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Avery Craven argued that the war could have been avoided. He
blamed northern “fanatics” such as Brown for whipping up sen-
timent against the South, causing southern politicians to
respond with equal vituperation. The “molders of public opin-
ion” divided the nation by creating “the fiction of two distinct
peoples.” Northerners and Southerners retained their alle-
giance as Americans. James G. Randall (1942) similarly saw no
differences between the North and South of sufficient magni-
tude to rip the nation apart. The leaders of both sides—he
called them a “bungling generation”—should not have
allowed overheated passions to ignite a
civil war. In the 1970s and 1980s histori-
ans who embraced the “new political
history,” which focused on statistical
analyses of voting behavior rather than
the rhetoric of politicians, argued that
war might have been avoided if the
Whig party had not disintegrated.
William Gienapp (1987) and Michael
Holt (1999) credited the two-party sys-
tem of the Whigs and Democrats with
holding the nation together during dif-
ficult times. Local coalitions on issues
such as temperance and immigration
had forestalled the divisive reckoning
over slavery. It was the collapse of the
Democrats and the emergence of the
Republican party in these contexts, not
the economic tension between the sec-
tions, that made war “irrepressible.” In
2007 John Ashworth revived the
Beard’s class-based argument: The
slaveholders were pursuing their class-
based interests, as were the
Northerners who opposed them. But
Ashworth framed the issues in a more
nuanced way. Most scholars accept that
the path to war lurched into unfath-
omable thickets of complex human
motivations and actions.
Source: Charles and Mary Beard,The Rise of American
Civilization(1927); Avery Craven,The Repressible
Conflict(1939); James G. Randall,The Coming of the
Civil War(1942); William Gienapp,The Origins of the
Republican Party(1987); Michael Holt,The Rise and
Fall of the American Whig Party (1999); John
Ashworth,Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the
Antebellum Republic(2007).T
his chapter recounts the events of the 1850s that drew the
nation into a civil war. Such narratives suggest that war was
inevitable, as many believed at the time. John Brown, the aboli-
tionist fanatic who was sentenced to death, declared on the
scaffold that the “crimes of this guilty land” would only be
purged “with Blood”—with war. Historians Charles and Mary
Beard used the term irrepressible conflictas a chapter title in
their 1927 history text, arguing that antithetical economic sys-
tems could not coexist, if only because paid workers could not
compete with slaves. In The Repressible Conflict(1939), however,
DEBATING THE PAST
Was the Civil War
Avoidable?
John Brown takes an oath to destroy slavery, 1847.
Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.