:Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic.Volume 2: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861

Abstract

In a time when many Americans studying United States history have jettisoned the concept of class as a primary category of historical analysis, John Ashworth argues in this volume that class was central to the coming of the Civil War. Those who look for a revival of Charles and Mary Beard here, however, will find Ashworth calling for “a more subtle notion of class” (p. 4) and a “far more subtle and complex .… relationship between ideas and interests” (p. 6) than many readers might expect from one who employs class as his organizing concept. For Ashworth, both the cause and the consequence of the American Civil War were tied inextricably to the weaknesses of the southern slave system. The economic underperformance of the South stemmed directly from the central class conflict of this book, that between masters and slaves. Slaves' desire for freedom lay at the root of all sectional controversies, not only the obvious ones surrounding the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act but also the more central ones relative to northerners' civil liberties and the expansion of slave territory. He thus begins his group-by-group analysis with southern fire-eaters, for whom worries about outside forces—from the federal government to free blacks and non-slaveholding white southerners—intervening in the master-slave relationship ever and always went back to anxieties over slave resistance. Their need to preserve their control over this class relationship shaped their political behavior within the Union and the drive for secession. Their solicitude to protect slavery was only evidence of its weakness, for northern employers of wage labor did not need to go to such lengths to preserve their class system.