three volumes on the conflict. Here, he takes on the shopworn argument of whether the main cause of the Civil War was the preservation of the Union or slavery. He purports “to fill a gaping hole in our collective memory” by establishing, once and for all, which of these impassioned issues was truly paramount.
For anyone new to the debate, a revisionist notion that the South truly went to war attempting to preserve the constitutional notion of states’ rights rose as a popular argument about 50 years ago. In part, this was a reaction to a perception of the Southern states as being made up of white racists and characterized the Northern states as being populated by militant abolitionists who uniformly viewed human bondage as a moral scourge.
Most historians know that such extreme characterizations are inaccurate. A plurality of Southerners was not in favor of slavery. Only about one person in four owned slaves or ever thought they would; many opposed slavery on moral grounds. Slaveholders nevertheless constituted a small but powerful political faction. By that same token, many Northerners had never seen a slave, and many were in favor of its continuance — just not its expansion.
Levine methodically cuts through the more sensational rhetoric to provide an objective portrait of what slavery actually was. So livid is the stain of shame that slavery has left on our national consciousness, his conclusion is hard for most contemporary Americans to accept: Except to the most ardent abolitionists, slavery was in the mid-19th century a patented fact of life in the United States. Its continuance, at least in the South, was also widely held to be an economic necessity. Even after nearly four years of the bloodiest war the modern world had ever seen, its utter abolishment was almost unimaginable.
Levine’s book marches economically through the conflict. After laying groundwork for the national debate that would ultimately be worked out on blood-soaked battlefields, he launches into a historical overview of the entire war. Linking major battles to political decisions, he outlines how the idea of universal emancipation took root and grew, not only in the mind of Abraham Lincoln but in the national perspective.
He establishes how the war’s genesis lay less in the question of constitutional law than in the notion of the dissolution of the grand democratic experiment that was the Union. No reasonable lawmaker, not even Lincoln, believed that the federal government had the right to interfere with state laws, even those regarding slavery. The gradual shift in thinking toward the notion that, indeed, Congress could abolish slavery at once and forever came about slowly and painfully and wouldn’t be fully realized until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865.
Levine also presents several ironies, for example, that the first 13th Amendment only prohibited the expansion of slavery to states and territories where it did not yet exist; that effort died, however, for want of ratification.
Another irony was that no one was quite sure of the exact nature of the conflict. Whether it was an insurrection, a rebellion or a legitimate war between two established nations was never clear either to the government or even to field officers trying to deal with local authorities in the South. This resulted in confusion regarding how to deal with runaway or liberated slaves; laws were on the books that specifically dealt with the issue, but how to apply them to people who were technically in rebellion was never certain.
Levine’s conclusion is that the war began over secession but that slavery was the cause of secession; the two issues cannot be separated. Ultimately, both were settled by the South’s defeat, but the question of how liberated human beings were to be treated politically would continue to plague the nation for another century and a half. Perhaps longer.
Levine’s well-documented study repeats work that has already been published, some quite recently. It adds little to the annals of Civil War history, but it provides a concise and well-written overview of the conflict and a cogent discussion of these still-polarizing issues.
Fiction writer and literary critic Clay Reynolds is a professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His forthcoming novel is Vox Populi.
The Fall of the House of Dixie
The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South
(Random House, $30)