A Critique of Charles Beard
According to Beard, the years before 1861 were filled with a subtle struggle between North and South over economic systems. The North’s resentment of the South stemmed from the latter’s perceived dominance in Congress. The south, in its turn, felt disenfranchised and threatened by the North’s growing economic power, and was secretly fearful about its near-complete reliance on the North. Thus, each side went to war for different but related reasons – the North to remove Southern roadblocks and the South to preserve its stable-yet-stagnating economy.
There are strengths to this interpretation, the most immediately obvious being its analysis of the different economic systems (a corollary to that being the statement of the North’s motives). Clearly the Northerners had more motives than just freeing the oppressed slaves; how else would one explain the rampant Negrophobia, with states such as Illinois as examples? The general antipathy toward the plight of fugitive slaves? The practical ineffectiveness of the Emancipation Proclamation? The rapid loss of interest toward Reconstruction? If the North had wanted to simply “do a good deed”, it’s not unreasonable to assume that that compassion would manifest itself in other ways in Northern politics. But it did not. Citing an economic for Northern involvement in a war that would cost it unimaginable blood and treasure rings more true than the idealistic “Liberty Crusaders” interpretation or the passive, reactive “Union Saviors” reasoning. If the North wanted to keep the Union together, it was in and of itself economically motivated. That clear-eyed logic is undeniably a strength of the Beard school.
His take on Southern motivation, though, is a bit murkier. The South, Beard posits, was fighting against perceived Northern economic dominance, but that makes little sense. It must be remembered that the South effectively started the war by seceding. In Beard’s interpretation, there is no clear rationale for that action; in Beard’s interpretation, the South had nothing to protect by starting a war, no grievance to be solved by seceding. In others, it does: namely, slavery. The South was threatened by the North’s industrialization precisely because there was no room in an industrial society for a slave/agrarian economy. Viewed in this light, Beard’s assertion that slavery had nothing to do with the war seems ludicrous.
How can one analyze the South without analyzing slavery? Slavery had an enormous impact on the South’s culture, its politics, its morality, and undeniably its economy. In analyzing the South, slavery, culture, and economy are inextricably linked. To ignore both slavery and culture (Beard says also that culture clash is not a strong enough motivator for war) is to analyze a South that never existed. Slavery in the South gave rise its static social structure, which solidified its agrarian culture, which cemented its agricultural economy, which led to a dependency on slavery. These steps are all equally important; Beard cannot use one as a cause of the Civil War while denying the importance of the others. That is unsound, misleading, and unacceptable.
In the most basic terms, there were two causes of the Civil War – the North and the South. Each of their individual motivations can be synthesized into one overarching motivation for each side. Beard is spot-on in his interpretation of the North – that it had something to gain economically from war, that its reasons for conflict had little to do with ideals or culture. However, the North and the South were vastly different and thus it is entirely possible that their motivations were vastly different. As previously stated, Beard’s theorized reasons for Southern involvement seem to be based on little knowledge of Southern culture. The major strength, then, of Beard is that it perfectly captures the North; the weakness is that it does not at all capture the South. To be considered a valid interpretation of a war, a theory must encompass both sides. Beard is therefore invalid.
