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Causes of the English Civil Wars

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The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) were caused by a monumental clash of ideas between King Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) and his parliament. Arguments over the powers of the monarchy, finances, questions of religious practices and toleration, and the clash of leaders with personalities, who passionately believed in their own cause but had little empathy towards any other view, all contributed to the decade-long conflict which saw over 600 battles and sieges, thousands of deaths, the execution of Charles, abolition of the monarchy, and the proclamation of England as a republic.

The Three Civil Wars

The conflict between the Royalists ('Cavaliers') and Parliamentarians ('Roundheads') which rocked Britain is usually divided into three distinct parts:

• The First English Civil War (1642-1646)
• The Second English Civil War (Feb-Aug 1648)
• The Third English Civil War or Anglo-Scottish War (1650-1651)

The causes of all three conflicts, sometimes collectively known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland , and Ireland ), were much the same except that following Charles I's execution in 1649, the figurehead for the Royalists during the Third Civil War became his son Charles II of Scotland.

Historians do not agree on the precise causes of the Civil Wars, and so the following is a summary of the various viewpoints with no particular weight given to one cause over another.

A Multitude of Causes

The principal causes of the English Civil Wars may be summarised as:

• Charles I's unshakeable belief in the divine right of kings to rule
• Parliament's desire to curb the powers of the king
• Charles I's need for money to fund his court and wars
• Religious differences between the monarch, Parliament, Scottish Covenanters, and Irish Catholics
• The personalities of key leaders on both sides, which did not allow for compromise
• A rise in the number and economic power of the new gentry who now sought political change
• A belief that the king was a wicked warmonger and had to be removed

The Divine Right of Kings

Charles was very much like his father James I of England (r. 1603-1625) in that he had an unshakeable belief in his divine right to rule, given to him, he thought, by God , and so no man, be it politician or soldier, should ever question his reign. The English king once stated: "Parliaments are altogether in my power…As I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue or not to be" (McDowall, 88). This belief was never shaken throughout the wars, as seen in 1649 when he refused to recognise the authority of those who had put him on trial for treason:

I would know by what power I am called hither…I would know by what authority, I mean lawful…Remember, I am your king, your lawful king…a king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth. (Ralph Lewis, 160)

Charles' personality had much to do with the crisis. A little shy and lacking confidence after a childhood away from the limelight when his elder brother was groomed for the crown, Charles was thrust into the glare of politics when Henry, Prince of Wales died of fever aged 18. Never quite trusting those around him, inflexible, repeatedly unwilling to make concessions, and not particularly receptive to criticism, Charles was perhaps led into making certain decisions that he himself did not whole-heartedly believe in or which were, at best, naive in their ignorance of opposing and more modern views. The king is also accused of being unaware of the different social, economic, and religious identities within his own kingdoms, particularly regarding Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but also in parts of England where there were differences between regions and between rural and urban communities. In fairness, similar criticisms could be made of his opponents with such bullish MPs as John Pym (1583-1643) and Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) who were utterly convinced God was on their side and not with the king.

There is also the argument that Charles inherited a difficult situation, his father being the first Stuart monarch after the Tudors. The kingdom was a united one in name only. There had been turbulent religious reforms going back to Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547), and the fallout of these was still being felt. Tensions between monarch and Parliament were not new either, and the antiquated system of state finances did not help smooth the relationship. Granted that the situation was not an easy one, some historians would accuse Charles of making it much worse, turning only potential problems into very real ones (Gaunt, 18).

The position of the king as an absolute monarch in Charles' own mind should have been seriously challenged by such events as the 1628 Petition of Right when Parliament demanded the king stop trying to raise money outside of that institution. Other demands included an end to both imprisonment without trial and the use of martial law against civilians. Desperately in need of money for his war with France, the king was obliged to agree to the demands but it in no way altered his opinion of his status as a monarch who had no need to consult anyone on how to govern his kingdom.

Disputes Over Finances

The monarchy traditionally required Parliament to meet and pass favour on royal requests for money, which typically entailed MPs deciding budgets and raising taxes. Charles grew tired of Parliament's obstinacy and insistence that money be accounted for and spending curbed. The king repeatedly called and dismissed parliaments but eventually grew tired of this situation and decided to rule alone. Parliament was not called between 1629 and 1640, a period often called the 'Personal Rule' of the king. This strategy worked well enough until the king desperately needed funds in 1639 to pay for his campaigns against a Scottish army, which had occupied the north of England, and a serious rebellion in Ireland, both fuelled by religious differences and the king's high-handed policies.

The king's efforts to raise money during his 'Personal Rule' had met with only limited success. He borrowed from bankers, extracted new customs duties, imposed forced loans on the wealthy, sold monopolies, and widened the extraction and use of Ship Money (originally imposed on coastal communities only to help fund the navy). He also imposed fines based on archaic forest laws and increased fines imposed by courts. Many of these measures were deeply unpopular with the merchant classes and local gentry, who were more numerous than ever before. Such men were keen to see a political role to match their importance to the economy , and they were unwilling to fund the whims of a monarch who caused what they saw as unnecessary wars and who supported a declining and outdated feudal aristocracy. It did not help that Charles spent grandly on new palaces and art collections. Parliament, knowing the king had nowhere else to go for more cash, could now force Charles into political reforms and concessions.

Charles called what became known as the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 to help raise an army, but this failed after three frustrating weeks of discussion. As a result, the king could only muster a weak militia force against the Scots in the so-called Bishops' Wars (1639-1640). These wars ended in Charles making concessions to Scotland in the Treaty of Ripon in October 1640. Scotland was permitted its religious freedom, and the leaders on the battlefield were promised a handsome sum in cash to stand down. The king then had the practical problem of where exactly to get this money from without Parliament.

Without much choice in the matter, another Parliament was called in November 1640, and so began a period known as the 'Crisis of the Monarchy'. MPs seized their opportunity with the Long Parliament, as it became known, to guarantee their future survival. Money would be raised to pay off the Scots, but only on the condition that laws were passed which meant a parliament must be called at least once every three years, that it could not be dissolved by the monarch's wishes alone, royal ministers now had to be approved by Parliament, and Ship Money was made illegal. The king agreed but then blithely ignored his promises.

One of the decisions of Parliament which had particularly struck Charles and soured relations more than ever was the trial for treason and execution of his closest advisor Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford (1593-1641) in May 1641. Stafford had been accused of preparing to bring an Irish army into England to aid the king, for which there was not much evidence. More significant, perhaps, was Parliament's fear of what exactly the gifted and utterly ruthless Stafford planned in the future regarding themselves. As far as Charles was concerned, Parliament had drawn first blood.

In October 1641 the king needed money for yet another army when a rebellion broke out against English rule (some would say tyranny) in Ireland, fuelled by grievances over massive English land confiscations and the exclusive employment of English and Scottish immigrants on many large estates. Ulster was a particularly bloody battleground while Charles and the English Parliament wrangled over the formation of an army necessary to quell the rebellion. Parliament was particularly anxious that the king use such a force in Ireland and not against themselves. These fears were perhaps not unfounded, and the king's attempted arrest of five MPs in January 1642 hardly instilled confidence. The group, who included John Pym, had written the Grand Remonstrance listing the king's abuses of power and which was passed by Parliament in November 1641. The Remonstrance was then made public. In retaliation for the arrests, the Parliamentarians locked the gates of London, preventing Charles from entering his own capital. However, the king was encouraged by the distinct lack of unity in Parliament as the Remonstrance had only been accepted by 159 votes to 148. Some MPs believed that the king's powers were being unjustly infringed upon (for example, that he could not choose his own counsellors or military leaders), while the more radical members were keen to curb those powers even further. A military solution to the deadlock might now be Charles' best tactic. The king relocated from Hampton Court to York and then to Nottingham in August 1642, where a royal army was formed.

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Religious Differences

As we have seen, the multiple threads of discord that caused the English Civil Wars were intertwined in a complex political, religious, and military knot. Charles frequently created new enemies because of his religious policies. In 1627, Charles began to promote the Arminians, a branch of the Anglican Church that emphasised ritual, sacraments, and the clergy, and not the style of preaching seen in other branches closer to Calvinism. Some saw this move as a dangerous shift back towards Catholicism, a sign of a secret Papist conspiracy to reverse the English Reformation , an idea which was widely circulated in the 17th century by word of mouth and the printing press, adding fictional fuel to a bonfire of conspiracy theories that went all the way back to the one real conspiracy: the Gunpowder Plot to blow up King and Parliament in 1605.

Charles was not, in fact, a Catholic but a High Anglican, that is he had certain sympathies with such aspects of the Christian Church as ceremony, the elevation of the clergy and bishops, and what he perceived as the beauty and order provided by certain decorations within the church building itself. For many, though, it was difficult to distinguish this from 'Popish' practices and Roman Catholic doctrine. There were, too, more concrete concerns over the Arminians' seeming support of an absolute monarchy.

In 1633, the king appointed William Laud (1573-1645), an Arminian, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England. Laud was detested by the Puritans , who remained a rich and powerful section of English society and who had a strong presence in Parliament. Many MPs and army officers were Independents or Congregationalists, that is they wanted less power in the hands of bishops and more inclusion in the Church. Many wanted greater freedom for 'independent' congregations that assembled according to the individual believers' consciences and their own interpretation of the Bible . Laud outraged the Puritans when he reintroduced what were widely seen as Catholic practices into the more austere Anglican Church. These included decorating churches, railing off the altar or communion table to restrict access only for the clergy, and encouraging music . Laud banned preaching on any day other than a Sunday and replaced this with the Catechism. He also banned the weekday lectures that Puritans so valued. From Laud's and the king's perspective, these religious changes were slight and intended to emphasise ritual and order, but for the Puritans, this was a direct attack on the achievements of the Reformation . With no real means to protest or obstruct these measures, and with punishments and fines for non-compliance, many Puritans decided to emigrate and find greater religious freedom in North America or the Netherlands.

Charles also upset the Scottish Kirk and its Presbyterian church leaders by trying to install bishops there. The introduction of a new prayer book in 1637 was made without even consulting the Kirk. The Presbyterians (moderate Puritans who believed in a church hierarchy) much preferred to stick to their system where each congregation was led by a minister who in turn reported to the Synod, an elected supervisory council of elders. Further, the Scots believed Charles had no right to impose anything on the Scottish Church, a point many were willing to fight for.

Far from being a problem of ecclesiastical debate, these issues boiled over onto the battlefield in the Bishops' Wars mentioned above. The Scottish Presbyterian Church was determined to defend its independence and so became an active ally of the Parliamentarians in the English Civil Wars before switching sides in support of the Royalists when Parliament was deemed the greater threat. Those Scots who sought an alliance with England were known as the Covenanters from the agreement known as the National Covenant of February 1638. Those who signed the agreement swore to defend the Presbyterian Church, even by military means if necessary.

In England, meanwhile, as we have seen, the situation between King and Parliament had worsened considerably. By 1642, both sides were gathering arms, fortifying the cities they controlled, and preparing for war. The first major battle was at Edgehill in October. The result was indecisive, as it would be in many of the battles that followed. While often seen as a war that did not involve a great number of civilians, it is estimated that at least one in four adult male Britons fought at some point, one in ten people in urban areas lost their homes, and the vast majority of people had to bear heavy taxes, even if they themselves avoided the actual fighting. As the Civil War progressed so new motives arrived for supporters on both sides. Charles' policy in Ireland further alienated the king from many of his English subjects. The king had struck a deal with Irish rebels so that Irish Catholic troops might bolster his army. This never came about in reality as most of the troops from Ireland were Charles' English soldiers now released from policing duties there, and even these were few in number. The episode did raise the serious question as to Charles' loyalty to the Anglican Church.

More and more people came to see the king as a despot and wilful warmonger who no longer had his people's interests foremost in his mind. The capture of the king's personal writing cabinet at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 revealed that the king had no intention of ever compromising with Parliament. Already for many, there could be no peaceful resolution to the conflict. This was particularly so after the Second Civil War and the invasion of a Scottish army into England. The king, even in self-imposed exile on the Isle of Wight, came to be viewed as a 'man of blood', a biblical term for a ruler who waged war against his own people. In his treaty with the Scots known as the Engagement of December 1647, he had even promised to favour the Presbyterian Church in England, disband the English army and rely only on a Scottish one, and suppress radical religious groups. This was the final straw.

With more money and a more professional army, the Parliamentarians were the victors again at the Battle of Preston in 1648 . Charles I was tried and found guilty of treason to his own people and government. The king was executed on 30 January 1649. The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, and the Anglican Church was reformed. Scotland remained loyal to the crown, and Charles' eldest son Charles was, by right of birth, its king. However, a Scottish army was again defeated by an English one in the so-called Third English Civil War, and the would-be Charles II was obliged to flee to France.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) ruled the 'Commonwealth' republic as Lord Protector. When Cromwell died, his chosen successor, his son Richard Cromwell, was not supported for long, and so, to avert another civil war, there was the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. Charles returned from France to become Charles II of England (r. 1660-1685), but he now had to rule alongside a much more powerful Parliament.

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Bibliography

• Anderson, Angela & Scarboro, Dale. Stuart Britain. Hodder Education, 2015.
• Bennett, Martyn. The English Civil War 1640-1649 . Routledge, 2014.
• Gaunt, Peter. The English Civil Wars. Osprey Publishing, 2003.
• Hunt, Tristram. The English Civil War at First Hand. Penguin UK, 2011.
• Miller, John. Early Modern Britain, 1450–1750 . Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Morrill, John. The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor & Stuart Britain. Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Wanklyn, Malcolm. Decisive Battles of the English Civil War. Pen and Sword Military, 2007.

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Cartwright, M. (2022, February 04). Causes of the English Civil Wars . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1939/causes-of-the-english-civil-wars/

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Personal Rule and the seeds of rebellion (1629–40)

The bishops’ wars and the return of parliament (1640–42).

• The first English Civil War (1642–46)
• Conflicts in Scotland and Ireland
• Second and third English Civil Wars (1648–51)
• Cost and legacy

• What is Charles I known for?
• What was Charles I’s early life like?
• How did Charles I become king of Great Britain and Ireland?
• What was the relationship between Charles I and Parliament like?
• Why was Charles I executed?

English Civil Wars

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• Table Of Contents

When did the English Civil Wars occur?

The English Civil Wars occurred from 1642 through 1651. The fighting during this period is traditionally broken into three wars: the first happened from 1642 to 1646, the second in 1648, and the third from 1650 to 1651.

What was the first major battle fought in the English Civil Wars?

The first major battle of the English Civil Wars fought on English soil was the Battle of Edgehill , which occurred in October 1642. Forces loyal to the English Parliament, commanded by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex , delayed Charles I’s march on London.

How many people died during the English Civil Wars?

An estimated 200,000 people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of the English Civil Wars, making it arguably the bloodiest conflict in the history of the British Isles.

When did the English Civil Wars come to an end?

The English Civil Wars ended on September 3, 1651, with Oliver Cromwell ’s victory at Worcester and the subsequent flight of Charles II to France.

English Civil Wars , (1642–51), fighting that took place in the British Isles between supporters of the monarchy of Charles I (and his son and successor , Charles II ) and opposing groups in each of Charles’s kingdoms, including Parliamentarians in England , Covenanters in Scotland , and Confederates in Ireland . The English Civil Wars are traditionally considered to have begun in England in August 1642, when Charles I raised an army against the wishes of Parliament , ostensibly to deal with a rebellion in Ireland. But the period of conflict actually began earlier in Scotland, with the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40, and in Ireland, with the Ulster rebellion of 1641. Throughout the 1640s, war between king and Parliament ravaged England, but it also struck all of the kingdoms held by the house of Stuart —and, in addition to war between the various British and Irish dominions, there was civil war within each of the Stuart states. For this reason the English Civil Wars might more properly be called the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The wars finally ended in 1651 with the flight of Charles II to France and, with him, the hopes of the British monarchy.

Compared with the chaos unleashed by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) on the European continent, the British Isles under Charles I enjoyed relative peace and economic prosperity during the 1630s. However, by the later 1630s, Charles’s regime had become unpopular across a broad front throughout his kingdoms. During the period of his so-called Personal Rule (1629–40), known by his enemies as the “Eleven-Year Tyranny” because he had dissolved Parliament and ruled by decree, Charles had resorted to dubious fiscal expedients, most notably “ ship money ,” an annual levy for the reform of the navy that in 1635 was extended from English ports to inland towns. This inclusion of inland towns was construed as a new tax without parliamentary authorization. When combined with ecclesiastical reforms undertaken by Charles’s close adviser William Laud , the archbishop of Canterbury , and with the conspicuous role assumed in these reforms by Henrietta Maria , Charles’s Catholic queen, and her courtiers, many in England became alarmed. Nevertheless, despite grumblings, there is little doubt that had Charles managed to rule his other dominions as he controlled England, his peaceful reign might have been extended indefinitely. Scotland and Ireland proved his undoing.

In 1633 Thomas Wentworth became lord deputy of Ireland and set out to govern that country without regard for any interest but that of the crown. His thorough policies aimed to make Ireland financially self-sufficient; to enforce religious conformity with the Church of England as defined by Laud, Wentworth’s close friend and ally; to “civilize” the Irish; and to extend royal control throughout Ireland by establishing British plantations and challenging Irish titles to land. Wentworth’s actions alienated both the Protestant and the Catholic ruling elites in Ireland. In much the same way, Charles’s willingness to tamper with Scottish land titles unnerved landowners there. However, it was Charles’s attempt in 1637 to introduce a modified version of the English Book of Common Prayer that provoked a wave of riots in Scotland, beginning at the Church of St. Giles in Edinburgh . A National Covenant calling for immediate withdrawal of the prayer book was speedily drawn up on February 28, 1638. Despite its moderate tone and conservative format, the National Covenant was a radical manifesto against the Personal Rule of Charles I that justified a revolt against the interfering sovereign .

