The Civil War and Slavery: A Response

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 92-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Foner
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Slave Resistance ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Modern Analysis ◽  
Economic Relationship ◽  
Sectional Conflict ◽  
North And South ◽  
Marxist Tradition

Abstract The four essays by Ashworth, Blackburn, Nimtz and Post all make important contributions to our understanding of the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, and to modern analysis of these questions within a Marxist tradition. Although they differ among themselves on key issues, they direct attention to problems too often neglected by other historians: the rôle of class-conflict within North and South in the coming of the War; the part played by slave-resistance in the sectional conflict; the nature of the economic relationship between slave and free economies; and a shift in control of the national state as an enduring result of the conflict.

The Politics of Slavery and the Coming Civil War

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
John Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Slave Resistance ◽  
The Third ◽  
The North ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sectional Conflict

This article is divided into four parts. The first recounts the events of the sectional crisis up to the Compromise of 1850. The second looks at factors underlying these events: the relationship between slavery and the Democratic Party, deepening attachment of the South to slavery, the economic and social changes that generated antislavery sentiment in the North (including the shift to wage labor), and the much neglected role of slave resistance in the politics of the sectional conflict. The third shows the decisive impact of these factors in the final decade of peace. The fourth refers to, and criticizes, some current interpretations and misunderstandings of the origins of the Civil War,

Smothering the Embers of Conflict in Darfur: Transnational Oil Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Military Spending ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Oil Companies ◽  
Oil Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Oil Revenues ◽  
North And South

It is not an easy feat to identify the origins of conflict in Darfur. It is a conflict so complex that one scholar can blame global warming while another blames a “genocidier” in Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and both have solid evidence for their case. The obvious factor that led to the Darfur conflict is past conflict in Sudan. The embers of past conflict were still glowing hot in Sudan when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between North and South in 2005 to end the civil war. Interestingly, the final years of civil war and the first years of conflict in Darfur coincide with increased oil development in Sudan. The issue of oil and conflict in Sudan is important because it involves the actions of corporations, investments of ordinary citizens around the world and the policies of governments. Part of the policy dialog surrounding Darfur and the lack of government-guaranteed human security relates to Sudan’s oil revenues and their connection to military spending. Certain NGOs have endeavoured to draw a direct link between increased oil revenues and military spending in Sudan, urging investors to divest from certain companies to alleviate suffering and conflict. Queen’s took steps last year to drop investments in certain Chinese oil companies because of their involvement in Sudan. This presentation will: examine the link between oil revenues and military spending in Sudan, explore the efficacy of divestment and other economic sanctions and draw some conclusions on the role of corporations (and their investors) in conflict zones.

The Antebellum Era and Civil War, 1800–1865

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-98
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
State Level ◽  
The North ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
North And South

Several antebellum conservatives sought to dismantle the Lockean foundations of American political thinking in favor of a political vision that affirmed the divine origins of government. Evangelical conservatives such as Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen were among the first to advance the “America as a Christian nation” argument that became a favorite of conservatives in the latter part of the twentieth century. By the 1830s, New England evangelicals, such as Connecticut Congregationalist pastor Lyman Beecher, came reluctantly to accept church disestablishment at the state level as best for both Christianity and society. During the Civil War, conservatives North and South built upon the work of their antebellum forerunners and stressed the essential place and role of Christianity. Two examples of this movement in the North were the campaigns to amend the Federal Constitution with an explicit reference to Christ and the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s coinage.

Social-Property Relations, Class-Conflict and the Origins of the US Civil War: Towards a New Social Interpretation

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 129-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Post
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Slave Resistance ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Civil War ◽  
Social Property

Abstract The origins of the US Civil War have long been a central topic of debate among historians, both Marxist and non-Marxist. John Ashworth’s Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic is a major Marxian contribution to a social interpretation of the US Civil War. However, Ashworth’s claim that the War was the result of sharpening political and ideological – but not social and economic – contradictions and conflicts between slavery and capitalism rests on problematic claims about the rôle of slave-resistance in the dynamics of plantation-slavery, the attitude of Northern manufacturers, artisans, professionals and farmers toward wage-labour, and economic restructuring in the 1840s and 1850s. An alternative social explanation of the US Civil War, rooted in an analysis of the specific path to capitalist social-property relations in the US, locates the War in the growing contradiction between the social requirements of the expanded reproduction of slavery and capitalism in the two decades before the War.

Towards a Bourgeois Revolution? Explaining the American Civil War

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The North ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cost ◽  
North And South

Abstract This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic1 to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core.

Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Regional Religion and North-South Alienation in Antebellum America

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Goen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Sectional Conflict ◽  
American Churches

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

The American Civil War: A Reply to Critics

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
John Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Causal Account ◽  
Slave Resistance ◽  
The North ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Sectional Conflict

Abstract This essay replies to critics of my earlier piece in Historical Materialism (Volume 19, Issue 4, 2011) which looked at the origins of the American Civil War. The essay re-emphasises the importance of the shift to wage labour in the North, it re-asserts the need to incorporate slave resistance as a key factor in any causal account of the sectional conflict, and it argues that the ultimate northern victory in that conflict should be seen as constituting a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It engages specifically with the criticisms and some of the alternative interpretations offered by Charles Post, Eric Foner and Neil Davidson.

Editor's Note

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kaliel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Red River ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relationship Of

The articles published in our Fall 2016 edition are connected loosely under the themes of public memory and the uses of identity in the past. We are thrilled to present to you three excellent articles in our Fall 2016 edition: The article "Dentro de la Revolución: Mobilizing the Artist in Alfredo Sosa Bravo's Libertad, Cultura, Igualdad (1961)" analyzes Cuban artwork as multi-layered work of propaganda whose conditions of creation, content, and exhibition reinforce a relationship of collaboration between artists and the state-run cultural institutions of post-revolutionary Cuba; moving through fifty years of history “’I Shall Never Forget’: The Civil War in American Historical Memory, 1863-1915" provides a captivating look at the role of reconciliationist and emancipationist intellectuals, politicians, and organizations as they contested and shaped the enduring memory of the Civil War; and finally, the article “Politics as Metis Ethnogenesis in Red River: Instrumental Ethnogenesis in the 1830s and 1840s in Red River” takes the reader through a historical analysis of the development of the Metis identity as a means to further their economic rights. We wholly hope you enjoy our Fall 2016 edition as much as our staff has enjoyed curating it. Editors  Jean Middleton and Emily Kaliel Assistant Editors Magie Aiken and Hannah Rudderham Senior Reviewers Emily Tran Connor Thompson Callum McDonald James Matiko Bronte Wells

The So-Called Prothetic i- and the sḏm-f Paradigms II: The “Nominal” sḏm-f and a Reappraisal

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 259-267
Author(s):  
Sami Uljas
Keyword(s):  
Present Author ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Syllabic Structure ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Partial Revision

This article discusses, first, the role of the i-prefix in the so-called “nominal” sḏm-f paradigm in earliest Old Egyptian textual data. It is argued that this represented a means of facilitating the creation of a distinctive syllabic structure with 2rad roots and of harmonising it with that of the 2red and 3inf classes. Second, the study contains a partial revision of some of the key issues treated in an earlier article by the present author on the role of the similarly written prefix in the subjunctive and “circumstantial” sḏm-f paradigms.

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