Civil War in the Making, 1815--1860

Avery O. Craven in his slim collection of lectures in taking a more interpretive than narrative approach to the Civil War finds that the majority of people in the North and South were conservative and only reluctantly came to war. Unlike most historians, he believes that slavery was not the primary cause of the war. He admits in another of his books, "The Coming of the Civil War," that his approach is "revisionist" but he said that his "effort in this book was to balance the picture, not to present a Southern point of view or to defend slavery" (vii). He believes that he was more fairly presenting the issues involved leading up to the war rather than accepting traditional, northern-centric biases. In his shorter book, he says that Lincoln's election precipitated secession because the South found that it must submit to Republican Party views or lose its way of life. He finds that the attitudes within that party justifiably gave rise to southern fears about its political domination and eventual abolition. Revolutionary changes in the North were based on its views of wealth and sin. He finds a cooperative management/labor paradigm shifting to an exploitative one in the new industrial North which led, in part, to condemning slavery as contributing to the problems of those exploited northern workers and farmers. Moral aspects in the North including religious revivalism combined with political reasons added to the party's antislavery stance which the South interpreted as primarily an abolition threat. Thus the disparate groups which finally made up the Republican Party gave southern interests valid reasons for worry over the future political power of the South and the concomitant threats to slavery. In the South where radical change was anathema, any thoughts of becoming "modernized" along the northern paradigm were viewed with horror. Attitudes therefore hardened in the South as well as the North and finally all of the abstractions boiled down to a very simple, but profound difference as expressed by Lincoln in 1860: "You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted" (67). Alexander Stephen's position maintained the southern right to slavery because the Constitution protected that property right and therefore could not be restricted. Craven emphasizes the anti-slavery debates in some southern states to make his point that before positions of the two sections hardened in the 1850's there was a substantial minority in the South which did not view chattel slavery as a positive good. But after the Compromise of 1850, the economic interests of the Northwest and Northeast united against southern interests paving the way for a clearer North-South conflict. Craven finds that the forces involved in creating the "Modern World" mainly after 1830 forced great changes and "these forces made long standing problems acute and clothed them with emotion" (85 footnote). The South could not accept a weakened co