The turn of events in Scotland horrified Charles, who determined to bring the rebellious Scots to heel. However, the Covenanters , as the Scottish rebels became known, quickly overwhelmed the poorly trained English army, forcing the king to sign a peace treaty at Berwick (June 18, 1639). Though the Covenanters had won the first Bishops’ War , Charles refused to concede victory and called an English parliament, seeing it as the only way to raise money quickly. Parliament assembled in April 1640, but it lasted only three weeks (and hence became known as the Short Parliament ). The House of Commons was willing to vote the huge sums that the king needed to finance his war against the Scots, but not until their grievances—some dating back more than a decade—had been redressed. Furious, Charles precipitately dissolved the Short Parliament. As a result, it was an untrained, ill-armed, and poorly paid force that trailed north to fight the Scots in the second Bishops’ War. On August 20, 1640, the Covenanters invaded England for the second time, and in a spectacular military campaign they took Newcastle following the Battle of Newburn (August 28). Demoralized and humiliated, the king had no alternative but to negotiate and, at the insistence of the Scots, to recall parliament.

A new parliament (the Long Parliament ), which no one dreamed would sit for the next 20 years, assembled at Westminster on November 3, 1640, and immediately called for the impeachment of Wentworth, who by now was the earl of Strafford. The lengthy trial at Westminster, ending with Strafford’s execution on May 12, 1641, was orchestrated by Protestants and Catholics from Ireland, by Scottish Covenanters, and by the king’s English opponents, especially the leader of Commons, John Pym —effectively highlighting the importance of the connections between all the Stuart kingdoms at this critical junction.

To some extent, the removal of Strafford’s draconian hand facilitated the outbreak in October 1641 of the Ulster uprising in Ireland. This rebellion derived, on the one hand, from long-term social, religious, and economic causes (namely tenurial insecurity, economic instability, indebtedness, and a desire to have the Roman Catholic Church restored to its pre- Reformation position) and, on the other hand, from short-term political factors that triggered the outbreak of violence. Inevitably, bloodshed and unnecessary cruelty accompanied the insurrection, which quickly engulfed the island and took the form of a popular rising, pitting Catholic natives against Protestant newcomers. The extent of the “massacre” of Protestants was exaggerated, especially in England where the wildest rumours were readily believed. Perhaps 4,000 settlers lost their lives—a tragedy to be sure, but a far cry from the figure of 154,000 the Irish government suggested had been butchered. Much more common was the plundering and pillaging of Protestant property and the theft of livestock. These human and material losses were replicated on the Catholic side as the Protestants retaliated.

The Irish insurrection immediately precipitated a political crisis in England, as Charles and his Westminster Parliament argued over which of them should control the army to be raised to quell the Irish insurgents. Had Charles accepted the list of grievances presented to him by Parliament in the Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 and somehow reconciled their differences, the revolt in Ireland almost certainly would have been quashed with relative ease. Instead, Charles mobilized for war on his own, raising his standard at Nottingham in August 1642. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms had begun in earnest. This also marked the onset of the first English Civil War fought between forces loyal to Charles I and those who served Parliament. After a period of phony war late in 1642, the basic shape of the English Civil War was of Royalist advance in 1643 and then steady Parliamentarian attrition and expansion.

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English Civil Wars

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 10, 2021 | Original: December 2, 2009

Between 1642 and 1651, armies loyal to King Charles I and Parliament faced off in three civil wars over longstanding disputes about religious freedom and how the “three kingdoms” of England, Scotland and Ireland should be governed. Notable outcomes of the wars included the execution of King Charles I in 1649, 11 years of republican rule in England and the establishment of Britain’s first standing national army.

Background: The Rise of the Stuarts and King Charles I

England’s last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I , died in 1603, and was succeeded by her cousin, James Stuart . Already King James VI of Scotland, he became King James I of England and Ireland as well, uniting the three kingdoms under a single ruler for the first time. Though at first the Catholic minority in England welcomed James’ ascension to the throne, they later turned against his regime, even attempting to blow up the king and Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot .

James’ son, Charles I, succeeded him on the throne in 1625. His marriage to a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France fueled suspicions (especially among more radical Protestants, known as Puritans ) that the king would introduce Catholic traditions back into the Church of England. Charles also believed strongly in his divine right to rule, and in 1629 he dismissed Parliament altogether; he would not recall it for the next 11 years.

War in Scotland

Beginning in the late 1630s, Charles made efforts to establish a more English-like religious practice in Scotland, generating fierce resistance among that country’s Presbyterian majority. A Scottish army defeated Charles’ forces and invaded England, forcing Charles to recall Parliament in 1640 to generate the money to pay his own troops and settle the conflict. Instead, Parliament acted quickly to restrict the king’s powers, even ordering the trial and execution of one of his chief ministers, Lord Strafford.

Amid the political upheaval in London, the Catholic majority in Ireland rebelled, massacring hundreds of Protestants there in October 1641. Tales of the violence inflamed tensions in England, as Charles and Parliament disagreed on how to respond. In January 1642, the king tried and failed to arrest five members of Parliament who opposed him. Fearing for his own safety, Charles fled London for northern England, where he called on his supporters to prepare for war. 

Did you know? In May 1660, nearly 20 years after the start of the English Civil Wars, Charles II finally returned to England as king, ushering in a period known as the Restoration.

First English Civil War (1642-46)

When civil war broke out in earnest in August 1642, Royalist forces (known as Cavaliers) controlled northern and western England, while Parliamentarians (or Roundheads) dominated in the southern and eastern regions of the country. The king’s forces appeared to be gaining the upper hand by early 1643, especially after concluding an alliance with Irish Catholics to end the Irish Rebellion. But a key alliance between the Parliamentarians and Scotland that year led to a large Scottish army joining the fray on Parliament’s side in January 1644.

On July 2, 1644, Royalist and Parliamentarian forces met at Marston Moor, west of York, in the largest battle of the First English Civil War. A Parliamentarian force of 28,000 routed the smaller Royalist army of 18,000 , ending the king’s control of northern England. In 1645, Parliament created a permanent, professional, trained army of 22,000 men. This New Model Army, commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell , scored a decisive victory in June 1645 in the Battle of Naseby, effectively dooming the Royalist cause.

Second English Civil War (1648-49) and execution of King Charles I

Even in defeat, Charles refused to give in, but sought to capitalize on the religious and political divisions among his enemies. While on the Isle of Wight in 1647-48, the king managed to conclude a peace treaty with the Scots and marshal Royalist sentiment and discontent with Parliament into a series of armed uprisings across England in the spring and summer of 1648.

After Fairfax, Cromwell and the New Model Army easily crushed the Royalist uprisings, hard-line opponents of the king took charge of a smaller Parliament. Concluding that peace could not be reached while Charles was still alive, they set up a high court and put the king on trial for treason. Charles was found guilty and executed by beheading on January 30, 1649 at Whitehall.

Third English Civil War (1649-51)

With Charles dead, a republican regime was established in England, backed by the military might of the New Model Army. Beginning late in 1649, Cromwell led his army in a successful reconquest of Ireland, including the notorious massacre of thousands of Irish and Royalist troops and civilians at Drogheda. Meanwhile, Scotland came to an agreement with the executed king’s eldest son, also named Charles, who was crowned King Charles II of Scotland in early 1651.

Even before he was officially crowned, Charles II had formed an army of English and Scottish Royalists, prompting Cromwell to invade Scotland in 1650. After losing the Battle of Dunbar to Cromwell’s forces in September 1650, Charles led an invasion of England the following year, only to suffer another defeat against a huge Parliamentarian army at Worcester. The young king narrowly escaped capture, but the decisive victory ended the Third English Civil War, along with the larger War of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland).

Impact of the Civil Wars

An estimated 200,000 English soldiers and civilians were killed during the three civil wars, by fighting and the disease spread by armies; the loss was proportionate, population-wise, to that of World War I.

In 1653, Oliver Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and tried (largely unsuccessfully) to consolidate broad support behind the new republican regime amid the continued growth of radical religious sects and widespread uneasiness about the new standing army.

After Cromwell’s death in 1658, he was succeeded as protector by his son Richard, who abdicated just eight months later. With the continued disintegration of the republic, the larger Parliament was reassembled, and began negotiations with Charles II to resume the throne. The triumphant king arrived in London in May 1660, beginning the English Restoration .

British Civil Wars. National Army Museum .

Mark Stoyle. Overview: Civil War and Revolution, 1603-1714. BBC .

The English Civil Wars: Origins, events and legacy. English Heritage .

Simon Jenkins. A Short History of England: The Glorious Story of a Rowdy Nation . (PublicAffairs, 2011) 

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The Origins & Causes of the English Civil War

We English like to think of ourselves as gentlemen and ladies; a nation that knows how to queue, eat properly and converse politely. And yet in 1642 we went to war with ourselves…

Victoria Masson

We English like to think of ourselves as gentlemen and ladies; a nation that knows how to queue, eat properly and converse politely. And yet in 1642 we went to war with ourselves. Pitting brother against brother and father against son, the English civil war is a blot on our history. Indeed, there was barely an English ‘gentleman’ who was not touched by the war.

Yet how did it start? Was it simply a power struggle between king and Parliament? Were the festering wounds left by the Tudor religious roller coaster to blame? Or was it all about the money?

Divine right – the God given right of an anointed monarch to rule unhindered – was established firmly in the reign of James I (1603-25). He asserted his political legitimacy by decreeing that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority; not the will of his people, the aristocracy or any other estate of the realm, including Parliament. Under this definition any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict the powers of the monarch goes against the will of God. The concept of a God given right to rule was not born in this period however; writings as far back as AD 600 infer that the English in their varied Anglo-Saxon states accepted those in power had God’s blessing.

This blessing should create an infallible leader – and there is the rub. Surely if you have been given power to rule by God, you should demonstrate an ability to wield this responsibility with a degree of success? By 1642 Charles I found himself nearly bankrupt, surrounded by blatant corruption and nepotism and desperate to hold onto the thin veil that masked his religious uncertainty. He was by no means an infallible leader, a fact that was glaringly obvious to both Parliament and the people of England.

Parliament had no tangible power at this point in English history. They were a collection of aristocrats who met at the King’s pleasure to offer advice and to help him collect taxes. This alone gave them some influence, as the king needed their seal of approval to legitimately set taxes in motion. In times of financial difficulty that meant the King had to listen to Parliament. Stretched thinly through the lavish lifestyles and expensive wars of the Tudor and Stuart period, the Crown was struggling. Coupled with his desire to extend his high Anglican (read here thinly disguised Catholic) policies and practices to Scotland, Charles I needed the financial support of Parliament. When this support was withheld, Charles saw it as an infringement on his Divine Right and as such, he dismissed Parliament in March 1629. The following eleven years, during which Charles ruled England without a Parliament, are referred to as the ‘personal rule’. Ruling without Parliament was not unprecedented but without access to Parliament’s financial pulling power, Charles’s ability to acquire funds was limited.

Charles’s personal rule reads like a ‘how to annoy your countrymen for dummies’. His introduction of a permanent Ship Tax was the most offensive policy to many. Ship Tax was an established tax that was paid by counties with a sea border in times of war. It was to be used to strengthen the Navy and so these counties would be protected by the money they paid in tax; in theory, it was a fair tax against which they could not argue.

Charles’s decision to extend a year-round Ship Tax to all counties in England provided around £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638. The resultant backlash and popular opposition however proved that there was growing support for a check on the power of the King.

This support did not just come from the general tax paying population but also from the Puritanical forces within Protestant England. After Mary I , all subsequent English monarchs have been overtly Protestant. This stabilization of the religious roller coaster calmed the fears of many in Tudor times who believed if a civil war was to be fought in England it would be fought along religious lines.

While outwardly a Protestant, Charles I was married to a staunch Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France. She heard Roman Catholic mass every day in her own private chapel and frequently took her children, the heirs to the English throne, to mass. Furthermore, Charles’ support for his friend Archbishop William Laud’s reforms to the English Church were seen by many as a move backwards to the popery of Catholicism. The re-introduction of stained glass windows and finery within churches was the last straw for many Puritans and Calvinists.

To prosecute those who opposed his reforms, Laud used the two most powerful courts in the land, the Court of High Commission and the Court of Star Chamber. The courts became feared for their censorship of opposing religious views and were unpopular among the propertied classes for inflicting degrading punishments on gentlemen. For example, in 1637 William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick were pilloried, whipped, mutilated by cropping and imprisoned indefinitely for publishing anti-episcopal pamphlets.

Charles’s continued support for these types of policies continued to pile on support for those that were looking to put a limit on his power.

By October 1640, Charles’ unpopular religious policies and attempts to extend his power north had resulted in a war with the Scots. This was a disaster for Charles who had neither the money nor the men to fight a war. He rode north to lead the battle himself, suffering a crushing defeat that left Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham occupied by Scottish forces.

Public demands for a Parliament were growing and Charles realised that whatever his next step was to be, it would require a financial backbone. After the conclusion of the humiliating Treaty of Ripon that let the Scots remain in Newcastle and Durham whilst being paid £850 a day for the privilege, Charles summoned Parliament. Being called upon to help King and country instilled a sense of purpose and power into this new Parliament. They now presented an alternative power in the country to the King. The two sides in the English Civil war had been established.

The slide to war becomes more pronounced from this stage onwards. That is not to say it was inevitable, or that the subsequent removal and execution of Charles I was even a notion in the heads of those who opposed him. However, the balance of power had begun to shift. Parliament wasted no time arresting and putting on trial the Kings closest advisers, including Archbishop Laud and Lord Strafford.

In May 1641 Charles conceded an unprecedented act, which forbade the dissolution of the English Parliament without Parliament’s consent. Thus emboldened, Parliament now abolished Ship Tax and the courts of The Star Chamber and The High Commission.

Over the next year Parliament began to introduce increased emboldened demands, and by June 1642 these were too much for Charles to bear. His bullish response in barging into the House of Commons and attempting to arrest five MPs lost him the last remnants of support among undecided MPs. The sides were crystallized and the battle lines were drawn. Charles I raised his standard on 22nd August 1642 in Nottingham: the Civil War had begun.

So the origins of the English Civil War are complex and intertwined. England had managed to escape the Reformation relatively unscathed, avoiding much of the heavy fighting that raged in Europe as Catholic and Protestant forces battled in The Thirty Year War. However, the scars of the Reformation were still present beneath the surface and Charles did little to avert public fears about his intentions for the religious future of England.

Money had also been an issue from the outset, especially as the royal coffers had been emptied during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. These issues were exacerbated by Charles’s mismanagement of the public coffers and through introducing new and ‘unfair’ taxes he simply added to the already growing anti-Crown sentiment up and down the country.

These two points demonstrate the fact that Charles believed in his Divine Right, a right to rule unchallenged. Through the study of money, religion and power at this time it is clear that one factor is woven through them all and must be noted as a major cause of the English Civil War; that is the attitude and ineptitude of Charles I himself, perhaps the antithesis of an infallible monarch.

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The English Civil Wars: History and Stories

The English Civil Wars were a catastrophic series of conflicts that took place in the middle of the 17th century. Fought between those loyal to the king, Charles I, and those loyal to Parliament, the wars divided the country at all levels of society. At the heart of the conflict were fundamental questions about power and religion.

The legacy of the Civil Wars can be seen not only in our political landscape, but in the historic environment. Many of the ruined castles we see today sustained their damage during the war. Learn more about the Civil Wars, the people who lived through them, and how the conflict unfolded at English Heritage sites.

• The English Civil Wars comprised three wars, which were fought between Charles I and Parliament between 1642 and 1651.
• The wars were part of a wider conflict involving Wales, Scotland and Ireland, known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
• The human cost of the wars was devastating. Up to 200,000 people lost their lives, or 4.5% of the population. This was as great a loss, proportionally, as during the First World War.
• The causes of the wars were complex and many-layered. At the centre of the conflict were disagreements about religion, and discontent over the king’s use of power and his economic policies.
• In 1649, the victorious Parliamentarians sentenced Charles I to death. His execution resulted in the only period of republican rule in British history, during which military leader Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. This period is known as the Interregnum, and lasted for 11 years until 1660 when Charles’s son, Charles II, was restored to the throne.
• The Civil Wars saw the beginning of the modern British Army tradition with the creation of the New Model Army – the country’s first national army, comprised of trained, professional soldiers.
• Many castles were besieged during the wars, resulting in severe damage. Others were deliberately destroyed, or ‘slighted’, after the fighting. The ruinous state of many of England’s castles that we see today can be traced back to these events.

The Civil Wars Explained

Journey through one the most complex and turbulent periods in English history with our comprehensive guide to the events of the Civil Wars.

We look at what caused the wars, how they unfolded, and what their legacy was – from their origins in the early years of Charles I’s reign to Parliament’s short-lived victory and the subsequent Restoration of the monarchy.

Key Figures and Stories

Read about the man at the centre of the most turbulent period of England’s history, and learn about the statue dedicated to him in Trafalgar Square, London. 

A Royal Prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle

Read about Charles I’s time as a prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, including his many attempts to escape.

Jane Whorwood: Royalist Spy

Jane Whorwood was one of the key agents behind attempts to free Charles I from captivity on the Isle of Wight, notably from Carisbrooke Castle, in 1648.

Charles II and the Royal Oak

Find out how the future king escaped from Parliamentarian forces after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, giving English history one of its greatest adventure stories.

The Battle of the Downs

This major sea battle between the Dutch and the Spanish in 1639 exposed the weakness of the English navy. Read more about the battle and how it destabilised Charles I’s reign in the years running up to the first Civil War.

The Civil Wars and the British Army

Discover how the reorganisation of the Parliamentarian army during the Civil Wars marked the beginning of the modern British Army tradition.

Living Through War

To live in the middle of the 17th century was to endure some of British history’s most distressing and divisive events. Discover just some of the people associated with our properties who lived through them, and how they carried on with their lives and professions.

