The Civil War was a titanic four-year struggle that had a profound effect on the United States. Often described as the “first modern war,” it completed the bourgeois revolution2 of 1776. The war abolished slavery and “as a continuation of the bourgeois revolution begun during the Revolution/founding period, swept away those obstacles to pure market relations in the North and West and established the dominance of the cash nexus in social relations, making this perhaps the most purely bourgeois of all countries.”3 The revolutionary nature of the war stemmed from the increasingly irreconcilable coexistence of Southern slave labor and an expanding Northern capitalism based on free wage labor. “The present struggle between the South and the North,” wrote Karl Marx shortly after the outbreak of war, “is...nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”4
These two systems, of free labor and slave labor, had co-existed for decades. Far from being incompatible, they had been a necessary complement to one another. Capitalist development in the North depended on a slave South, which in turn fuelled the growth of slavery. “Northern merchants helped finance and export the Southern cotton crop” to the British textile industry. British capitalists provided credit for Northern exports and for imports of British-made manufactured goods.5 But there was a growing contradiction between the two economies. The rapid growth of Northern industry and agriculture, combined with large-scale immigration, transformed the North and its relation to the South. A new coalition of forces emerged, united in its opposition to the expansion of slavery. Composed of industrial capitalists, Midwest farmers, workers, and artisans, this coalition formed the basis of the new Republican Party. The chief slogan the Republicans advanced was “free soil, free labor,” embodying the aspiration of a modern economy based on widespread property ownership (“free soil”) and artisanal enterprise (“free labor”). The main impediment to achieving either of these goals, argued the Republicans, was the slaveocracy’s domination of government and the continued expansion of slavery into new territories. For Northern capital, slavery had become an impediment to capitalist development. Consolidation of political and economic power required limiting the further expansion of slavery.
The South was economically backward compared to the North, but its political power was greater. Of sixteen presidents elected between 1788 and 1848, half were Southern slaveholders.6 The slaveholders’ power stemmed from the Constitution’s provision that three-fifths of the disenfranchised slave population would be counted in determining a state’s representation in Congress and the allocation of electoral votes.
The economic divergence between North and South grew more stark in the decades leading up to the war. As the historian James McPherson describes it, “More striking was the growing contrast between farm and nonfarm occupations in the two sections. In 1800, 82 percent of the Southern labor force worked in agriculture compared with 68 percent in the free states. By 1860 the Northern share had dropped to 40 percent, while the Southern proportion had actually increased slightly, to 84 percent.”7 When it came to race, the demographics were clear: “[T]he most crucial demographic difference between North and South resulted from slavery. Ninety-five percent of the country’s Black people lived in the slave states, where Blacks constituted one-third of the population in contrast to their 1 percent of the Northern population.”8
The North-South conflict also expressed the growing competition between American and British capitalism. On the eve of the Civil War, the South’s output of cotton amounted to three-quarters of the world’s output. Cotton was the country’s most important export and source of foreign exchange, with most of the profits from shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing ending up in Northern hands. During the cotton boom of the 1850s, Southern planters demanded the South build its own fleet to ship cotton directly to England so it wouldn’t have to depend on Yankee shippers.9 The fortunes of the Southern ruling class were therefore completely tied to British, not Northern, capitalism. Northern capital could only fully establish itself by imposing its interests over those of the South. Above all, this meant breaking the slaveholders’ control of the state.
The Republican Party was able to unite otherwise antagonistic classes against the slaveocracy. The Republican Party, however, did not oppose slavery as such—only its expansion. Lincoln’s 1860 election campaign repeatedly stressed that the Republican Party did not wish to end slavery or grant social and political rights to Blacks. Lincoln’s views are representative of the Republican Party’s approach: “I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”10 So long as there were Blacks in the United States, he added, “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”11 “All I ask for the Negro,” Lincoln explained, “is that if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.”12
Lincoln’s initial response to secession included several attempts to avoid an escalation of the conflict. He was especially concerned to maintain the loyalty of the border slave states, insisting that restoration of the Union could be achieved without any challenge to slavery. Indeed, as historian Cedric Robinson writes,
As late as August 1862, in a meeting with Black leaders, Lincoln appealed for support for voluntary emigration. “Not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours....”
The abolitionists were sorely disappointed in the president. Wendell Phillips, perhaps the leading white abolitionist orator, who had cautiously championed Lincoln’s election (“not an abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man, Mr. Lincoln consents to represent an antislavery idea”), now characterized him as “stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted.”13
In August 1862, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune,14 wrote to Lincoln, “We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss.”15 In a public reply, Lincoln explained, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.... What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”16
Since the 1960s, many historians have clearly exposed the myth that Lincoln “fought the war to free the slaves,” stressing his belief in colonization, his desire to conciliate with the South, and his attempts to limit the scope of the conflict. This is indeed a necessary critical corrective to the mythic view of Lincoln. By the same token, however, many of these historians fail to grasp the revolutionary character of the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction that followed it. A revisionist effort that began as a challenge to the dominant racist histories of the Civil War is today used to justify pessimistic and conservative ideas. As Eric Foner argues, historians who began by challenging the portrayals of Reconstruction as a “tragic era,” now portray
change in the post–Civil War years as fundamentally “superficial.” Persistent racism, these postrevisionist scholars argued, had negated efforts to extend justice to Blacks, and the failure to distribute land prevented the freedmen from achieving true autonomy and made their civil and political rights all but meaningless. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars, Black and white, extended this skeptical view to virtually every aspect of the period. Recent studies of Reconstruction politics and ideology have stressed the “conservatism” of Republican policymakers, even at the height of Radical influence.... Summing up a decade of writing, C. Vann Woodward observed in 1979 that historians now understood “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstruction really was.”17
Such interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction downplay the significance and impact of these events, and crucially dismiss the possibility of any outcome other than the one that occurred. But the importance of this period is precisely that it showed that racism was not immutable and that ideas can change rapidly in periods of social