Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise

In their classic work, The Rise of American Civilization, Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard famously termed the Civil War “a Second American Revolution and in a strict sense, the First.” Over the past seventy years, historians have often debated the merits of the Beards' classification and the extent to which the Civil War transformed the social structure of the United States. Scholars have shown much less interest in comparing the causes of and preludes to the two great military conflicts that defined American national identity. This lacuna in the historiography is surprising because, on even cursory inspection, the parallels are striking. Both the Revolution and the Civil War broke out roughly a dozen years after the formal conclusion of a war for empire on the North American continent that ended in an overwhelming triumph for Anglo-Americans. In each case, the acquisition of new territory raised critical questions about the authority structure of the empire and the limits of local autonomy. What began as a debate over the powers of the central government developed into a full-blown constitutional crisis that resulted in a declaration of independence and military resistance by several geographically contiguous provinces (thirteen in the case of the Revolution, eleven in the case of the Civil War). Faced with armed insurrection, the central government raised a huge military force to suppress the rebels, and a long and brutal war ensued. Although the ultimate results of the military conflicts differed greatly, the patterns of events leading to war seem remarkably similar.¹

This congruence suggests that it would be useful to revisit the causation of the Civil War with the model of the American Revolution in mind. For guidance in this task, I turn to John M. Murrin's provocative essay “The French and Indian War, the American …