Margaret Cavendish

Novelist, poet and philosopher Margaret Cavendish travelled to Paris with Queen Henrietta Maria to escape the violence of the Civil Wars, and remained in exile there throughout the Interregnum. Against the backdrop of this political upheaval, she wrote prolifically on sex, gender, and natural and political philosophy.

Lady Anne Clifford

In 1649 Lady Anne Clifford, a staunch Royalist, left London to reclaim her family estates in northern England. Finding her lands badly neglected and the five Clifford castles much damaged by the events of the Civil Wars, she devoted the final three decades of her life to restoring them.

John Dryden

Poet John Dryden briefly served in Cromwell’s government and on his death commemorated him in ‘Heroic Stanzas’. After the Restoration, however, his loyalties shifted and he wrote several long poems praising Charles II. The king later officially employed Dryden as Poet Laureate. Read more about the poet and where to find his London blue plaque.

Samuel Pepys

Diarist Samuel Pepys witnessed Charles I’s execution as a 15-year-old boy. He held Republican sympathies that day, but, like Dryden, he swiftly adopted Royalist loyalties once Charles II was restored to the throne. It was to Pepys that Charles II recounted his dramatic escape from Boscobel House. Read more about the famous chronicler, and discover his London blue plaque.

Castles Under Siege

Discover the places in English Heritage’s care that were besieged during the wars.

Old Wardour

In 1643 Lady Blanche Arundell defended Old Wardour against Parliamentarian attack for six days before being forced to surrender. Read more about the siege and the castle’s fate after the wars.

In 1646 Goodrich Castle was the scene of one of the most hard-fought sieges of the first Civil War, which Parliament finally won with the aid of a huge mortar, known as Roaring Meg. 

Scarborough

Scarborough Castle was besieged twice during the Civil Wars, and during one of them, the bombardment was so intense that half the tower collapsed. Read about the sieges, and more of the castle’s history, here.

In 1646 Pendennis was one of the last Royalist strongholds to hold out against the Parliamentarian army. About 1,000 soldiers and their dependants endured a five-month siege, only surrendering when their food supplies ran out.

After Charles I seized Donnington in 1643, the castle was attacked by the Parliamentarians many times – twice being relieved by the king in person. Victorious Parliamentarian troops finally demolished the castle in 1646, leaving only the gatehouse standing. 

Beeston Castle passed between Royalist and Parliamentarian hands several times during the Civil Wars. The Royalists finally surrendered in 1645, and the castle was slighted.

War came to Walmer in 1648, while Charles I was imprisoned. In Kent, a rebellion broke out in support of the king. Sailors from the English navy in the Downs captured Sandown, Deal and Walmer castles, but all were eventually recaptured by Parliament.

Walmer’s neighbour, Deal Castle, also saw battle in 1648, and held out against a ferocious siege for nearly three months before finally succumbing to Parliament. Read more about Deal’s history.

Explore More

Boscobel House

Explore the history of Boscobel House, where Charles II hid while fleeing Parliamentarian soldiers in 1651. 

White Ladies Priory

Read about Boscobel’s sister site, where Charles II first arrived after his flight from the battle of Worcester. It was here that he adopted his disguise as a peasant, and plotted his escape.

Cromwell’s Castle

Standing on a rocky promontory in the Scilly Isles, this round tower was built after Parliament’s conquest of the Scillies in 1651 and is one of the few surviving Cromwellian fortifications in Britain. Read more about its history.

Life under siege at Goodrich Castle

The 17th-century objects found at Goodrich Castle help us to imagine what life at the castle was like during the Civil War siege. View some of them in detail here.

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Oliver cromwell english civil war charles i.

Causes of the English Civil War

What caused the civil war what part did cromwell play in causing the war.

Contemporaries were themselves unsure what had caused the war. The parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke was able to discern no clear cause, explaining the outbreak of hostilities as the result of ‘one unexpected accident after another’ which had caused the nation ‘insensibly’ to slide into war. When contemporaries attempted more sophisticated analysis of the causes of the civil war, they came up with very different conclusions. While the royalist politician Edward Hyde, later the Earl of Clarendon, felt that war had resulted from political errors and blunders made by both sides in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the civil war, the political philosopher James Harrington felt that it was caused by long term social and economic changes which had been underway since the sixteenth century or before.

Historians have always adopted and continue to adopt very different approaches to the causes and origins of the civil war. Some, like Harrington, have continued to look to long-term problems, issues or developments, dating back to the early Tudor or even the late medieval period, while others, like Hyde, have argued that state and society were sound until the early seventeenth century or beyond and that the causes of the war were very short-term, emerging only in the 1620s or the 1630s. Many of the so-called revisionists, who dominated the field for parts of the 1970s and 1980s, took this second line, attempting to discredit older explanations which rested on long-term causes and instead tending to stress shorter-term issues, problems which came to prominence only after 1625. More recently, anti- or post-revisionists have criticised this approach, arguing that the revisionists went too far in focusing on short-term issues and in underplaying or ignoring evidence of medium- and long-term problems.

Some historians, following in Harrington’s footsteps, have continued to see the war as caused by long-term social and economic developments and problems. This approach (and responses to it) dominated the field in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when many Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike saw the civil war as a class war, caused by tensions between rising middle classes and a declining aristocracy (and crown). Although later work threw considerable doubt on this approach by apparently demonstrating that England and Wales did not divide on clear class lines in 1642, some historians still broadly hold to significant elements of this interpretation, and many others see increasing social and economic tensions in the century 1540-1640, caused by a doubling of the English and Welsh population over that period, as contributing to a greater or lesser extent to the collapse into civil war.

For much of the Victorian and Edwardian period, the so-called Whig interpretation dominated the field. This tended to stress two elements, both of them long-term problems festering away at the heart of the English state. One was mainly secular, namely a growing power-struggle between on the one hand parliament in general and the House of Commons in particular, anxious to gain a greater role in government and to win power to enable it to protect and promote the rights and liberties of the people, and on the other hand the crown, which sought to retain powers and prerogatives itself. The second was mainly religious, namely a growing power struggle between on the one hand a vociferous band or party of Godly puritans, who wanted the process of Protestant Reformation to go much further and who were dissatisfied with the existing state church, and on the other hand the crown and upper echelons of the Church of England, who supported the status quo or who were reluctant to push ahead with further Reformation anywhere near as far or as fast as the puritans wanted. Both problems, these historians argued, were apparent by the reign of Elizabeth I, if not before, and they worsened during the first half of the seventeenth century through continuous or intermittent sniping and through occasional political, religious and constitutional crises and confrontations. At length, these long-term and worsening problems led to an unbridgeable divide and to civil war. This approach, largely ignored or dismissed as irrelevant or secondary by Marxist socio-economic interpretations, was confronted head-on in the 1970s and 1980s by the revisionists, with their stress on shorter-term issues and their arguments that there were few if any longer-term problems within the English state, that down to the 1620s or 1630s the political, constitutional and religious elements of the state were working well, with an emphasis on harmony, consensus and co-operation.

From the nineteenth century onwards, most historians have taken a top-down approach to analysing the causes of the war, looking at the role and motivation of the leading political and social players in the conflict and in many cases focusing on the world of Whitehall and Westminster, on developments in central government and administration. However, over the last few decades some historians have taken a bottom-up approach, exploring how and why the nation as a whole or particular geographical parts of it divided in the early 1640s, assessing the factors which influenced provincial opinion, seeking to discover what motivated the mass of the population in the towns and countryside either to take up arms and fight for one side or the other or to attempt to remain neutral and uninvolved. For some historians this is no more than a secondary issue – it may explain how the nation divided once war began, but the war itself was caused by fractures within elites, either the political elite at the centre of state, church and government or the social elites who led the rising middle classes to war against the aristocracy. But for other historians, this is a crucial, even the crucial, issue – no matter how and why the political or social elites may have fallen out amongst themselves, full-scale civil war could have occurred only because of much broader and deeper fractures present within society and the country as a whole. Accordingly, from the 1960s onwards a great deal of research and writing has analysed developments, opinions and divisions in towns, counties, regions or the provinces as a whole during the pre-war decades and on through the civil war itself; while some of this work has tended to focus on urban and rural elites, much of it has sought to cover a broader social span or has specifically addressed questions of non-elite, popular opinion and allegiance.

Much recent work has sought to demonstrate that during the pre-war decades those living in the provinces were well aware of developments in church and state, and that, far from being inward looking and concerned solely or largely with local affairs, the people of England and Wales were affected by, and took an informed interest in, the regime’s foreign and domestic policies. This informed interest could be found at many levels of society and was not the exclusive preserve of the small urban or rural elites. Many local historians have gone on to suggest that secular or religious concerns, many of them stemming from or reacting to government policies, were causing tensions and divisions within English and Welsh society during the pre-war decades, real or potential fracture lines which not only explain how and why society quickly divided into different camps once war had broken out but also (some historians contend) form a major plank in causing the civil war itself, in explaining why England and Wales collapsed into war in the early 1640s. For some historians, these fracture lines involved a complex mixture of social, economic and cultural factors, seen in geographical divisions between on the one hand arable and mixed farming areas of often small parishes, with hierarchical and paternalistic communities which stood by traditional religious, cultural and communal life, and on the other hand wood-pasture areas of often large parishes, more fluid and open, individual and distinctive communities which embraced moral and religious change and reformation and new ideas in general. For other historians, the fracture lines in provincial communities were more straightforward, caused principally by religious divergences and conflict between religious traditionalists and increasingly vocal groups of Godly reformers, who came to dominate some communities and whose dissatisfaction with the existing Church of England led them to agitate for further reformation. Indeed, some historians have suggested that religion was the dominant issue which divided the country and thus precipitated civil war at the centre as well as in the provinces. They argue that whatever differences there were over state finance, foreign policy or whatever, only religion was so central to the elite and the non-elite alike, so fundamental to everyone’s lives, that compromise proved impossible and instead not only were key members of the elite driven to seek a physical and military solution in defence of their faith but also their stands struck a chord and received much wider support in many English and Welsh communities, so generating full-scale civil war.

Understandably enough, in seeking the causes of the English civil war most historians have focussed on England and Wales, but the wider context has never been entirely ignored. The outbreak of civil war in England clearly followed on from, and was to some extent shaped by, the failed wars against Scotland in 1639 and 1640 and the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in 1641, and many historians have examined the contribution which those Scottish and Irish events made to the outbreak of civil war in England and Wales. Similarly, many historians have noted the wider continental difficulties which the early Stuart monarchs faced – such as pressure to enter European conflicts in support of Protestantism and the very costly failure of Charles I’s foreign policy when he did go to war against Spain and France in the latter half of the 1620s – and they have assigned them a (generally quite minor) role in the sequence of events which led to civil war.

From time to time, some historians have gone further down this path. A few have seen the civil war in England and Wales, as well as the wars between England and Scotland and the rebellion in Ireland, as just three manifestations of a much broader general crisis of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, a concentration of revolts, rebellions, civil wars and wars between states which engulfed much of Europe (and parts of the wider world) over this period. They suggest that this concentration of wars and armed instability shared a common cause, perhaps widespread socio-economic tension and class strife caused by climatic downturn, perhaps political tension caused by the centralising aspirations of heads of state, perhaps pressure on government caused by the fiscal and administrative burdens of the expanding military arm of the state. Some historians have accepted and followed this line or argument, though many were and are sceptical that one or more specific causes can lie behind and explain the outbreak of so many different types of conflict in so many differently organised states in so many diverse and widely spread theatres and geographical regions.

From a slightly different perspective, during the late 1980s and 1990s many historians took a renewed interest in the British nature of the English civil war, seeing it as one element of the British wars or the wars of the three kingdoms of the period from 1637 to 1651 or beyond. They stress the repeated and intimate inter-connections between the conflicts which broke out in Scotland, Ireland and England and Wales over the years 1637-42 and suggest that they probably had common causes, a British problem or problems. Scotland, Ireland and England and Wales formed a multiple kingdom, each with its own very different and distinctive history and traditions, judicial and administrative mechanisms, religion and society, but from 1603 onwards all were ruled by a single monarch. When that monarch proved to be careless of the rights and the distinctive ways of his component kingdoms and when he brutally attempted to impose religious change and greater religious uniformity throughout his religiously divided inheritance, the result was crisis, collapse and war. However, some historians have not been wholly convinced by this British line, arguing that although the contributions of Scotland and Ireland undoubtedly help explain the form and timing of the descent into civil war, the outcome in England and Wales was a distinctive English and Welsh war, albeit one with many Scottish and Irish connections, not a single British conflict. Many contend that there must be English causes to the civil war, that internal English and Welsh problems must have been present, and that only deep divisions within England and Wales can explain why civil war broke out there in summer 1642 and raged on for much of the decade.

In attempting to weigh up what caused the English civil war, it is important to recognise that the different lines of interpretation and explanation may not be mutually exclusive. It is quite possible that a number of problems and issues came together in triggering the outbreak of war, each of them carrying roughly equal weighting and playing an important part in the breakdown. Similarly, different participants may have been motivated to take up arms and begin a civil war for slightly or very different reasons – the causes of the breakdown at the centre in 1642, which led the political elite of Whitehall and Westminster to resort to arms, may not have been the same as the factors which led provincial communities to divide into warring groups or which motivated large numbers of ordinary people to take up arms.

What role did Cromwell play in all of this? How far did he personally contribute to causing the civil war? As Cromwell had played no significant role in central or even local government before 1640 – he had sat in just one parliament, that of 1628-9, in which he was a very minor and insignificant figure, and he had never served as a county JP or held high office – he is largely irrelevant to interpretations of the civil war which emphasise long-term causes. If the civil war is seen as resulting from long-term political, constitutional and religious problems dating back to the sixteenth century or from long-term socio-economic tensions and class strife whose origins may even have pre-dated 1500, Cromwell’s personal role in and contribution to the descent into civil war can be no more than negligible. Cromwell might have a slightly larger role to play in lines of interpretation – such as those advanced by the revisionists in the 1970s and 1980s – which lay greater stress on short-term causes and on political blunders made by both sides in the years preceding 1642, but even if this line is followed, Cromwell’s personal contribution was almost certainly very small.

Down to his election to the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640, Cromwell was politically inexperienced and insignificant. He had lost out in a power-struggle in his native Huntingdon at the start of the 1630s and been firmly slapped down, and in the later 1630s he may have spoken out for those seeking compensation from local fen drainers around Ely (though the evidence is far from clear), but overall he does not come across as a political animal and he had never held power or influence in central or local government. Yet during the opening two years of the Long Parliament, 1640-42, Cromwell does stand out as being surprisingly active and prominent within the House. He was certainly not one of the leaders of parliamentary business and events – he was not one of the leading critics of royal government whom Charles tried to arrest in January 1642 – and at times his inexperience and a certain naivety let him down, leading to a number of embarrassing blunders and misdirected failures. But considering his inexperience down to 1640 and his apparent obscurity when he took his seat in the Long Parliament, his record is impressive and somewhat surprising. He was a prominent critic of some aspects of royal government and of the church, frequently he was named to committees and acted as Teller in divisions or as messenger to the House of Lords, and he presented important petitions from individuals or communities. He reportedly helped to draft a Bill aimed at the complete abolition of episcopacy, he moved the second reading of a Bill for annual parliaments (which, modified, eventually became the Triennial Act), and he was prominent in moves for parliament to appoint guardians for the Prince of Wales and for the Earl of Essex to be appointed commander of the militia by Ordinance rather than by Act of Parliament, thereby removing the need to seek and obtain royal assent. In 1641 he urged the prosecution of those allegedly involved in the Army Plots and in 1641-2 he was outspoken in advocating a vigorous, armed response not only to the Irish rebellion but also to other Catholic conspiracies at home and abroad.

Historians interpret Cromwell’s prominent and conspicuous role during the opening two years of the Long Parliament in different ways. For some, this is the first sign of Cromwell’s self-made rise from obscurity to fame, arguing that in the wake of his religious conversion at some stage during the 1630s, he had a burning desire to seek reform in church and state alike and, believing that he was doing God’s will, he gained the confidence and energy to drive himself and others forward in pursuit of those goals. For others, Cromwell’s obscurity in 1640 has been over-played and is at least in part illusory, for by then he was allied by marriage, kinship or friendship to a number of far more experienced, important and prominent critics of royal government who sat in the Long Parliament, including John Pym, John Hampden and Oliver St John in the Commons and Bedford, Warwick and Saye and Sele in the Lords. From the early days of the Long Parliament, these alliances gave Cromwell a greater standing and reputation than his own social position or previous political experience would merit. Leading on from this, some historians have suggested that Cromwell was deliberately being used by some or all of these more prominent and experienced politicians, that they were employing Cromwell as their agent to fly kites for them, to give an airing to policies and initiatives which might be pursued if they won sufficient support.

In summer 1642, as political fighting gave way to armed preparation for war, Cromwell was certainly one of those members of parliament and of the political elite who firmly supported the parliamentary cause and who were willing to stand up and be counted. In early and mid August 1642, before war had formally been declared by the king, Cromwell returned to his home area and with a troop of newly-raised horse helped to secure Cambridge town and castle and its magazine for parliament. In Cambridge he also prevented part of a consignment of college plate being sent off for the use of the king. Cromwell was by no means the only MP to have taken this sort of physical, armed stance, by no means the only member of the landed elite to have nailed his colours to the mast in this way, but at this stage only a small minority of the more courageous, committed parliamentarians were prepared to act in this manner. Cromwell’s actions in Cambridge in August 1642 serve as a visible measure of his personal courage and commitment to the cause, but they did not of themselves contribute significantly to causing and starting the English civil war. Whatever line we take on that hotly disputed and unresolved historical controversy, Cromwell’s personal role, stance and actions played at most only the most minor part in the problems and tensions, in the developments and sequence of events, which caused the English civil war.

