Continuing from yesterday’s post: Gunderson’s argument, for all its questionable aspects, does have the virtue of making the dispute over slavery the cause of the Civil War itself. (1) It remains even now a sacrosanct point in the Lost Cause view that slavery was definitely not the cause of the Civil War. (Just ask Nikki Haley.)
He writes, “The reader has probably inferred from the foregoing discussion that this study will develop an explanation of the Civil War based on two forces, the South's vested interest in slavery and the North's aversion to it.”
He proceeds to explain from the available data – which in terms of counting the numbers of slaves was pretty decent – to show that the Southern economy was heavily invested in human slavery.
And he makes an argument that doesn’t need heavy statistical documentation:
The first seven states with the highest stake in slavery seceded in response to Lincoln's election. The next four states, North Carolina through Tennessee, decided not to withdraw from the Union when the deep South did, but that clearly was a temporizing stance. When the outbreak of hostilities forced them to unequivocally choose, they opted for the side which was attempting to preserve slavery. The last three states elected to remain in-and fight for-the union, notwithstanding their mixed feelings about the course.
The seceding states and the Confederacy itself were insistent of the centrality of maintaining property in human beings in the glorious Confederate cause.
And he remarks, apparently with a dose of irony: “The above results suggest that addressing the question of Civil War causation in the relatively amorphous context of ‘North’ and ‘South’ conceals a good deal of helpful information.” Because the war wasn’t about geography – except to the extent that geography involved slavery.
He also makes the point, “In all southern states … some individuals had an enormous [economic] interest in preserving slavery while others gained little or nothing from its perpetuation.” But that point can get tricky in Lost Cause polemics when the argument is made that most Southerners didn’t own slaves, so the war couldn’t have been about slavery. Because non-slaveowners in the South could and often did have a psychological identification with the slavery cause as such, because many a white farmer was working for the day when they themselves could afford to own slaves.
As Gunderson puts it, “slavery was also valued by the slave states” for objectives “such as race control”. And he makes the point in the context of warning that even the raw data on slave ownership has to be recognized as limited insofar as the picture it gives of broader public attitudes toward slavery in the slave states.
But after that, he goes into assumptions for which the statistical evidence is thin. In somewhat stereotypical economist style, he brings in equations like the one I referenced at the beginning of the previous post in this series in which he tries to estimate the various factors in the decision-making with mathematical equations, including how costly each side expected the war to be. As he writes, this set of assumptions “[i]n essence ... says that the war came because both parties viewed it as their least costly alternative.” He calls it a "’total package’ of expectations to explain the Civil War.”
But the value of mathematical equations in evaluating such events is considerably less than the seeming precision they may give the impression of achieving.
Near the end, he summarizes again the centrality of slavery in bringing about the Civil War:
[T]he South's vested interest in slavery is sufficient to explain its decision to go to war. Other reasons could have reinforced that behavior, but the South's direct economic stake in slavery provides a complete explanation by itself. For example, the South may have also wished to preserve slavery as a device for race control or they may have wished to reduce federal taxation, but neither of those reasons or any other is necessary to explain their resort to warfare.
Notes:
(1) Gunderson, Gerald (1974): The Origin of the American Civil War. The Journal of Economic History 34:4, 915-950. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2116615>
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