Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise

Gary J. Kornblith

In their classic work, The Rise of American Civilization, Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard famously termed the Civil War "a Second American Revolution and in a strict sense, the First." Over the past seventy years, historians have often debated the merits of the Beards' classification and the extent to which the Civil War transformed the social structure of the United States. Scholars have shown much less interest in comparing the causes of and preludes to the two great military conflicts that defined American national identity. This lacuna in the historiography is surprising because, on even cursory inspection, the parallels are striking. Both the Revolution and the Civil War broke out roughly a dozen years after the formal conclusion of a war for empire on the North American continent that ended in an overwhelming triumph for Anglo-Americans. In each case, the acquisition of new territory raised critical questions about the authority structure of the empire and the limits of local autonomy. What began as a debate over the powers of the central government developed into a full-blown constitutional crisis that resulted in a declaration of independence and military resistance by several geographically contiguous provinces (thirteen in the case of the Revolution, eleven in the case of the Civil War). Faced with armed insurrection, the central government raised a huge military force to suppress the rebels, and a long and brutal war ensued. Although the ultimate results of the military conflicts differed greatly, the patterns of events leading to war seem remarkably similar.1	1
This congruence suggests that it would be useful to revisit the causation of the Civil War with the model of the American Revolution in mind. For guidance in this task, I turn to John M. Murrin's provocative essay "The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy." Noting that "Gipson was one of few American historians to erect counterfactual arguments into explicit research tools," Murrin accepted Gipson's methodology but questioned his conclusions. Whereas Gipson posited that "had Canada remained French after 1763, ... 'Americans [would] have continued to feel the need as in the past to rely for their safety'" on the mother country and would not have rebelled, Murrin argued almost the opposite. By his account, the "Gallic Peril" had never produced Anglo-American harmony, and after the Canadian cession the mainland colonists were more, not less, vulnerable to military pressure from the north if they wished to secede from the British Empire. Thus the French departure from Can-ada was not the necessary and sufficient cause of the American War of Independence.2	2
Murrin acknowledged, however, that "important links can indeed be established between [Gipson's] 'Great War for the Empire' and the American Revolution." With wry delight, Murrin portrayed those connections as more ironic than ironclad. He traced how British policy makers in the 1760s overlooked the successes of the later years of the French and Indian War to address problems from the early years that no longer required solutions. "The war provided a catalyst for all kinds of change," he concluded, "but evidently it could not alter the habitual way that politicians looked at old problems.... Britain may actually have lost her colonies because, in the last analysis, the English simply did not know how to think triumphantly."3	3
Like Murrin, I want to address the "important links" between a war for empire and a war for independence. My focus is on a different pair of wars: the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War of 1861–1865. My counterfactual hypothesis is also a bit different. Rather than project a different military outcome, I posit the absence of the Mexican-American War.	. . .