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What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

I would like to thank David Dangerfield, Allen Driggers, Tiffany Florvil, Margaret Gillikin, Ramon Jackson, Evan Kutzler, Tyler Parry, David Prior, Tara Strauch, Beth Toyofuku, and Ann Tucker for their comments on an early version of this essay, and to extend special thanks to Mark M. Smith for perceptive criticism of multiple drafts. I would also like to thank Edward Linenthal for his expert criticism and guidance through the publication process and to express my gratitude to the four JAH readers, Ann Fabian, James M. McPherson, Randall Miller, and one anonymous reviewer, for their exceptionally thoughtful and helpful comments on the piece.

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Michael E. Woods, What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature, Journal of American History , Volume 99, Issue 2, September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

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Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular Civil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.” 1

Despite the impulse to close ranks amid the culture wars, however, professional historians have not abandoned the debate over Civil War causation. Rather, they have rightly concluded that there is not much of a consensus on the topic after all. Elizabeth Varon remarks that although “scholars can agree that slavery, more than any other issue, divided North and South, there is still much to be said about why slavery proved so divisive and why sectional compromise ultimately proved elusive.” And as Edward Ayers observes: “slavery and freedom remain the keys to understanding the war, but they are the place to begin our questions, not to end them.” 2 The continuing flood of scholarship on the sectional conflict suggests that many other historians agree. Recent work on the topic reveals two widely acknowledged truths: that slavery was at the heart of the sectional conflict and that there is more to learn about precisely what this means, not least because slavery was always a multifaceted issue.

This essay analyzes the extensive literature on Civil War causation published since 2000, a body of work that has not been analyzed at length. This survey cannot be comprehensive but seeks instead to clarify current debates in a field long defined by distinct interpretive schools—such as those of the progressives, revisionists, and modernization theorists—whose boundaries are now blurrier. To be sure, echoes still reverberate of the venerable arguments between historians who emphasize abstract economic, social, or political forces and those who stress human agency. The classic interpretive schools still command allegiance, with fundamentalists who accentuate concrete sectional differences dueling against revisionists, for whom contingency, chance, and irrationality are paramount. But recent students of Civil War causation have not merely plowed familiar furrows. They have broken fresh ground, challenged long-standing assumptions, and provided new perspectives on old debates. This essay explores three key issues that vein the recent scholarship: the geographic and temporal parameters of the sectional conflict, the relationship between sectionalism and nationalism, and the relative significance of race and class in sectional politics. All three problems stimulated important research long before 2000, but recent work has taken them in new directions. These themes are particularly helpful for navigating the recent scholarship, and by using them to organize and evaluate the latest literature, this essay underscores fruitful avenues for future study of a subject that remains central in American historiography. 3

Historians of the sectional conflict, like their colleagues in other fields, have consciously expanded the geographic and chronological confines of their research. Crossing the borders of the nation-state and reaching back toward the American Revolution, many recent studies of the war's origins situate the clash over slavery within a broad spatial and temporal context. The ramifications of this work will not be entirely clear until an enterprising scholar incorporates those studies into a new synthesis, but this essay will offer a preliminary evaluation.

Scholarship following the transnational turn in American history has silenced lingering doubts that nineteenth-century Americans of all regions, classes, and colors were deeply influenced by people, ideas, and events from abroad. Historians have long known that the causes of the Civil War cannot be understood outside the context of international affairs, particularly the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Three of the most influential narrative histories of the Civil War era open either on Mexican soil (those written by Allan Nevins and James McPherson) or with the transnational journey from Mexico City to Washington of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis ). The domestic political influence of the annexation of Texas, Caribbean filibustering, and the Ostend Manifesto, a widely publicized message written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 that called for the acquisition of Cuba, are similarly well established. 4

Recent studies by Edward Bartlett Rugemer and Matthew J. Clavin, among others, build on that foundation to show that the international dimensions of the sectional conflict transcended the bitterly contested question of territorial expansion. Rugemer, for instance, demonstrates that Caribbean emancipation informed U.S. debates over slavery from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) through Reconstruction. Situating sectional politics within the Atlantic history of slavery and abolition, he illustrates how arguments for and against U.S. slavery drew from competing interpretations of emancipation in the British West Indies. Britain's “mighty experiment” thus provided “useable history for an increasingly divided nation.” Proslavery ideologues learned that abolitionism sparked insurrection, that Africans and their descendants would become idlers or murderers or both if released from bondage, and that British radicals sought to undermine the peculiar institution wherever it persisted. To slavery's foes, the same history revealed that antislavery activism worked, that emancipation could be peaceful and profitable, and that servitude, not skin tone, degraded enslaved laborers. Clavin's study of American memory of Toussaint L'Ouverture indicates that the Haitian Revolution cast an equally long shadow over antebellum history. Construed as a catastrophic race war, the revolution haunted slaveholders with the prospect of an alliance between ostensibly savage slaves and fanatical whites. Understood as a hopeful story of the downtrodden overthrowing their oppressors, however, Haitian history furnished abolitionists, white and black, with an inspiring example of heroic self-liberation by the enslaved. By the 1850s it also furnished abolitionists, many of whom were frustrated by the abysmally slow progress of emancipation in the United States, with a precedent for swift, violent revolution and the vindication of black masculinity. The Haitian Revolution thus provided “resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols” for antislavery and proslavery partisans alike and helped “provoke a violent confrontation and determine the fate of slavery in the United States.” 5

These findings will surprise few students of Civil War causation, but they demonstrate that the international aspects of the sectional conflict did not begin and end with Manifest Destiny. They also encourage Atlantic historians to pay more attention to the nineteenth century, particularly to the period after British emancipation. Rugemer and Clavin point out that deep connections among Atlantic rim societies persisted far into the nineteenth century and that, like other struggles over New World slavery, the American Civil War is an Atlantic story. One of their most stimulating contributions may therefore be to encourage Atlantic historians to widen their temporal perspectives to include the middle third of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding the hotly contested public memory of the Haitian Revolution, Rugemer and Clavin push the story of American sectionalism back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggesting that crossing geographic boundaries can go hand in hand with stretching the temporal limits of sectionalism. 6

The internationalizing impulse has also nurtured economic interpretations of the sectional struggle. Brian Schoen, Peter Onuf, and Nicholas Onuf situate antebellum politics within the context of global trade, reinvigorating economic analysis of sectionalism without summoning the ghosts of Charles Beard and Mary Beard. Readers may balk at their emphasis on tariff debates, but these histories are plainly not Confederate apologia. As Schoen points out, chattel slavery expanded in the American South, even as it withered throughout most of the Atlantic world, because southern masters embraced the nineteenth century's most important crop: cotton. Like the oil titans of a later age, southern cotton planters reveled in the economic indispensability of their product. Schoen adopts a cotton-centered perspective from which to examine southern political economy, from the earliest cotton boom to the secession crisis. “Broad regional faith in cotton's global power,” he argues, “both informed secessionists' actions and provided them an indispensable tool for mobilizing otherwise reluctant confederates.” Planters' commitment to the production and overseas sale of cotton shaped southern politics and business practices. It impelled westward expansion, informed planters' jealous defense of slavery, and wedded them to free trade. An arrogant faith in their commanding economic position gave planters the impetus and the confidence to secede when northern Republicans threatened to block the expansion of slavery and increase the tariff. The Onufs reveal a similar dynamic at work in their complementary study, Nations, Markets, and War. Like Schoen, they portray slaveholders as forward-looking businessmen who espoused free-trade liberalism in defense of their economic interests. Entangled in political competition with Yankee protectionists throughout the early national and antebellum years, slaveholders seceded when it became clear that their vision for the nation's political economy—most importantly its trade policy—could no longer prevail. 7

These authors examine Civil War causation within a global context, though in a way more reminiscent of traditional economic history than similar to other recent transnational scholarship. But perhaps the most significant contribution made by these authors lies beyond internationalizing American history. After all, most historians of the Old South have recognized that the region's economic and political power depended on the Atlantic cotton trade, and scholars of the Confederacy demonstrated long ago that overconfidence in cotton's international leverage led southern elites to pursue a disastrous foreign policy. What these recent studies reveal is that cotton-centered diplomatic and domestic politics long predated southern independence and had roots in the late eighteenth century, when slaveholders' decision to enlarge King Cotton's domain set them on a turbulent political course that led to Appomattox. The Onufs and Schoen, then, like Rugemer and Clavin, expand not only the geographic parameters of the sectional conflict but also its temporal boundaries. 8

These four important histories reinforce recent work that emphasizes the eruption of the sectional conflict at least a generation before the 1820 Missouri Compromise. If the conflict over Missouri was a “firebell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson called it, it was a rather tardy alarm. This scholarship mirrors a propensity among political historians—most notably scholars of the civil rights movement—to write “long histories.” Like their colleagues who dispute the Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative of the civil rights era, political historians of the early republic have questioned conventional periodization by showing that sectionalism did not spring fully grown from the head of James Tallmadge, the New York congressman whose February 1819 proposal to bar the further extension of slavery into Missouri unleashed the political storm that was calmed, for the moment, by the Missouri Compromise. Matthew Mason, for instance, maintains that “there never was a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went unchallenged.” Mason shows that political partisans battered their rivals with the club of slavery, with New England Federalists proving especially adept at denouncing their Jeffersonian opponents as minions of southern slaveholders. In a series of encounters, from the closure of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 to the opening (fire)bell of the Missouri crisis, slavery remained a central question in American politics. Even the outbreak of war in 1812 failed to suppress the issue. 9

A complementary study by John Craig Hammond confirms that slavery roiled American politics from the late eighteenth century on and that its westward expansion proved especially divisive years before the Missouri fracas. As America's weak national government continued to bring more western acreage under its nominal control, it had to accede to local preferences regarding slavery. Much of the fierce conflict over slavery therefore occurred at the territorial and state levels. Hammond astutely juxtaposes the histories of slave states such as Louisiana and Missouri alongside those of Ohio and Indiana, where proslavery policies were defeated. In every case, local politics proved decisive. Neither the rise nor the extent of the cotton kingdom was a foregone conclusion, and the quarrel over its expansion profoundly influenced territorial and state politics north and south of the Ohio River. Bringing the growing scholarship on both early republic slavery and proslavery ideology into conversation with political history, Hammond demonstrates that the bitterness of the Missouri debate stemmed from that dispute's contentious prehistory, not from its novelty. Just as social, economic, and intellectual historians have traced the “long history” of the antebellum South back to its once relatively neglected early national origins, political historians have uncovered the deep roots of political discord over slavery's expansion. 10

Scholars have applied the “long history” principle to other aspects of Civil War causation as well. In his study of the slave power thesis, Leonard L. Richards finds that northern anxieties about slaveholders' inordinate political influence germinated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Jan Lewis's argument that the concessions made to southern delegates at the convention emboldened them to demand special protection for slavery suggests that those apprehensions were sensible. David L. Lightner demonstrates that northern demands for a congressional ban on the domestic slave trade, designed to strike a powerful and, thanks to the interstate commerce clause, constitutional blow against slavery extension emerged during the first decade of the nineteenth century and informed antislavery strategy for the next fifty years. Richard S. Newman emphasizes that abolitionist politics long predated William Lloyd Garrison's founding of the Liberator in 1831. Like William W. Freehling, who followed the “road to disunion” back to the American Revolution, Newman commences his study of American abolitionism with the establishment of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. Most recently, Christopher Childers has invited historians to explore the early history of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. 11

Skeptics might ask where the logic of these studies will lead. Why not push the origins of sectional strife even further back into colonial history? Why not begin, as did a recent overview of Civil War causation, with the initial arrival of African slaves in Virginia in 1619? This critique has a point—hopefully we will never read an article called “Christopher Columbus and the Coming of the American Civil War”—but two virtues of recent work on the long sectional conflict merit emphasis. First, its extended view mirrors the very long, if chronically selective, memories of late antebellum partisans. By the 1850s few sectional provocateurs failed to trace northern belligerence toward the South, and vice versa, back to the eighteenth century. Massachusetts Republican John B. Alley reminded Congress in April 1860 that slavery had been “a disturbing element in our national politics ever since the organization of the Government.” “In fact,” Alley recalled, “political differences were occasioned by it, and sectional prejudices grew out of it, at a period long anterior to the formation of the Federal compact.” Eight tumultuous months later, U.S. senator Robert Toombs recounted to the Georgia legislature a litany of northern aggressions and insisted that protectionism and abolitionism had tainted Yankee politics from “ the very first Congress .” Tellingly, the study of historical memory, most famously used to analyze remembrance of the Civil War, has moved the study of Civil War causation more firmly into the decades between the nation's founding and the Missouri Compromise. Memories of the Haitian Revolution shaped antebellum expectations for emancipation. Similarly, recollections of southern economic sacrifice during Jefferson's 1807 embargo and the War of 1812 heightened white southerners' outrage over their “exclusion” from conquered Mexican territory more than three decades later. And as Margot Minardi has shown, Massachusetts abolitionists used public memory of the American Revolution to champion emancipation and racial equality. The Missouri-to-Sumter narrative conceals that these distant events haunted the memories of late antebellum Americans. Early national battles over slavery did not make the Civil War inevitable, but in the hands of propagandists they could make the war seem inevitable to many contemporaries. 12

Second, proponents of the long view of Civil War causation have not made a simplistic argument for continuity. Elizabeth Varon's study of the evolution of disunion as a political concept and rhetorical device from 1789 to 1859 demonstrates that long histories need not obscure change over time. Arguing that “sectional tensions deriving from the diverging interests of the free labor North and the slaveholding South” were “as old as the republic itself,” Varon adopts a long perspective on sectional tension. But her nuanced analysis of the diverse and shifting political uses of disunion rhetoric suggests that what historians conveniently call the sectional conflict was in fact a series of overlapping clashes, each with its own dynamics and idiom. Quite literally, the terms of sectional debate remained in flux. The language of disunion came in five varieties—“a prophecy of national ruin, a threat of withdrawal from the federal compact, an accusation of treasonous plotting, a process of sectional alienation, and a program for regional independence”—and the specific meanings of each cannot be interpreted accurately without regard to historical context, for “their uses changed and shifted over time.” To cite just one example, the concept of disunion as a process of increasing alienation between North and South gained credibility during the 1850s as proslavery and antislavery elements clashed, often violently, over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the extension of slavery into Kansas. Republican senator William Henry Seward's famous “irrepressible conflict” speech of 1858 took this interpretation of disunion, one that had long languished on the radical margins of sectional politics, and thrust it into mainstream discourse. Shifting political circumstances reshaped the terms of political debate from the 1830s, when the view of disunion as an irreversible process flourished only among abolitionists and southern extremists, to the late 1850s, when a leading contender for the presidential nomination of a major party could express it openly. 13

Consistent with Varon's emphasis on the instability of political rhetoric, other recent studies of Civil War causation have spotlighted two well-known and important forks in the road to disunion. Thanks to their fresh perspective on the crisis of 1819–1821, scholars of early national sectionalism have identified the Missouri struggle as the first of these turning points. The battle over slavery in Missouri, Robert Pierce Forbes argues, was “a crack in the master narrative” of American history that fundamentally altered how Americans thought about slavery and the Union. In the South, it nurtured a less crassly self-interested defense of servitude. Simultaneously, it tempted northerners to conceptually separate “the South” from “America,” thereby sectionalizing the moral problem of slavery and conflating northern values and interests with those of the nation. The intensity of the crisis demonstrated that the slavery debate threatened the Union, prompting Jacksonian-era politicians to suppress the topic and stymie sectionalists for a generation. But even as the Missouri controversy impressed moderates with the need for compromise, it fostered “a new clarity in the sectional politics of the United States and moved each section toward greater coherence on the slavery issue” by refining arguments for and against the peculiar institution. The competing ideologies that defined antebellum sectional politics coalesced during the contest over Missouri, now portrayed as a milestone rather than a starter's pistol. 14

A diverse body of scholarship identifies a second period of discontinuity stretching from 1845 to 1850. This literature confirms rather than challenges traditional periodization, for those years have long marked the beginning of the “Civil War era.” This time span has attracted considerable attention because the slavery expansion debate intensified markedly between the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Compromise of 1850. Not surprisingly, recent work on slavery's contested westward extension continues to present the late 1840s as a key turning point—perhaps a point of no return—in the sectional conflict. As Michael S. Green puts it, by 1848, “something in American political life clearly had snapped. … [T]he genies that [James K.] Polk, [David] Wilmot, and their allies had let out of the bottle would not be put back in.” 15

Scholars not specifically interested in slavery expansion have also identified the late 1840s as a decisive period. In his history of southern race mythology—the notion that white southerners' “Norman” ancestry elevated them over Saxon-descended northerners—Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. identifies these years as a transition period between two theories of sectional difference. White southerners' U.S. nationalism persisted into the 1840s, he argues, and although they recognized cultural differences between the Yankees and themselves, the dissimilarities were not imagined in racial terms. After 1850, however, white southerners increasingly argued for innate differences between the white southern “race” and its ostensibly inferior northern rival. This mythology was a “key element” in the “flowering of southern nationalism before and during the Civil War.” Susan-Mary Grant has shown that northern opinion of the South underwent a simultaneous shift, with the slave power thesis gaining widespread credibility by the late 1840s. The year 1850 marked an economic turning point as well. Marc Egnal posits that around that year, a generation of economic integration between North and South gave way to an emerging “Lake Economy,” which knit the Northwest and Northeast into an economic and political alliance at odds with the South. Taken together, this scholarship reaffirms what historians have long suspected about the sectional conflict: despite sectionalism's oft-recalled roots in the early national period, the late 1840s represents an important period of discontinuity. It is unsurprising that these years climaxed with a secession scare and a makeshift compromise reached not through bona fide give-and-take but rather through the political dexterity of Senator Stephen A. Douglas. 16

