The coming of the Civil War

¶ … Civil War

Niven, John. The Coming of the Civil War, 1837-1861. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidon, Inc.

John Niven's book the Coming of the Civil War starts with a nice, detailed chronology of events which introduces the reader to the important events between 1837 and 1861 that preceded the American Civil War. For Niven, the problem of slavery was central to the eruption of the Civil War, as the southern states seceded for the purpose of preserving their slave system. Therefore, Niven starts his discussion by looking at the emergence of the peculiar institution in colonial America. He agrees with Edmund Morgan (the author of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia [New York, 1975]) that in the seventeenth century slave-owners viewed black slaves as the permanent and necessary underclass for maintaining social stability. And this social benefit of slavery for slave-owners as well as its economic benefits prompted the slave-owners to institutionalize the slave system. In contrast, the northerners developed diversified forms of farming, and used their surplus profit for fostering commerce, fisheries, and the industrial growth. These different developments in the South and the North eventually clashed, culminating in the Civil War.

Niven sees American unity, in terms of relations between the North and the South, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries as fragile. The American Revolution, he says, united the nation in the struggle against British imperialism, but as soon as the United States emerged as an independent nation, the tensions began. Discussing the debates over the contents of the Constitution and the follow-up discussion at the Philadelphia Convention, Niven say that the "institution of slavery was a fundamental problem for which the convention found only a temporary solution" (p.5). If the question of enumeration of slaves for determining the number of state representatives in the House was settled through a compromise (by counting each slave as one-fifth of a citizen), the differences of opinion over slave trade were far more significant. Several southern states strongly objected to banning the slave trade because of increasing dependence on cheap labor provided by the slaves, while northern slaves, partly because of moral opposition to slavery and partly because of its decreasing profitability, proposed a ban on slave trade and a gradual emancipation of slaves in the United States.

Economic and political differences among the North and the South eventually turned into cultural differences as well. Due to faster modernization in the North, many northerners began to view their southern counterparts as backward in their outlook. These differences were further exacerbated with the rise of penny press. Local press in each region, trying to generate greater readership, depicted cultural and social institutions of the other region in highly negative terms, with little regard to accuracy and objectivity. "There is no doubt," Niven writes, "that after a quarter of a century of such constant editorial bashing, the southern and northern publics could believe the worst of each other" (p. 12). Nowhere was such inflammatory rhetoric condemning each other as divisive as it was in the discussion of slavery. And finally the "virus of slavery that had infected the colonies in 1619 was finally incapacitating the Union," while "the triumph of the Republican party in the presidential election . . . made a war between the sections virtually certain" (p. 16).