Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Origins of the Civil War
Authors: Etcheson Nicole 
Published: June 2007

Author’s Introduction

The author argues that slavery is the root cause of the Civil War even though historians have often posited other explanations. Some other interpretations have been ideological (i.e., about the morality of slavery), others have been economic, political, or cultural.

Focus Questions

If you were to make an argument for the causes of the Civil War, what evidence or types of evidence would you want to examine?

In what ways can the different types of arguments (ideological, economic, political, and cultural), be combined to explain the causes of the Civil War? Do such arguments exclude or reinforce each other? In what ways?

Author Recommends

* E. L. Ayres, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York, NY: Norton, 2003).

A study of two counties, one north and one south, during the end of the sectional crisis and the early Civil War. While Potter, Walther, and Wilentz offer sweeping, often political, histories, Ayres offers a microhistory approach to the sectional conflict. Although Ayres writes within the tradition of seeing cultural differences between North and South, he concludes that slavery was the issue that drove the two sections apart.

* M. A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Views the development of the sectional crisis through the lens of Manifest Destiny. Territorial expansion drove hostility between the sections. Morrison concentrates on the political developments of the period connected to the acquisition and organization of the territories to show how the issue of slavery in the territories polarized the sections.

* D. M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1976).

The most comprehensive survey of the decade before the war. Potter traces the development of slavery as a political issue that North and South could not resolve. While it is a masterly and nuanced treatment of the political history, it does not incorporate social history and is more detailed than is useful for most undergraduates. E. H. Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (Wilmington, Scholarly Resources, 2004) has recently supplanted Potter as a survey of the decade. It is an easier read for undergraduates and incorporates the new literature than has emerged since Potter wrote.

* S. Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, NY: Norton, 2005).

A sweeping history of the United States from the constitutional era to the outbreak of the Civil War. Wilentz attempts to update Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s synthesis The Age of Jackson by returning to a focus on the evolution of democracy while at the same time incorporating the social history that emerged after Schlesinger wrote. Only the last third of this very long book covers the 1850s, but Wilentz argues that democracy had taken differing sectional forms by that period: a free‐labor version in the North and a plantation version in the South.

Online Materials

1. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/)

A prize‐winning website that profiles Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Material from this website formed the basis of Ayres, In the Presence of Mine Enemies. Although the website primarily concentrates on the Civil War itself, it provides access to newspapers and letters and diaries from the 1850s that show the development of, and reaction to, the sectional crisis in those counties. It also shows students the types of materials (census, tax, and church records as well as newspapers and letters and diaries) with which historians work to build an argument.

2. American Memory from the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html)

Although not specifically devoted to the origins of the Civil War, the American Memory site provides access to the collections of the Library of Congress which contain massive amounts of primary materials for students and scholars. From the website, one can gain access to congressional documents, periodicals from the 1850s, nineteenth‐century books, music, legal documents, memoirs by white and black southerners as well as slave narratives.

Sample Syllabus

Nicole Etcheson’s ‘Origins of the Civil War,’ History Compass, 3/1 (2005), doi:10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2005.00166.x can be used as a reading in any Civil War course.