That Douglas succeeded where the eminent Henry Clay had failed suggests another late 1840s discontinuity that deserves more scholarly attention. Thirty-six years older than the Little Giant, Clay was already Speaker of the House when Douglas was born in 1813. Douglas's shepherding of Clay's smashed omnibus bill through the Senate in 1850 “marked a changing of the guard from an older generation, whose time already might have passed, to a new generation whose time had yet to come.” This passing of the torch symbolized a broader shift in political personnel. The Thirty-First Congress, which passed the compromise measures of 1850, was a youthful assembly. The average age for representatives was forty-three, only two were older than sixty-two, and more than half were freshmen. The Senate was similarly youthful, particularly its Democratic members, fewer than half of whom had reached age fifty. Moreover, the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster between March 1850 and October 1852 signaled to many observers the end of an era. In 1851 members of the University of Virginia's Southern Rights Association reminded their southern peers that “soon the destinies of the South must be entrusted to our keeping. The present occupants of the arena of action must soon pass away, and we be called upon to fill their places. … It becomes therefore our sacred duty to prepare for the contest.” 17

Students of Civil War causation would do well to probe this intergenerational transfer of power. This analysis need not revive the argument, most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, that the “blundering generation” of hot-headed and self-serving politicos who grasped the reins of power around 1850 brought on an unnecessary war. Caricaturing the rising generation as exceptionally inept is not required to profitably contrast the socioeconomic environments, political contexts, and intellectual milieus in which Clay's and Douglas's respective generations matured. These differences, and the generational conflict that they engendered, may have an important bearing on both the origins and the timing of the Civil War. Peter Carmichael's study of Virginia's last antebellum generation explores this subject in detail. Historians have long recognized that disproportionately high numbers of young white southerners supported secession. Carmichael offers a compelling explanation for why this was so, without portraying his subjects as mediocre statesmen or citing the eternal impetuousness of youth. Deftly blending cultural, social, economic, and political history, Carmichael rejects the notion that young Virginia gentlemen who came of age in the late 1850s were immature, impassioned, and reckless. They were, he argues, idealistic and ambitious men who believed deeply in progress but worried that their elders had squandered Virginia's traditional economic and political preeminence. Confronted with their state's apparent degeneration and their own lack of opportunity for advancement, Carmichael's young Virginians endorsed a pair of solutions that put them at odds with their conservative elders: economic diversification and, after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, southern independence. Whether this generational dynamic extended beyond Virginia remains to be seen. But other recent works, including Stephen Berry's study of young white men in the Old South and Jon Grinspan's essay on youthful Republicans during the 1860 presidential campaign, indicate that similar concerns about progress, decline, and sectional destiny haunted many young minds on the eve of the Civil War. More work in this area is necessary, especially on how members of the new generation remembered the sectional conflict that had been raging since before they were born. Clearly, though, the generation that ascended to national leadership during the 1850s came of age in a very different world than had its predecessor. Further analysis of this shift promises to link the insights of the long sectional conflict approach (particularly regarding public memory) with the emphasis on late 1840s discontinuity that veins recent scholarship on sectionalism. 18

Recent historians have challenged conventional periodization by expanding the chronological scope of the sectional conflict, even as they confirm two key moments of historical discontinuity. This work revises older interpretations of Civil War causation without overturning them. A second trend in the literature, however, is potentially more provocative. A number of powerfully argued studies building on David Potter's classic essay, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” have answered his call for closer scrutiny of the “seemingly manifest difference between the loyalties of a nationalistic North and a sectionalistic South.” Impatient with historians who read separatism into all aspects of prewar southern politics or Unionism into all things northern, Potter admonished scholars not to project Civil War loyalties back into the antebellum period. A more nuanced approach would reveal “that in the North as well as in the South there were deep sectional impulses, and support or nonsupport of the Union was sometimes a matter of sectional tactics rather than of national loyalty.” Recent scholars have accepted Potter's challenge, and their findings contribute to an emerging reinterpretation of the sectional conflict and the timing of secession. 19

Disentangling northern from national interests and values has been difficult thanks in part to the Civil War itself (in which “the North” and “the Union” overlapped, albeit imperfectly) and because of the northern victory and the temptation to classify the Old South as an un-American aberration. But several recent studies have risen to the task. Challenging the notion that the antebellum North must have been nationalistic because of its opposition to slavery and its role in the Civil War, Susan-Mary Grant argues that by the 1850s a stereotyped view of the South and a sense of moral and economic superiority had created a powerful northern sectional identity. Championed by the Republican party, this identity flowered into an exclusionary nationalism in which the South served as a negative reference point for the articulation of ostensibly national values, goals, and identities based on the North's flattering self-image. This sectionalism-cum-nationalism eventually corroded national ties by convincing northerners that the South represented an internal threat to the nation. Although this vision became genuinely national after the war, in the antebellum period it was sectionally specific and bitterly divisive. “It was not the case,” Grant concludes, “that the northern ideology of the antebellum period was American, truly national, and supportive of the Union and the southern ideology was wholly sectional and destructive of the Union.” Matthew Mason makes a related point about early national politics, noting that the original sectionalists were antislavery New England Federalists whose flirtation with secession in 1815 crippled their party. Never simply the repository of authentic American values, the nineteenth-century North developed a sectional identity in opposition to an imagined (though not fictitious) South. Only victory in the Civil War allowed for the reconstruction of the rest of the nation in this image. 20

If victory in the war obscured northern sectionalism, it was the defense of slavery, coupled with defeat, that has distorted our view of American nationalism in the Old South. The United States was founded as a slaveholding nation, and there was unfortunately nothing necessarily un-American about slavery in the early nineteenth century. Slavery existed in tension with, not purely in opposition to, the nation's perennially imperfect political institutions, and its place in the young republic was a hotly contested question with a highly contingent resolution. Moreover, despite their pretensions to being an embattled minority, southern elites long succeeded in harnessing national ideals and federal power to their own interests. Thus, defense of slavery was neither inevitably nor invariably secessionist. This is a key theme of Robert Bonner's expertly crafted history of the rise and fall of proslavery American nationalism. Adopting a long-sectional-conflict perspective, Bonner challenges historians who have “conflate[d] an understandable revulsion at proslavery ideology with a willful disassociation of bondage from prevailing American norms.” He details the efforts of proslavery southerners to integrate slavery into national identity and policy and to harmonize slaveholding with American expansionism, republicanism, constitutionalism, and evangelicalism. Appropriating the quintessentially American sense of national purpose, proslavery nationalists “invited outsiders to consider [slavery's] compatibility with broadly shared notions of American values and visions of a globally redeeming national mission.” This effort ended in defeat, but not because proslavery southerners chronically privileged separatism over nationalism. Rather, it was their failure to bind slavery to American nationalism—signaled by the Republican triumph in 1860—that finally drove slaveholders to secede. Lincoln's victory “effectively ended the prospects for achieving proslavery Americanism within the federal Union,” forcing slavery's champions to pin their hopes to a new nation-state. Confederate nationalism was more a response to the demise of proslavery American nationalism than the cause of its death. 21

Other recent studies of slaveholders' efforts to nationalize their goals and interests complement Bonner's skilled analysis. Matthew J. Karp casts proslavery politicians not as jumpy sectionalists but as confident imperialists who sponsored an ambitious and costly expansion of American naval power to protect slavery against foreign encroachment and to exert national influence overseas. For these slaveholding nationalists, “federal power was not a danger to be feared, but a force to be utilized,” right up to the 1860 election. Similarly, Brian Schoen has explored cotton planters' efforts to ensure that national policy on tariff rates and slavery's territorial status remained favorable to their interests. As cotton prices boomed during the 1850s, planters grew richer and the stakes grew higher, especially as their national political power waned with the ascension of the overtly sectional Republican party. The simultaneous increase in planters' economic might and decline in their political dominance made for an explosive mixture that shattered the bonds of the Union. Still, one must not focus solely on cases in which proslavery nationalism was thwarted, for its successes convinced many northerners of the veracity of the slave power thesis, helping further corrode the Union. James L. Huston shows that both southern efforts to nationalize property rights in slaves and the prospect of slavery becoming a national institution—in the sense that a fully integrated national market could bring slave and free labor into competition—fueled northern sectionalism and promoted the rise of the Republican party. Proslavery nationalism and its policy implications thus emboldened the political party whose victory in 1860 convinced proslavery southerners that their goals could not be realized within the Union. 22

As the standard-bearers of northern and southern interests battled for national power, both sides emphasized that their respective ideologies were consistent with the nation's most cherished principles. Shearer Davis Bowman has argued that “northern and southern partisans of white sectionalism tended to see their respective sections as engaged in the high-minded defense of vested interests, outraged rights and liberties, and imperiled honor, all embedded in a society and way of life they deemed authentically American.” In a sense, both sides were right. Recent scholarship in such varied fields as intellectual, religious, political, and literary history suggests that although often incompatible, the values and ideals of the contending sections flowed from a common source. Work by Margaret Abruzzo on proslavery and antislavery humanitarianism, John Patrick Daly and Mark A. Noll on evangelical Protestantism, Sean Wilentz on political democracy, and Diane N. Capitani on domestic sentimental fiction suggests that the highly politicized differences between northern and southern ideologies masked those ideologies' common intellectual roots. Some scholars have argued for more fundamental difference, maintaining that southern thinkers roundly rejected democracy and liberal capitalism, while others have gone too far in the other direction in presenting northern and southern whites as equally committed to liberalism. But the dominant thrust of recent work on sectional ideologies suggests that they represented two hostile sides of a single coin minted at the nation's founding. Since a coin flip cannot end in a tie, both sides struggled for control of the national government to put their incompatible ideals into practice. The nationalization of northern ideals was a hotly contested outcome, made possible only by armed conflict. Conversely, the sectionalization of white southern ideals was not inevitable. Proponents of both sections drew on nationalism and sectionalism alike, embracing the former when they felt powerful and the latter when they felt weak. “As long as the Government is on our side,” proslavery Democrat and future South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens wrote in 1857, “I am for sustaining it and using its power for our benefit. … [if] our opponents reverse the present state of things then I am for war .” 23

Together, recent studies of northern sectionalism and southern nationalism make a compelling case for why the Civil War broke out when it did. If the South was always a separatist minority and if the North always defended the American way, secession might well have come long before 1861. It is more helpful to view the sectional conflict as one between equally authentic (not morally equivalent) strands of American nationalism grappling for the power to govern the entire country according to sectionally specific values. Southern slaveholders ruled what was in many ways the weaker section, but constitutional privileges such as the infamous three-fifths clause, along with other advantageous provisions such as the rule requiring a two-thirds majority in the nominations of Democratic presidential candidates, allowed them to remain dominant prior to 1860, until their successes aroused a sense of northern sectionalism robust enough to lift the Republican party into power. Almost overnight, the proslavery nationalist project collapsed. Only then did decisive numbers of southern whites countenance disunion, a drastic measure whose use had long been resisted within the South. The Civil War erupted when northern sectionalism grew powerful enough to undermine southern nationalism. 24

In the model of Civil War causation sketched above, northern voters who joined the Republicans fretted over the fate of liberty in a slaveholding republic. But whose liberty was at stake? Recent scholarship powerfully demonstrates that for moderate opponents of slavery the most damnable aspect of the institution was not what it did to slaves but what it allowed slaveholders to do to northern whites. Popular antislavery grew from trepidation about the power of the slaveholding class and its threat to republican liberty, not from uproar against proslavery racism and racial oppression. And since this concern fueled the Republican party's rapid growth and 1860 presidential triumph, white northerners' indignant response to slaveholders' clout contributed significantly to the coming of the war by providing secessionists with a pretext for disunion. According to this interpretation of northern politics, slavery remains at the root of the sectional conflict even though racial egalitarianism did not inspire the most popular brands of antislavery politics and even though many of the debates over slavery, as Eric Foner has pointed out, “were only marginally related to race.” At the same time, recent scholarship on southern politics foregrounds slave agency and persuasively demonstrates that conflict between masters and slaves directly affected national affairs. If the fate of the enslaved did not preoccupy most northern whites, the same cannot be said of their southern counterparts, whose politics are intelligible only in the context of slave resistance. In sum, recent work confirms the centrality of slavery in the coming of the war in a very specific and nuanced way, showing that the actions and contested status of enslaved people influenced southern politics directly and northern politics more obliquely. This work reveals an asymmetry in the politics of slavery: in the South it revolved around maintaining control over slaves in the name of white supremacy and planters' interests, while in the North it centered on the problem of the slaveholding class. 25

Moral indignation at racial prejudice in the twentieth century does not necessarily provide the key to an understanding of the dispute between the sections in the nineteenth century. While some abolitionists were indignant at the slave system and what it did to black men, many more northerners became antisouthern and antislavery because of what the slave system did or threatened to do to them. A failure to recognize this can easily lead us into a blind alley of oversimplification, and to view the events of a hundred years ago as a morality play with heroes and villains rather than a plausible presentation of a human dilemma.

Many twenty-first century scholars have taken this point to heart while implicitly challenging Gara's stark contrast between moral and self-interested antislavery. They stress the primary importance of white liberty in popular antislavery critiques but show that slavery's “moderate” opponents were no less morally outraged than their “radical” counterparts. Slavery could be condemned on moral grounds for a wide variety of reasons, some of which had much to do with enslaved people and some of which—whether they stressed the degeneracy of southern society, the undemocratic influence of slaveholders' political clout, or the threat that proslavery zealots posed to civil liberties—did not. Thus, recent scholars have made Gara's “crucial distinction” while underlining the moral dimensions of ostensibly moderate, conservative, or racist antislavery arguments. Popular antislavery strove to protect democratic politics from the machinations of a legally privileged and economically potent ruling class. Slaveholders' inordinate political power was itself a moral problem. These findings may prompt historians to reconsider the relative emphasis placed on class and race in the origins and meanings of the Civil War, particularly regarding the political behavior of the nonabolitionist northern majority. 27

Numerous recent studies emphasize that perceived threats to white freedom pushed northerners to oppose the slave power, support the Republican party, and prosecute the Civil War on behalf of liberty and the Union. Nicole Etcheson's study of the violent struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over Kansas during the mid-1850s contends that the key issue at stake was freedom for white settlers. During the Civil War many Kansans who had fought for the admission of their state under an antislavery constitution applauded emancipation, but Etcheson persuasively argues that “Bleeding Kansas began as a struggle to secure the political liberties of whites.” Racist pioneers from both sections battled to ensure that the plains would remain a haven for white freedom, disagreeing primarily over slavery's compatibility with that goal. Similarly, Matthew Mason shows that antislavery politics in the early national period, spearheaded by Federalists, thrived only when northern voters recognized “how slavery impinged on their rights and interests.” Russell McClintock's analysis of the 1860 election and northerners' reaction to secession and the bombardment of Fort Sumter indicates that anxiety over slaveholders' power encouraged a decisive, violent northern response. As the antislavery position edged closer to the mainstream of northern politics, critiques of slavery grounded in sympathy for enslaved people faded as less philanthropic assaults on the institution proliferated. Carol Lasser's study of the shifting emphasis of antislavery rhetoric demonstrates that between the 1830s and the 1850s, “self-interest replaced sin as a basis for antislavery organizing,” as antislavery appeals increasingly “stressed the self-interest of northern farmers and workers—mainly white and mainly male.” Ultimately, popular antislavery cast “free white men, rather than enslaved African American women,” as “the victims of ‘the peculiar institution.’” 28

Even histories of fugitive slave cases underscore the preeminence of white liberty as the activating concern for many northerners. As the historian Earl M. Maltz has pointed out, the fugitive slave issue was never isolated from other political controversies. Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which seemed to prove the existence of a southern plot to spread slavery onto previously free western soil, fugitive slave cases during and after 1854 aroused increased hostility among white northerners who suspected that slaveholders threatened the liberties of all Americans. Those fears intensified throughout the 1850s in response to cases in which free northerners stood trial for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. In two of the three cases explored by Steven Lubet the defendants were not runaway slaves but predominantly white northerners accused of abetting fugitives from slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act's criminalization of noncompliance with slave catchers proved especially odious. “For all of its blatant unfairness,” Lubet argues, “the Act might have been considered tolerable in the North—at least among non-abolitionists—if it had been directed only at blacks.” It was not, of course, and some of the act's most celebrated cases placed white northerners in legal jeopardy for crossing swords with the slave power. Two recent studies of the Joshua Glover case reinforce this point. Formerly a slave in St. Louis, Glover escaped to Wisconsin and, with the help of sympathetic white residents, from there to Canada in 1854. But the dramatic confrontation between free-state citizens and the slaveholder-dominated federal government only began with Glover's successful flight, since the political reverberations of the case echoed for many years after Glover reached Canadian soil. Debates over the rights and duties of citizens, over the boundaries of state and federal sovereignty, and over the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act hinged on the prosecution of the primarily white Wisconsinites who aided Glover's escape. None gained more notoriety than Sherman Booth, the Milwaukee newspaper editor whose case bounced between state and federal courts from 1854 to 1859, and whose attorney, Byron Paine, capitalized on his own resulting popularity to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Long after attention left Glover, who was undoubtedly relieved to be out of the public eye, conflicts over northern state rights and individual rights highlighted the threat to white liberty posed by the slave power and its federal agents. 29

Of course, the white northerners prosecuted under proslavery law would have remained in obscurity if not for the daring escapes made by enslaved people. As Stanley Harrold has shown, runaway slaves sparked dozens of bloody skirmishes in the antebellum borderland between slavery and freedom. To stress the importance of conflicts over white liberty in the coming of the Civil War is not to ignore the political impact of slave resistance. Quite the reverse: recent studies of Civil War causation have deftly explored the relationship between slave agency and sectional antagonism, revealing that slave resistance provoked conflict between whites, even in situations where racial justice was not the main point of contention. Northern sectionalism was a reaction against proslavery belligerence, which was fueled by internal conflicts in the South. Narratives of Civil War causation that focus on white northerners' fears for their liberties depend on slave agency, for the aggressiveness of the slave power was, essentially, a response to the power of slaves. 30

Revealingly, recent works by John Ashworth and William W. Freehling both stress this theme. Both scholars published long-awaited second volumes of their accounts of Civil War causation in 2007. Beyond this coincidence, however, it would be difficult to find two historians more dissimilar than Ashworth, a Marxist who privileges labor systems and class relations, and Freehling, a master storyteller who stresses contingency and individual consciousness. For all their methodological and ideological differences, however, Ashworth and Freehling concur on an essential point: the struggle between masters and slaves accelerated the sectional conflict by forcing masters to support undemocratic policies that threatened northern liberties. The resulting hostility of northerners toward slaveholders provoked a fierce response, and the cycle continued. By weaving the day-to-day contest between masters and slaves into their political analyses, both authors fashion a “reintegrated” American history that blends the insights of social and political history. 31

According to Ashworth, class conflict forced ruling elites in both sections to pursue clashing political and economic policies. Thus, structural divergence in social and economic systems between North and South inflamed the political and ideological strife that resulted in disunion. Class conflict was especially problematic in the South, whose enslaved population did not accept proslavery principles in the same way that, by the 1850s, some northern workers embraced free-labor ideology. Instead, interminable slave resistance compelled southern masters to gag congressional debate over slavery, to demand stringent fugitive slave laws, and to agitate for a territorial slave code—in short, to act the part of an authoritarian slave power. “Behind every event in the history of the sectional controversy,” Ashworth argues in his first volume, “lurked the consequences of black resistance to slavery.” A dozen years of additional work confirmed this thesis. In his second volume, Ashworth contends that “the opposition of the slaves to their own enslavement is the fundamental, irreplaceable cause of the War.” The Civil War did not begin as a massive slave rebellion because southern masters managed to contain the unrest that threatened their rule, but the price of this success was a deteriorating relationship with northerners. By contending for their freedom, slaves obliged their masters to behave in ways that convinced even the most bigoted northern whites that slavery menaced their own liberties. 32

colliding democratic and despotic governing systems. The Old South combined dictatorship over blacks with republicanism for whites, supposedly cleanly severed by an All-Mighty Color Line. But to preserve dictatorial dominion over blacks, the slaveholding minority sometimes trenched on majoritarian government for whites, in the nation as well as in their section. … Northerners called the militant slavocracy the Slave Power, meaning that those with autocratic power over blacks also deployed undemocratic power over whites. Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or abolitionists. Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white men's majoritarian rights.

