Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?

Lecture Description

Professor Blight begins this lecture with an attempt to answer the question "why did the South secede in 1861?" Blight offers five possible answers to this question: preservation of slavery, "the fear thesis," southern nationalism, the "agrarian thesis," and the "honor thesis." After laying out the roots of secession, Blight focuses on the historical profession, suggesting some of the ways in which historians have attempted to explain the coming of the Civil War. Blight begins with James Ford Rhodes, a highly influential amateur historian in the late 19th century, and then introduces Charles and Mary Beard, whose economic interpretations of the Civil War had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

Course Description

This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

Related Resources

Lecture Transcript, Handouts, and Reading Assignment

Course Index

1. Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
2. Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
3. A Southern World View: the Old South and Proslavery Ideology
4. A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology, and the Abolition Movement
5. Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
6. Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
7. "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party
8. Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union
9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
10. The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
11. Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
12. "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
13. Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency
14. Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
15. Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
16. Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
17. Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
18. "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost
19. To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
20. Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
21. Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
22. Constitutional Crisis and the Impeachment of a President
23. Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
24. Retreat from Reconstruction: the Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
25. The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
26. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory
27. Legacies of the Civil War