The Origins of the Civil War: A New Interpretation

Abstract

The Origins of the Civil War: A New Interpretation Kenneth S. Greenberg (bio) John Ashworth. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, volume 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xii + 520 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $64.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). John Ashworth is a historian with a grand vision. The book under review here is the first volume of a projected two-volume study of the origins of the American Civil War. Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850, will be followed by Towards a Bourgeois Revolution, which will carry the story from 1850 through the Civil War. Even with only half of this study in print, we can appreciate the main features of an ambitious work of synthesis. Ashworth is a scholar who works within the broad Marxist tradition of historical analysis. The scope of the book he has produced is as vast as any undertaken by a major historian in recent years. In explaining the causes of the Civil War, Ashworth analyzes not only the labor systems and economies of both northern and southern societies, but also their relation to the world of politics and ideas, and to the interactions of all these factors within and between the sections. The book includes extended and detailed discussions of the Jeffersonian political tradition, the Missouri Crisis of 1820, the nature of slave labor as well as of precapitalist and capitalist free labor, antebellum economic development, the abolitionist movement, the proslavery argument, the Second Party System, and the Compromise of 1850—along with scores of related topics. It is the kind of large, complex, and subtle work destined to provoke both sharp praise and sharp criticism from fellow historians. As with any work in the Marxist tradition, Ashworth rests his analysis on an understanding of class and class conflict. Such material factors, he believes, must be at the heart of any explanation of the causes of the Civil War. Explicitly rejecting E. P. Thompson’s emphasis on class consciousness as central to the definition of class, Ashworth understands class “in terms of the relationship between two groups at the point of production, where one group is seeking to appropriate to itself some or all of the labor of the other” (p. 13). Moreover, he believes that behavior which “is the product of a desire to [End Page 607] benefit some or all the members of one group at the expense of some or all the members of the other, can be seen as class conflict, whatever the consciousness of the participants” (p. 13). In other words, for Ashworth, class and class conflict depend on material circumstances that need not be understood by historical subjects. Ashworth also draws on the concept of “hegemony” originally developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramschi during the 1920s, and in recent times made famous in impressive books about slavery and antislavery by Eugene Genovese and David Brion Davis. 1 Gramschi’s ideas are not easily compressed into a short summary, but they center on one key concept. Gramschi had been concerned with the problem of why the Bolshevik revolution did not spread to the West after its success in Russia. He believed that the answer was rooted in the “hegemonic” leadership exercised by the ruling class—by the way their intellectual, cultural, and moral beliefs came to be at least partially accepted by the masses as ideal values rather than as values that served class interests. Ashworth applies this concept to a variety of antebellum contexts—with special emphasis on the point that the antebellum leaders who articulated hegemonic ideas had virtually no consciousness that their beliefs served a ruling class. In other words, just as with class and class conflict, Ashworth emphasizes that hegemony operated with no one aware of its nature or existence. The best way to see this theoretical structure in action is to look closely at a few of the topics of concern to Ashworth. He begins this volume by situating slave resistance as a central, necessary factor in the coming of the Civil War. But as with everything else in the world described by Ashworth, slave resistance operated as a cause of the war...