Scholars who foreground northern concern for white liberty in a slaveholding republic underline the importance of class conflict between northern voters and southern elites in the coming of the Civil War. Moderate antislavery northerners condemned slaveholders for aristocratic pretensions and tyrannical policies, not for racial bigotry. But for many scholars, race remains the key to understanding antebellum sectional politics. The tendency remains strong to frame the sectional conflict and the Civil War as one campaign in a longer struggle for racial justice. Not surprisingly, studies of radical abolitionism are the most likely works to employ this framework. Radical abolitionists nurtured a strikingly egalitarian conception of race and fought for a social vision that most scholars share but one that the modern world has not yet realized, and therein lies their appeal. Moreover, those who foreground race in the coming of the war do not naïvely suggest that all northern whites were racial egalitarians. Since the 1960s, commitment to an admirable antiracist ideal, not wishful thinking, has given a powerful boost to a primarily racial interpretation of the sectional conflict. But the recent scholarly emphasis on issues of class and the slave power suggests that framing the sectional conflict as a clash over racial injustice is not the most useful approach to understanding Civil War causation. 34

The slave power was defined not by racism but by slaveholders' capacity to use federal law and muscle to advance their class interests. Proslavery racism was, like all racism, reprehensible, but it is easily, even when subtly, overstated in accounts of Civil War causation. It is, for example, hardly incorrect to refer to the proslavery ideologue James Henry Hammond as “a fiercely racist South Carolina politician,” but that characterization emphasizes a trait he shared with most northern voters rather than what alienated Hammond from them and thus hastened the rise of the Republican party and the outbreak of war. What distinguished Hammond from his northern antagonists was his “mudsill” theory of society (which he outlined in an 1858 Senate speech) and its implications for American class relations. Proceeding from the presumption that every functioning society must rest upon the labors of a degraded “mudsill” class, Hammond argued that the southern laboring class, because it was enslaved, was materially better off and politically less threatening than its northern counterpart. Hammond's highly public articulation of this theory outraged proponents of free labor and made him a particularly notorious proslavery propagandist. Illinois Republicans who rallied under a banner declaring “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln” recognized the deep-seated class dimensions of their party's conflict with Hammond and his ilk. Moreover, Hammond's comparison of the northern and southern working classes suggests a curious ambiguity in the relative importance of class and race in proslavery ideology. This subject demands further scholarly attention, but important advances have recently been made. On the one hand, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have indicated that the irascible George Fitzhugh, who proclaimed that working people of all colors would be better off as slaves, was not alone in developing a defense of slavery compatible with racism but ultimately based on class relations. On the other hand, slaveholders, at least as much as any other antebellum Americans, benefited from portraying slavery as a fundamentally racial issue. As Frank Towers has shown, planters feared the day when nonslaveholding southern whites might begin to think in terms of class and shuddered at the prospect of working-class politics in southern cities. That one of the most strident articulations of the race-based proslavery argument—which promised that the subjugation of blacks made equals of all white men—appeared in 1860 was no coincidence, as southern elites sought to ensure regional white unity on the eve of a possible revolution. In pursuit of their interests, southern ideologues drew on both class- and race-based arguments, and if the latter stand out to modern readers, the former did more to alienate individuals in the free states. Slaveholders' conflict with northern voters, the collision that triggered secession and war, grew not out of clashing racial views but out of competition for political power. 35

The most broadly appealing brands of antislavery defined this competition as one between classes. Proponents of popular antislavery presented sectional issues in terms of class more often than race, and with tremendous effect. Their interpretation of sectional friction generated mass sympathy for a cause that otherwise would have remained a fringe movement. This moderate antislavery ideology is easily discounted if we attribute genuine antislavery sentiments only to those few northerners uncontaminated by racism. It grew from many sources: Jacksonian antipathy to concentrated economic and political power; an often-radical producerism that would guarantee to the worker the fruits of his labor; a demand for land reform that would reserve western soil for white farmers; and a morally charged concern about the fate of democracy in a nation dominated by slaveholders. Class-based Jacksonian radicalism thus informed the ideology of the Free Soil party and, crucially, the Republicans. Antislavery politicians such as New Hampshire's John P. Hale, a Democrat who drifted into the Republican ranks via the Free Soil party, “defined the controversy over slavery and its continuation as an issue between aristocratic slave owners and ‘sturdy republicans’ rather than between innocent slaves and sinful masters,” points out Jonathan H. Earle. It was this contest that aroused a northern majority to vote Lincoln into office and to enlist in the Union army. The issues of money, power, class, and democracy that concerned Jacksonian and other moderate antislavery northerners were not less morally charged because they focused on white liberty and equality in a republic. Nor should we forget that this class-based antislavery critique contained the seeds of a racial egalitarianism that sprouted, however feebly, during the Civil War. The experience of war often turned whites-only egalitarianism into a far more sweeping notion of human equality. To ignore this transformation is to discount the radicalizing influence that the Civil War had on many northern soldiers and civilians. 36

When coupled with an analysis of southern politics that emphasizes slave agency, this revival of scholarly interest in popular antislavery ideology offers not only a convincing interpretation of Civil War causation but also a politically and pedagogically important narrative about class and politics in American history. Adam Rothman's 2005 essay on the slave power is a model of this fresh and constructive approach. On one level, he presents an accessible introduction to the history and historiography of nineteenth-century slaveholders. But the chief contribution of the work lies in the context in which the essay was published: an anthology on American elite classes, from early national merchant capitalists to postwar anti–New Dealers, and their relationship with American democracy. Casting the slave power in this light gives the sectional conflict a bold new meaning, one that reveals the Civil War to have been both much more than and much less than a precursor to the civil rights movement. It appears as a struggle between (an imperfect) popular democracy and one of the most powerful and deeply rooted interests in antebellum politics. One might argue that Americans simply replaced one set of masters—southern planters—with another, the rising robber barons. Nevertheless, the Civil War offers one of precious few instances in American history in which a potent, entrenched, incredibly wealthy, and constitutionally privileged elite class was thoroughly ousted from national power. This makes the class-based issues that helped spark the war too important to forget. 37

That narrative may also aid in the quest for that holy grail of academic history: a receptive public audience. The neo-Confederate outcry against the alleged anti-southern bias of McPherson's 2000 “What Caused the Civil War?” essay and the ongoing controversy over the Confederate flag indicate that much of the public does not share in the scholarly consensus on slavery's central place in Civil War causation. Unfortunately, no quick fix exists for popular misconceptions about the war, but scholarship that frames the conflict over slavery as a struggle in which the liberties of all Americans were at stake may influence minds closed to depictions of the war as an antiracist crusade. This is not to argue that historians should pander to popular prejudice or that race is not a central theme in the history of the Civil War era. Rather, historians can and should capitalize on the political and pedagogical advantages of an important body of scholarship that sharpens our understanding of Civil War causation by explaining why even incorrigible northern racists voted and fought against southern slaveholders, and that reminds us that slavery impacted all antebellum Americans, North and South, black and white. When northerners urged the “necessity” of defending their liberty against the encroaching “tyranny” of a government “under the absolute control of an oligarchy of southern slave holders,” as Judge F. C. White of Utica, New York, wrote in 1858, they meant precisely what they said. To gainsay the salience of race in the causes, course, and outcome of the Civil War would be a terrible mistake, but it would be equally misleading to neglect the matters of class, power, and democracy at the heart of the slavery debate; these issues contributed mightily to the origins of the nation's bloodiest conflict and to its modern-day significance. 38

Whatever its ultimate fate in the classroom and public discourse, recent scholarship on the coming of the Civil War reveals an impatience with old interpretive categories, an eagerness to challenge the basic parameters that have long guided scholarly thinking on the topic, and a healthy skepticism of narratives that explain the war with comforting, simplistic formulae. The broad consensus on slavery's centrality has not stifled rapid growth and diversification in the field. Indeed, the proliferation of works on Civil War causation presents a serious challenge to anyone seeking to synthesize the recent literature into a single tidy interpretation. Rather than suggest an all-encompassing model, this essay has outlined three broad themes that could provide fertile ground for future debate. A reaction against the expanding geographic and temporal breadth of Civil War causation studies, for example, might prompt scholars to return to tightly focused, state-level analyses of antebellum politics. Recent political histories of antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana suggest that this approach has much to contribute to our understanding of how national debates filtered down to state and local levels. Other scholars might take an explicitly comparative approach and analyze the causes, course, and results of the American Civil War alongside those of roughly contemporaneous intrastate conflicts, including the Reform War (1857–1861) in Mexico and China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Comparative history's vast potential has been amply demonstrated by Enrico Dal Lago's study of agrarian elites and regionalism in the Old South and Italy, and by Don H. Doyle's edited collection on secession movements around the globe. Similarly, scholars undoubtedly will challenge the interpretive emphases on proslavery American nationalism, antislavery northern sectionalism, and the class dimensions of the sectional conflict that pervade much of the recent scholarship and receive close attention in this essay. But others might carry on this work by studying phenomena such as the disunionist thrust of radical abolitionism. The campaign for free-state secession never sank deep roots in northern soil. But by the late 1850s it was a frequent topic of editorials in abolitionist publications such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and it captured mainstream headlines through events such as the 1857 Worcester Disunion Convention. And even if race, southern sectionalism, and northern Unionism dominate future narratives of Civil War causation, further debate will sharpen our analysis of an easily mythologized period of American history. 39

These debates will be no less meaningful because of scholars' near-universal acknowledgement of the centrality of slavery in the coming of the Civil War. Instead, they illustrate C. Vann Woodward's observation that “most of the important debates over history … have not been about absolute but about relative matters, not about the existence but about the degree or extent of the phenomenon in question.” Beneath a veneer of consensus lies interpretive nuance and healthy disagreement, which we can hope will inform both academic and popular commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial. 40

The title of this article borrows from Howard K. Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War,” Social Science Research Bulletin, 54 (1946), 53–102. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953–1955), VIII, 332–33; James M. McPherson, “What Caused the Civil War?,” North and South, 4 (Nov. 2000), 12–22, esp. 13. This consensus extends into college textbooks, many written by James McPherson, which “contain little debate over war causation since they recognize that slavery was the root cause of the war.” See William B. Rogers and Terese Martyn, “A Consensus at Last: American Civil War Texts and the Topics That Dominate the College Classroom,” History Teacher, 41 (Aug. 2008), 519–30, esp. 530. See also Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean, “A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks,” Civil War History, 51 (Sept. 2005), 317–24. Charles W. Joyner, “The Flag Controversy and the Causes of the Civil War: A Statement by Historians,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 24 (Winter 2001), 196–98, esp. 197. For lengthier exposés of slavery, secession, and postbellum mythmaking from recent years, see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2001); and James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, eds., The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” (Jackson, 2010).

Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, 2008), 4. Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York, 2005), 128. For Edward Ayers's call for reinvigorated debate on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War, see ibid. , 131–44.

For analyses of earlier literature, see Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War”; Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York, 1962); David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the Civil War,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, by David M. Potter (Baton Rouge, 1968), 87–150; and Eric Foner, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History, 20 (Sept. 1974), 197–214. For more recent historiographical assessments of specific topics related to the sectional crisis, see Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, 2005), 25–200. For a reinterpretation of the full century and a half of scholarship on Civil War causation that briefly samples recent literature, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (June 2011), 237–64. Several important bodies of literature are underrepresented in my historiography. One is work on the five months between Abraham Lincoln's election and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which addresses the question of why and how secession sparked a shooting war. This outcome was not inevitable, because the causes of disunion were not identical to the causes of the Civil War itself. This essay focuses on the former topic. For recent interpretations of the latter, see Dew, Apostles of Disunion; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001); Larry D. Mansch, Abraham Lincoln, President-Elect: The Four Critical Months from Election to Inauguration (Jefferson, 2005); Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007); Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, 2008); Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2008); Lawrence M. Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis: The Effort to Prevent Civil War (Jefferson, 2009); William J. Cooper Jr., “The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (Feb. 2011), 3–16; Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War, 1861 (New York, 2011); and Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011). Biographies are also not explored systematically here. Recent biographies related to the coming of the Civil War include William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia, S.C., 2001); John L. Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, 2005); John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, 2005); Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2006); and Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis . Thanks in part to the close proximity of Lincoln's bicentennial birthday and the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholarship on the sixteenth president continues to burgeon. For analyses of this vast literature, see James Oakes, “Lincoln and His Commas,” Civil War History, 54 (June 2008), 176–93; Sean Wilentz, “Who Lincoln Was,” New Republic, July 15, 2009, pp. 24–47; and Nicole Etcheson, “Abraham Lincoln and the Nation's Greatest Quarrel: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History, 76 (May 2010), 401–16. For an account of Lincoln historiography in the Journal of American History, see Allen C. Guelzo, “The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History, ” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 400–416. That biography and studies of the secession winter are thriving suggests a possible waning of the long-dominant “irrepressible conflict” interpretation, as both approaches emphasize contingency and individual agency. Collective biography, particularly on Lincoln's relationships with other key figures, has also flourished. On Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007); Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008); and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008). On Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, see Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York, 2008); and Roy Morris, The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (New York, 2008). A third body of literature that needs further historiographical analysis relates to gender and the coming of the Civil War. See, for example, Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, 2003); Nina Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill, 2008); Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge, 2009); and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). For discussions of the classic schools of scholarship, see Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, by Kenneth M. Stampp (New York, 1980), 191–245; Ayers, What Caused the Civil War?, 132–33; and Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003), 78–79. For a call for a synthesis of the fundamentalist and revisionist interpretations, see Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? On the continued relevance of these camps, see James Huston, “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War,” Reviews in American History, 34 (Sept. 2006), 329. The coming of the Civil War has long shaped discussions of historical causation, including Lee Benson and Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: Two Appraisals,” History and Theory, 1 (no. 2, 1961), 163–85; and William Dray and Newton Garver, “Some Causal Accounts of the American Civil War,” Daedalus, 91 (Summer 1962), 578–98.

Key works on the transnational turn include “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–542; Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” History Teacher, 36 (Nov. 2002), 37–64; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006); and Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007). Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), I, 3–5; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 3–5; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 1–6. On continental expansion and sectional conflict, see Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1997). On the divisive influence of sectionalized fantasies of tropical conquest, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973). For an early work on Haiti's transnational significance, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988). On the relationship between the Ostend Manifesto and domestic politics, see Robert E. May, “A ‘Southern Strategy’ for the 1850s: Northern Democrats, the Tropics, and Expansion of the National Domain,” Louisiana Studies, 14 (Winter 1975), 333–59, esp. 337–42; and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. II: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (New York, 2007), 395–98.

Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 7; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 5. Other recent transnational studies of Civil War causation include Timothy Roberts, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Antebellum Violence in Kansas,” Journal of the West, 44 (Fall 2005), 58–68; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, Ga., 2011). Several recent dissertations explore the equally permeable boundary between North and South. See Joseph T. Rainer, “The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000); Wesley Brian Borucki, “Yankees in King Cotton's Court: Northerners in Antebellum and Wartime Alabama” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 2002); Eric William Plaag, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2006); and Alana K. Bevan, “‘We Are the Same People’: The Leverich Family of New York and Their Antebellum American Inter-regional Network of Elites” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). On the “mighty experiment,” see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002). The compelling scholarship on global antislavery undoubtedly encouraged the internationalization of Civil War causation studies. David Brion Davis's contributions remain indispensable. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 –1823 (Ithaca, 1975); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006). For a work that places antebellum southern thought, including proslavery ideology, into an international context, see Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols., Chapel Hill, 2004).

Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 6–7; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 9–10.

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2009), 10; Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville, 2006). John Majewski offers a different perspective on slavery and free trade, acknowledging that slaveholders were hardly united in favor of protection and arguing that the moderate Confederate tariff represented a compromise between protectionists and free traders. See John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, 2009).

