| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. By James L. Huston. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xviii, 394 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2804-1.)

Historians have long debated the origins of the Civil War and have advanced a number of theses to explain the sectional conflict. Undaunted by this rich literature, James L. Huston proposes an interpretation that at root the Civil War was caused by a struggle over the recognition of property rights in slaves. Huston stresses that slave property represented a huge share of national wealth in antebellum America, but it was concentrated in one region and therefore politically vulnerable. Southerners, he contends, grew increasingly alarmed that the federal government might redefine property in such a way as to deny protection to slavery. Accordingly, they demanded a national government sympathetic to their understanding of property rights. Northerners, on the other hand, feared that competition from slave labor threatened the foundations of a middle-class society based on family farms and free labor. They resisted the contention that the federal government must affirm the sanctity of slave property and allow its expansion into the western territories. A political compromise over the contested issue of property rights in slaves became impossible.

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