On the centrality of cotton exports in the economic history of the South—and the United States—see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961). On the Old South's place in world economic history and its dependency on the global cotton market, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (New York, 1983), 34–60. On the cotton trade and Confederate diplomacy, see Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr., King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931). On the early history of the cotton kingdom, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html . The foundational text for “long movement” scholarship is Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233–63. An influential application of this paradigm is Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008). For a sharp critique of the long movement concept, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265–88. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006), 5.

John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007). For an accessible introduction to the early struggles over slavery, see Gary J. Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821 (Lanham, 2010). On slavery's post-Revolution expansion, see Rothman, Slave Country . For the social and intellectual history of early proslavery thought, see Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829: An Anthology (Columbia, S.C., 2006); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2008); and Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009).

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 28–51; Jan Lewis, “The Three-Fifths Clause and the Origins of Sectionalism,” in Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio, 2008), 19–46; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, 2006); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002); Christopher Childers, “Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay,” Civil War History, 57 (March 2011), 48–70. For a discussion of the temporal parameters of his own work, see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), vii.

Paul Calore, The Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Territorial Disputes between North and South (Jefferson, 2008). John B. Alley, Speech of Hon. John B. Alley, of Mass., on the Principles and Purposes of the Republican Party: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Monday, April 30, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 2; Robert Toombs, Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs, on the Crisis. Delivered before the Georgia Legislature, December 7, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 5. Emphasis in original. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 99; Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, 2010). On the memory of the American Revolution in William Lloyd Garrison's proudly anachronistic rhetoric, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 2003). On abolitionists' use of public commemorations of British emancipation to recruit new activists, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, “‘No Occurrence in Human History Is More Deserving of Commemoration Than This’: Abolitionist Celebrations of Freedom,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 200–219. On the link between collective memory of the Texas Revolution and the growth of Confederate nationalism in Texas, see Andrew F. Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 114 (July 2010), 21–36. On the memory of the Civil War, see, for example, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); William Alan Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 5, 17, 317–22, esp. 17, 5. Emphasis in original.

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, 2007), 3. Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 211.

Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, 2010), 17–18. For recent studies of the slavery expansion issue in the late 1840s and early 1850s, see Joel H. Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York, 2005); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007); John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, 2003); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York, 2010); and Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2010). Also in the late 1840s, antislavery activists shifted away from efforts to abolish the interstate slave trade and toward the restriction of slavery's expansion. See Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power, 113–39. General histories that begin in the 1845–1850 period include Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (New York, 1934); Nevins, Ordeal of the Union; Potter, Impending Crisis; Ludwell H. Johnson, Division and Reunion: America, 1848–1877 (New York, 1978); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore, 1988); Robert Cook, Civil War America: Making a Nation, 1848–1877 (London, 2003); and Green, Politics and America in Crisis .

Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 28. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, 2000), 61–80; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, 2009), 21–122. For accessible accounts of the Compromise of 1850, see Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War; and Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice.

Green, Politics and America in Crisis, 41. On the ages of representatives and senators in 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1964), 32, 40. On the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), 494. “Address, 1851, of the Southern Rights Association of the University of Virginia to the Young Men of the South” [Dec. 19, 1850?], folder 1, box 1, William Henry Gist Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia).

The classic statement of this “revisionist” interpretation is J. G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27 (June 1940), 3–28. For a different psychological interpretation of generational influences on politics, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979). For a generational analysis of the rise of immediate abolitionism around 1830, see James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History, 56 (Nov. 1990), 633–35. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill, 2005). Earlier works that emphasize secession's popularity among youthful southern whites include William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974); and Henry James Walker, “Henry Clayton and the Secession Movement in Alabama,” Southern Studies, 4 (Winter 1993), 341–60. Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, 2003); Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–78.

David M. Potter, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” in South and the Sectional Conflict, by Potter, 34–83, esp. 75, 65.

Grant, North over South, 6; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 42–74. See also Kevin M. Gannon, “Calculating the Value of Union: States' Rights, Nullification, and Secession in the North, 1800–1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2002).

Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009), xv, 84, 217. On slaveholders' influence over national policy and their use of federal power to advance proslavery interests, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, completed and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago, 2010). For a work that argues that the slave power thesis was not mere paranoia and disputes the dismissive interpretation of earlier historians, see Richards, Slave Power . Works that Leonard Richards disputes include Chauncey S. Boucher, “ In re That Aggressive Slavocracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 8 (June–Sept. 1921), 13–79; and David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1970). The painful shift from proslavery American nationalism to proslavery southern nationalism can be traced in the career of the Alabama Whig Henry Washington Hilliard. See David I. Durham, A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808–1892 (Baton Rouge, 2008).

Matthew J. Karp, “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (May 2011), 283–324, esp. 290; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 197–259; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003).

Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2010), 12. Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 2002); Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), esp. xxii, 576, 791; Diane N. Capitani, Truthful Pictures: Slavery Ordained by God in the Domestic Sentimental Novel of the Nineteenth-Century South (Lanham, 2009). On the antidemocratic impulse behind secession in South Carolina and, ostensibly, the rest of the Confederacy, see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000). See also Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (Tuscaloosa, 2009). On the southern rejection of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York, 2005); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York, 2008). For the argument that both sections were equally dedicated to liberalism, see David F. Ericson, The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America (New York, 2000). For a compelling argument that secession stemmed from a fierce reaction against nineteenth-century liberal trends and from fealty to the true American republic, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 12–13. Francis W. Pickens to Benjamin F. Perry, June 27, 1857, folder 3, box 1, B. F. Perry Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Emphasis in original.

On the fragility of an antebellum nationalism built on ideals that developed clashing sectional characteristics, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, 2002), 8–9.

This work expands on a theme advanced in Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (1949; East Lansing, 1964). Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 120.

Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History, 15 (March 1969), 5–18, esp. 9, 6.

On the difficulty of placing antislavery activists on a spectrum of political opinion, see Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge, 2005), 265.

Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, 2004), 8; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 5; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, 26–28. On the importance of “the Union”—antebellum shorthand for an experiment in democratic self-government freighted with world-historical significance—in arousing the northern war effort, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic, 28 (Spring 2008), 113, 112.

Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence, 2010), 54. Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 44. The white defendants Steven Lubet examines are Castner Hanway, charged with treason for his involvement in an 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania, clash, and Simeon Bushnell, a participant in an 1858 Oberlin, Ohio, slave rescue. The third case Lubet looks at is that of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio, 2006); Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave (Madison, 2007).

Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010). On fugitive slaves and national politics, see R. J. M. Blackett, “Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery after 1850,” American Nineteenth Century History, 10 (June 2009), 119–36.

John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York, 1995); Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, II; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1961 (New York, 2007). For an exploration of their differences, see John Ashworth, “William W. Freehling and the Politics of the Old South,” American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (Spring 2004), 1–29. On the “reintegration” of political and social history, see William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994).

Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, I, 6, II, 1.

Freehling, Road to Disunion, II, xii, xiii. On the relationship between slave resistance and politics in antebellum Virginia, see William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2003). On the political consequences of mass panic over suspected slave revolts in 1860, see Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge, 2007).

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, 2008); Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 103. Elizabeth Varon mentions the speech but not its impact on northern workers. See ibid ., 308–10. For the class implications of James Henry Hammond's theory, see Samantha Maziarz, “Mudsill Theory,” in Class in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Robert E. Weir (3 vols., Westport, 2007), II, 549–50. On northerners' response to the speech, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982), 347. On the Republican banner, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 196–98. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Slavery in White and Black . Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2004). J. D. B. DeBow, The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder: The Right of Peaceful Secession; Slavery in the Bible (Charleston, 1860). On elite secessionists' heavy-handed efforts to mobilize nonslaveholding whites behind secession and the only partial success of racist demagoguery, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–84.

In his vindication of Jacksonian antislavery, Daniel Feller criticizes the “fixation with race” that leads too many scholars “to question the sincerity or good intentions of any but the most outspoken racial egalitarians among the opponents of slavery.” Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 50. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 92; Feller, “Brother in Arms”; Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois,” Civil War History, 47 (March 2001), 7–29; Sean Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (Sept. 2004), 375–401. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 190–253; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York, 2007), 12, 221; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology during the Civil War,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation, ed. Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia, 2002), 103–27.

Adam Rothman, “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 64–91. On the collapse of planters' national power, despite their continued regional dominance, see Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review, 95 (Feb. 1990), 75–98.

F. C. White to John P. Hale, Feb. 16, 1858, folder 8, box 12, John P. Hale Papers (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord). On the response to McPherson's essay, see John M. Coski, “Historians under Fire: The Public and the Memory of the Civil War,” Cultural Resource Management, 25 (no. 4, 2002), 13–15. On the Confederate flag controversy, see J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, 2000); K. Michael Prince, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (Columbia, S.C., 2004); and John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2003). Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005); Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens, Ga., 2010). On the Worcester Disunion Convention, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1995), 140–41; and Ericson, Debate over Slavery, 74–79.

C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 79.

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The English Civil War: Causes, Costs and Benefits Term Paper

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Factors that led to civil war

The number of people who perished, gains or advantages, works cited.

The English Civil War broke out in 1642 and lasted for nine years (Coates 1-2). The parliament and monarchial administration disagreed on the ideals and principles upheld by each side and their unwillingness to cede ground on any issue (Henry and Delf 2). In the end, a war became the only option to settle their issues (Henry and Delf 2-6). The war occurred in three stages or periods. The first two stages occurred in 1642–1646 and in 1648–1649 (Backman 1-10) involving the Long Legislature and King Charles the first. The final stage occurred in 1649–1651 and involved the Rump Legislature and the Royal leadership under King Charles the second (Backman 3).

Ultimately, the Parliament emerged victorious and made changes both to justice and governance system. When it comes to the law, the English Civil War acted as a platform for establishing governance standards for future English leaders. That is, they had to derive consent or approval from Parliament whenever they wanted to pursue in issue of national interest (Henry and Delf 4). This paper discusses the English civil war in terms of causative factors, costs/disadvantages, and advantages/benefits.

Whig school of thought

According to Whig school of thought, the Civil War resulted from a protracted struggle between the Monarchial rule and parliamentary rule (White 3-5). In this case, the parliament wanted the conventional rights of people preserved, whilst the royal leadership wanted to expand its right in a way that would allow it to dictate issues (Backman 4-6).

Marxist school of thought

According to Marxist school of thought, the English Civil War was purely a class war (Henry and Delf 5-7). That is, those who benefited a lot from the dictatorship of Charles the first such as lords and church leaders, strongly defended his leadership, whilst parliament with the support of middle classes such as industrial and trading groups strongly resisted the monarchial leadership (Coates 2).

Revisionist school of thought

Revisionist, on the other hand, indicated that the English civil war arose from different factors each having a significant impact. For instance, Anglican doctrines were to be imposed on the Scottish and were strongly resisted (Coates 4). King Charles then had to use the military to enforce his directive. With this, he also forced the legislature to raise the tax in order to get sufficient amount of money to sustain the army (Backman 7). However, other groups still resisted his directive as no side was willing to compromise.

Local demands and problems

The monarchial leadership was also resisted as a result of local displeasures (Backman 10-13). For instance, the livelihood of many people was negatively impacted after the enforcement of drainage-schemes. With this, many people thought that King Charles was too insensitive to local grievances (White 4). This aspect saw many easterners join parliament a group that played a role in resisting the tyrannical leadership of King Charles.

Unwilling to convene parliament

Since the King was not able to raise money or revenue through the legislature, he was not willing to convene it (Henry and Delf 23-25). This meant that he would use other orthodox means to raise money. He started by bringing back into effect some outdated principles. For example, those who failed to turn up for coronation of the king were to pay a certain fine. The King also introduced ship tax payable by inlanders for sustenance of the Royal Navy. The wealthy were also compelled to purchase titles. Those who refused were fined heavily (Henry and Delf 9). Some people refused to pay any of these taxes arguing that they were unlawful. They were taken to courts and fined heavily for refusing to abide by the set laws (Backman 5). This aspect provoked widespread fury against the king’s leadership.

The constitutionality of parliament and a show of power

Before the civil war, the English Parliament did not have any permanent responsibility provided for in law and constitution. The parliament only convened on temporary basis and only served as an advisory committee to the royal leadership (White 6-10). The king also would dissolve it whenever he wanted. As such it lacked legal powers to force its will upon the government. This issue did not please many people especially parliamentarians.

As a show of power and strength, in 1941 parliament ordered for the execution of Strafford, the key adviser to the King. In addition, parliament demanded for the abolition of the Star Chamber court (Backman 23-33). This issue savored the relationship between the king and parliament, with the king leading an army to parliament to arrest his main opponents.

The concern of parliament with regard to the petition of right

When the king married Henrietta Maria, a catholic, many people raised concerns over the issue (White 3). The concerns were centered on a possibility of raising catholic children including future monarch leaders. This was a deep seated issue based on the fact that England was officially protestant under the Church of England (White 4). The other aspect is the decision by the king to intervene on the European Protestant war. This meant that the expenditure would increase something that parliament was unwilling to sanction.

During the English civil war, figures for casualties are not reliable, although some rough estimates have been provided (Henry and Delf 11-13). These estimates point out that England suffered a loss of about four percent, Scotland about six percent and Ireland about forty percent of the entire population. From this figures, it is apparent that Ireland was hard hit by the civil war than England and Ireland.

A number of ordinary people derived a lot of benefits from the lawlessness of civil society during the war period (Backman 2). People living in the countryside seized many things such as timber and estates from the church leadership and the royal family. Living conditions improved particularly for communities living on acquired estates. After the first stage of the civil war, it became apparent that the traditional way of life advanced by the king had started fading. Some element of democracy was also introduced (Henry and Delf 4). Ultimately, since the monarchial leadership was declared null and void, three countries, Scotland, Ireland and England, were administered under the commonwealth of England.

The English Civil War resulted from the disagreement between the parliament and the monarchial leadership or the government. Whilst the king had absolute powers to dictate on whatever he wanted, the parliament kept enhancing especially in the context of sanctioning tax collection for the government. Often, parliament would not yield to the demands of the king, leading to protracted sideshows and eventually the war that claimed many lives.

Backman, Clifford. The cultures of the West: a history, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

Coates, Ben. The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2004. Print.

Henry, Chris and Brian Delf. English Civil War artillery 1642-51, Oxford, London: Osprey Publishing, 2005. Print.

White, Michelle. Henrietta Maria and the English civil wars. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2006. Print.

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Causes of the English Civil War

The English Civil War from 1642 to 1651 was a period of social belligerence, religious disputes, political experimentation and instability in England, Scotland and Ireland. However, less is known but much is debated about the causes since they did not seem likely to produce the conflicts, just the type of it. Some historians have focused on society and the masses, others on elites, others on socio-economic aspects and many more in the running of the church and the state. Others complain about the top-down approaches, too much focus on Scotland and Ireland, and misinterpretations of documents left by royalists and parliamentarians. There are those who argue it was a religious conflict, while others argue that it was portrayed by some contemporaries as a holy war. Although many still disagree, there is a growing consensus among historians that religion did played a paramount role in causing the conflicts. The years leading to the Civil War were a period of royal miscalculations, Scottish and Irish revolts due mainly to religious tensions, religious discussions between royalists and parliamentarians, and religious zeal which produced an unexpected and unwanted civil war. While political and constitutional grievances seemed to have triggered the conflicts and build up tension, religion was the primary underlying factor.

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• DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27110-8
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The causes of the English Civil War

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Civil-war stories in lands of commanded forgetting: restoration england and late twentieth-century el salvador, a 'lunatick revolter from loyalty': the death of rowland wilson and the english revolution, staging legal authority: ideas of law in caroline drama, north atlantic culture wars, counsel and command in early modern english thought, conscience, conviction and contention : religious diversity in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century english church, the construction and use of gender in the pamphlet literature of the english civil war, 1642-1646, john pym, ideographs, and the rhetoric of opposition to the english crown, milton’s ‘radicalism’ in the tyrannicide tracts, the legacy of the english civil war: rethinking the revolution, related papers.

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Conrad russell. the causes of the english civil war . new york: oxford university press. 1990. pp. xv, 236. $84.00 cloth, $15.00 paper..

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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/4050758

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Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Civil War

Essays on Civil War

Civil war essay topic examples.

The American Civil War is a significant part of our nation's past, filled with fascinating stories, debates, and events. Whether you want to argue, compare, describe, persuade, or narrate, we have a wide range of essay topics that will take you on a journey through this pivotal period in American history. Join us as we delve into the heart of the conflict, examine key figures, analyze strategies, vividly depict battles, and explore the moral imperatives that shaped the course of the Civil War. These essay topics will guide you on your historical voyage, offering insights into the complexities and enduring legacies of this era.

Argumentative Essays

Argumentative Civil War essays require you to analyze and present arguments related to this historical conflict. Here are some topic examples:

• 1. Argue whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or states' rights.
• 2. Analyze the role of key political figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, in shaping the outcome of the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War stands as a monumental chapter in our nation's history, marked by conflicting ideologies and profound repercussions. In this essay, I will argue that at its core, the Civil War was a struggle over the institution of slavery and its implications for the United States.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the argument for the centrality of slavery in the Civil War underscores its deep-rooted impact on our nation's evolution. As we reflect on this defining period, we are challenged to confront the enduring legacy of this conflict and its implications for our society today.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast Civil War essays involve examining the differences and similarities between various aspects of the conflict. Consider these topics:

• 1. Compare and contrast the strategies and leadership styles of Union and Confederate military commanders.
• 2. Analyze the impact of the Civil War on the lives of soldiers and civilians in the North and the South.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: The American Civil War featured diverse military strategies and leadership styles, alongside varying experiences for those directly affected. In this essay, I will delve into the differences and similarities between Union and Confederate military commanders and the profound effects of the war on individuals on both sides of the conflict.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of military leaders and civilian experiences during the Civil War provide a multifaceted view of this historic event. As we examine these aspects, we gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of this period in American history.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive Civil War essays enable you to vividly depict events, battles, or notable figures from the era. Here are some topic ideas:

• 1. Describe the Battle of Gettysburg, emphasizing its pivotal role in the outcome of the war.
• 2. Paint a detailed portrait of Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his leadership qualities and the challenges he faced during the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: The American Civil War witnessed significant battles and iconic figures that have left an indelible mark on our history. In this essay, I will immerse you in the vivid details of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the conflict, and provide a descriptive portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the leader who steered the nation through this tumultuous period.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive exploration of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's leadership underscores the indomitable spirit of a nation in crisis. As we reflect on these historical aspects, we gain insight into the resilience and determination that defined this era.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive Civil War essays involve convincing your audience of a particular perspective or interpretation of the conflict. Consider these persuasive topics:

• 1. Persuade your readers that the Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point in the Civil War and a moral imperative.
• 2. Argue for or against the notion that the Reconstruction era effectively addressed the issues arising from the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: The Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction era represent critical chapters in the aftermath of the Civil War. In this persuasive essay, I will present the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation not only altered the course of the war but also marked a moral imperative in the struggle for freedom.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument for the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation challenges us to acknowledge the moral dimensions of the Civil War. As we examine this transformative period, we are urged to consider the enduring impact of this historic document on the journey toward equality.

Narrative Essays

Narrative Civil War essays allow you to tell a compelling story from the perspective of a historical figure or a fictional character during the Civil War era. Explore these narrative essay topics:

• 1. Narrate a day in the life of a Civil War soldier, conveying the challenges and emotions they faced on the battlefield.
• 2. Imagine yourself as a journalist covering the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and recount your experiences and emotions during that historic event.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War was a time of upheaval and turmoil, experienced firsthand by soldiers and civilians alike. In this narrative essay, I will transport you to the battlefield and the tumultuous events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, offering a personal perspective on these historical moments.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the narrative accounts of a Civil War soldier's life and a journalist's experiences during the Lincoln assassination bring history to life in a profoundly human way. As we immerse ourselves in these narratives, we gain a deeper appreciation for the individuals who lived through these tumultuous times and the resilience they displayed.

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The Factors of Civil War According to Oates

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April 12, 1861 - April 26, 1865

United States

Confederate States of America, United States

Battle of Antietam, Fort Pillow Massacre, Battle of Gettysburg, Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, Battle of Monocacy

Abraham Lincoln, who served as the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln's leadership and steadfast commitment to preserving the Union were instrumental in guiding the Northern states to victory. General Robert E. Lee, who served as the commander of the Confederate Army. Lee's military prowess and strategic genius earned him respect even among his adversaries. Clara Barton, known as the "Angel of the Battlefield," made a lasting impact as a nurse and humanitarian during the war. She later founded the American Red Cross, which continues to provide humanitarian assistance worldwide.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, was a defining moment in the history of the United States. It emerged from a complex set of circumstances and prerequisites that spanned several decades. One of the primary prerequisites was the issue of slavery. The institution of slavery had long been a divisive issue between the Northern and Southern states. The expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, heightened tensions and fueled regional conflicts. Economic differences also played a significant role. The Northern states had undergone rapid industrialization, while the Southern states relied heavily on agriculture, particularly cotton production. This led to differing priorities and conflicting interests between the two regions. Political factors, such as debates over states' rights and the balance of power between the federal government and the states, further exacerbated the tensions. The election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, who opposed the expansion of slavery, intensified the divide and prompted several Southern states to secede from the Union. The historical context of the American Civil War was characterized by deep-rooted divisions over slavery, economic disparities, and political conflicts. These factors ultimately culminated in a devastating conflict that reshaped the nation's history and had long-lasting consequences for both the United States and the institution of slavery.

One of the most significant effects was the abolition of slavery. The Civil War served as a catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declared slaves in Confederate territories to be free. Ultimately, the war led to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865, officially abolishing slavery nationwide. The Civil War also had far-reaching political consequences. It solidified the power of the federal government over the states and established the supremacy of the United States as a single, indivisible nation. The conflict clarified the relationship between the federal and state governments, paving the way for the expansion of federal authority in subsequent years. Moreover, the war's aftermath brought about significant social and cultural changes. Reconstruction efforts aimed to rebuild and integrate the Southern states into the Union, but the process was marked by challenges, resistance, and the rise of racial segregation. These struggles set the stage for the civil rights movement in the following century. Economically, the war transformed the United States into a more industrialized nation. The demand for supplies and weaponry during the war accelerated industrialization in the North. Additionally, the emancipation of slaves created a labor force that contributed to the country's economic growth.

In the Union states, there was a prevailing sentiment that the war was necessary to preserve the Union and end the institution of slavery. Many Northerners supported the cause, viewing it as a fight for justice and the preservation of the nation's democratic ideals. Abolitionists and those who opposed the expansion of slavery were particularly vocal in their support of the Union cause. In the Confederate states, public opinion leaned towards defending their perceived rights to self-governance and the institution of slavery. The idea of states' rights and the defense of Southern traditions resonated strongly among many Southerners. They believed in the necessity of secession to protect their way of life and preserve their economic system. Public opinion within individual communities could also vary. Families were often divided, with some members fighting for the Union and others for the Confederacy. People in border states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, experienced particularly complex and nuanced views due to their proximity to both sides. Over time, public opinion on the Civil War has evolved. The war's causes and consequences have been reevaluated and interpreted through different lenses, leading to ongoing discussions and debates. Today, the Civil War is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in American history, with public opinion encompassing a range of perspectives that continue to shape our understanding of the conflict.

Films: "Gone with the Wind" (1939), "Glory" (1989), "Lincoln" (2012). Literature: "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane, "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara.

The topic of the American Civil War holds immense importance for academic exploration and essay writing due to its significant impact on American history and society. This conflict, fought between the Northern and Southern states from 1861 to 1865, centered on fundamental issues like slavery, states' rights, and the preservation of the Union. Studying the American Civil War allows us to delve into the complexities of the nation's past and comprehend the deep-rooted divisions that led to this brutal conflict. It provides a platform to analyze the moral, political, and socioeconomic factors that shaped the war's outcomes and repercussions. Furthermore, exploring the Civil War fosters a deeper understanding of the struggle for civil rights and the long-lasting consequences that continue to shape the United States today. By examining primary sources, historical narratives, and varying perspectives, essays on the American Civil War can shed light on pivotal events, influential figures, military strategies, and the experiences of individuals affected by the war. It offers an opportunity to critically analyze the causes, motivations, and legacies of this watershed moment in American history, ultimately contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the nation's past and its ongoing pursuit of equality and justice.

1. Foner, E. (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company. 2. McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. 3. McPherson, J. M. (2003). Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. Oxford University Press. 4. McPherson, J. M. (2007). This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford University Press. 5. Miller, R. J. (2003). Lincoln and His World: The Civil War Era. University of Nebraska Press. 6. Oakes, J. (2012). Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. W. W. Norton & Company. 7. Potter, D. M. (1990). The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Harper Perennial. 8. Robertson, J. I. (2002). Civil War: America Becomes One Nation. DK Publishing. 9. Symonds, C. L. (2001). The American Heritage History of the Battle of Gettysburg. HarperCollins. 10. Ward, G. C. (1990). The Civil War: An Illustrated History. Alfred A. Knopf.

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The Causes Of The English Civil War History Essay

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015

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The crown was placed upon his head and with that he became King Charles I of England, on June 2, 1626. Over 25 years later, his head would also symbolize the end of his reign through execution. He would become the first English monarch to be tried and sentenced to death since the monarchy's establishment, largely due to his causing of the English Civil War. The war stemmed from a long-standing weakness of the monarch and Charles I's attempt to strengthen the figure head of a nation. However, the Civil War proved to be crucial to the political system of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. The English Civil War permanently and directly shaped the balance of power between the monarch and the parliament of England.

The underlying problems facing Charles I during his reign began in the 16th century. In 1550, the price of food in England had doubled from that of 1500. The cost then doubled again by 1590 and in 1640 the price was six times that of 1500. A great contributor to this was the importing of silver from Central and South America by Spain during this time period. Such a great increase in currency production inflated prices across Europe, including England. Another factor was a population increase, which led to increased demand and in turn inflation. The lower classes were not the only people affected by this time of difficulty. Queen Elizabeth I was forced during her rule to sell approximately &pound;900,000 of property in order to pay off personal debt. This act left the monarchy very vulnerable to public scrutiny. It also left many doubting the power, prestige, and divine right of the monarch (Russell 98-99). With the death of King James in 1625, his son Charles took the throne. With regard to political experience, Charles had none. All he did have was royal blood and a claim to divine right. The king was deeply religious and favored the ceremonious Church of England, partially because as King he was the head of the church. This worried many members of parliament, which was dominantly Puritan. They feared that Charles' taking to ceremonies could possibly lead to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. They also feared that he would then desire to enforce Catholicism as the national religion (Lace 22). This fear was justified by the actions of Charles in Scotland in the mid-1630s. In an attempt to further unite the nations which he ruled, he substituted Anglican worship for the Presbyterian worship which was most commonly prevalent in Scotland. This angered the large Presbyterian population and resulted in a large revolt in 1938 (Gentles 276). Two wars were fought as a result of this conflict. Both were failures and English soldiers retreated in great numbers in 1640. The essential reason for this was the drying up of funds to support the fighting.

In a desperate attempt to increase the current taxes enforced on the public, Charles called together the Parliament which he had vowed never to call again after dissolving it three times prior (Gentles 277). By this point, the majority of the Parliament opposed the taxation put in place by the King. He had recently implemented an additional tax called ship money. This was a tax used specifically to aid the building and maintenance of the Royal Navy. The Parliament, in an attempt to restrict the power of the monarch, passed laws through legislation that called for the beheading of one of Charles' advisors, the earl of Strattford. They also passed bills that abolished all taxes without the consent of the parliament. In addition, Royal courts were abolished that the parliament viewed as supporting the King's abuse of power. King Charles I, to prevent immediate rebellion, signed all of these bills into law (Lace 36). By doing so, he greatly limited his own power in an attempt for appeasement. Charles ruled peacefully for the following year until October of 1641. It was during this month that rumors spread throughout the nation of England that Irish citizens had begun a rebellion against English rule.

The specifics of the rumors varied. Some claimed that over one hundred thousand English women and children had been killed by Irish mobs. In actuality approximately four thousand English citizens were killed, and very few were women or children. Nonetheless, it was clear that action had to be taken by King Charles I. While these goings on occurred, a member of parliament who opposed the King took it upon himself to present a bill to the parliament. It proposed an even further restriction on the power of the monarch, including the nominating of all the King's advisors by the parliament. Parliament voted and the bill was passed by a very small margin. Charles responded by arresting five members of the parliament, including the composer of the bill. King Charles I personally traveled to the next parliament meeting, only to find that the five persons to be arrested had been notified of their arrest beforehand and had fled. The conflict between the King and the parliament had reached its breaking point. Civil war was eminent (Russell 252-257).

The two sides, those supporting the King and those supporting the parliament, built up their armed forces and raised money in anticipation of the upcoming war. On August 22, 1642 Charles I officially declared war in a public announcement and requested his supporters, the Royalists, take action to assist him in his effort against the parliamentarians as they would be known. As in many wars, the two sides created mocking nicknames for each other. The Royalists were called Cavaliers, a reference to the Spanish word caballeros meaning mounted knight which emphasized the quasi-Catholic customs of the King. The parliamentarians were known as the Roundheads. The Roundheads were in actuality an organization of apprentices in London who cut their hair very short (Lace 43).

The support for both sides displayed social variety. The lords of the various territories of England were practically evenly split between the Parliamentarians and Royalists. However, the more influential lords mainly sided with the King. These lords were also vastly skilled as riding horses and trained in fighting on horseback. This presented the Royalists with the advantage during the beginning years of the war in which large expanses of land had to be crossed during battles. In one of the first battles, the Battle of Edge Hill, the sides found it very difficult to control their vast armies. At one point, a large portion of the Royalist cavalrymen halted while the rest continued to ransack the belongings of the Parliamentarians who had been forced into retreat. This caused mass confusion on both sides fighting. It resulted in the Parliamentarians returning to the battlefield to continue fighting. The war ended at dusk with both sides agreeing to continue in the morning. This never came to be and the battle was ended with the Parliamentarians taking heavier loses than the Royalists. In this way, the Royalists started the war off on a high note. The battles for the next two years resulted in much the same way, with both sides claiming victory. However, a trend began to form in 1643. The Royalists began using military tactics from the mind of the Parliamentarian Lieutenant General, Oliver Cromwell. His strategy to send the cavalry into battle in waves proved revolutionary in these conflicts (Lace 47). He led the army into battles in which victory seemed ineffable, including many where the Royalist army outnumbered the Parliamentarian cavalry 2 to 1 and surprise attacks on the Parliamentarian bases. The soldiers under his control fought heroically and in many cases were able to successfully drive the Royalists back to their own camps. After these battles it became clear that the war would continue on for an inconceivable amount of time. However, neither side surrendered but rather continued to recruit soldiers and raise money and supplies to fight on.

In 1644 the tide of the war shifted to the side of the Parliamentarians. In the battle of Marston Moor Royalist forces were outnumbered and suffered a great defeat. Likewise, in the battle of Naseby the Royalists were defeated in a mere three hours. Nearly all of their foot soldiers were killed and a large portion of their cavalry was taken out by the well strategized effort of the Parliamentarians on behalf of Oliver Cromwell (Ashley 119-120, 128-129). This battle ended the first portion of the English Civil War. The fighting would continue for another five years. The battles would conclude with much the same results and in 1648 the Royalists surrendered (Ashley 163). A remonstrance was quickly drafted by a member of the Parliament, Ireton. It called for many constitutional reforms and also the immediate placement of the King on trial. The King was placed on trial, by the decision of the Parliament, and was sentenced to death by execution. King Charles I was beheaded on January 30, 1649 (Gentles 282).

The beheading of the monarch meant an opportunity for the Parliament to restructure the government. They did just that by forming the Commonwealth of England. Immediately, the Commonwealth faced foreign invasion. Thousands of Irish citizens revolted yet again and threatened to invade the island of England. However, before the army could be raised to suppress them a rebellion from within their ranks rose up (Lace 78-80). This mutiny was defeated soon after it began and the focus shifted to Ireland. After defeating this rebellion in the battle of Worcester, Cromwell, the Lord-General of the Commonwealth, settled into an entirely political life. He was soon disappointed by the actions of the Parliament under the new government. Instead of focusing on the political and social reforms that fueled the creation of the Commonwealth, many member of the Parliament became determined with the maintenance and expansion of their individual property (Lace 91). Soon Cromwell had had enough. In 1653 Cromwell, much to the dismay of the people of England, disbanded the Parliament indefinitely and became sole ruler of England (Lace 92). This granted him the power he need to pass whatever reforms he pleased, on the other hand it also directly contradicted the policy of a representative form of government that gained him power in the first place. He announced on April 30 his appointment of 140 men to become a representative entity in the English government.

This body, headed by Cromwell as Lord Protector, successfully passed many reforms in its peaceful rule. For the first time in over nine years England experienced no conflict, politically or militaristically, in its government. One of Cromwell's greatest reforms was that of the court system. He abolished the death penalty for insignificant crimes and the court system's efficiency was greatly improved (Lace 98). In 1657 Cromwell was presented with an offer that would require much contemplation, that he accept the crown and become England's next monarch. After great consideration he declined the offer presented by members of the representative branch of government. He continued to rule as Lord Protector until September 3, 1658 when he died of an apparent infection caused by a kidney stone (Lace 108).

The death of the Commonwealth of England shortly followed that of Cromwell. Despite the reintroduction of the monarch of England, the power of the Parliament had been greatly shifted forever. Never again would a monarch be able to disregard the Parliament as King Charles I had, nor would they ever hold as much power as they had previously. Eventually and to this day, the Parliament would come to control the monarch and not vice-versa. Due to the fighting of the English Civil War the balance of power between the monarch and the Parliament of England was shifted forever.

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US History - Causes of the Civil War

Subject: History

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

9 July 2024

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This lesson examines the causes of the US Civil War, which was fought from 1861 to 1865. Students will learn about the key factors that led to the conflict, including slavery, states’ rights, economic differences, and sectionalism. Activities include video analysis, timeline sorting, guided reading, and writing PEEKA paragraphs. The lesson concludes with a discussion on the outcomes of the war and its lasting impact on American society.

Lesson Content and Activities:

Introduction: Discuss the US Civil War and its significance in American history. Introduce today’s keywords: Slavery, States’ Rights, Economic Differences, Sectionalism, Abraham Lincoln.

Video Task: Watch a video on the causes of the US Civil War. List as many causes of the event as you can hear and share your list with a partner.

Research Activity: Research the following topics: Slavery, States’ Rights, Economic Differences, Sectionalism, Election of Abraham Lincoln. Use the videos, information sheet, and the internet for research.

Timeline Activity: Sort the timeline cards into the correct chronological order, covering key events leading up to the Civil War.

Categorisation Task: Categorise and sort your evidence into relevant factors (Social, Political, Economic). Fill in your research table accordingly.

Guided Reading: Complete a guided reading activity on the causes of the US Civil War. Subtitle each paragraph, write down three key facts, and look up any unknown words.

Writing Task: Write a PEEKA paragraph explaining one cause of the US Civil War. Use the PEEKA planning sheet for guidance.

Class Discussion: Share and discuss the PEEKA paragraphs. Reflect on the collective impact of these factors leading to the Civil War.

Recap Quiz: Participate in a recap quiz to reinforce key points from the lesson.

Resources: Video link on the causes of the US Civil War Research topics and table Timeline cards Primary source documents Guided reading text PEEKA paragraph guidelines and planning sheet

From a series of over 50 lessons made by Wolsey Academy on the history of the United States. They provide a thorough foundation of knowledge in this vital period of world history and provide an excellent foundation for all future study. Each lesson looks to focus on a range of historical skills and exam techniques to equip students with knowledge and transferable research, analysis and study skills. To find the complete bundle search on the Wolsey Academy website.

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