In the decades immediately following the end of the war in 1865, several authors published

their own evaluations of the causes of the war. According to many later scholars most of these
authors participated indirectly or directly in the war and hence their books represented an
attempt to justify their own actions of those of their respective sections. Hence when they
looked at the war, they viewed ‘in terms of a conspiracy.’ According to contemporary
northern like Henry Wilson, the Southern secessionists were men dedicated to the cause of
the advancement of slavery, regardless of the harm to the rest of the nation. Hence to most of
the Northern writers, the war resulted from a conspiracy of slave owners committed to an
immoral intuition. On the other hand , Southern Writers argued that the war was not a moral
conflict over the issue of slavery , but the basic cause of the war was the unconstitutional and
aggressive acts of the north which used its power for political and economic gain and was
determined to the destroy the south and its institutions. At the same time a third group of
contemporary scholars were developing the concept of a ‘needless’ or ‘avoidable conflict’.
People like President James Buchanan who argued that there was no substantive issue
important enough in 1861 to necessitate a resort to arms, the war had been brought on by
extremists of both sides. These three contemporary views on the causes of the civil war set
the stage for the historical debate that began at the end on the 19th century and continues till
date.
Around late 19th century, Nationalist School emerged that tried to provide a more balanced
and less partisan picture of the war. The most dominant Nationalist Interpretation was
provided by James Ford Rhodes whose multivolume history of the United States between
1850- 1877 became a classic. According to him the civil war was an ‘irrepressible conflict’
between the North and the South, and the South had been clearly in the wrong. For him
slavery was an immoral institution and the South had fought the war to extend slavery. In
simplest terms, for the Nationalist school, the causes of the war were less important than its
result. Southern nationalist scholars emphasized nationalism, sectional conflict, and integration
of the south into nation by virtue of which they were able to benefit from industrialization and
prosperity. Woodrow Wilson argued that that the South remained outside the spirit of
Nationalism, primarily because of slavery and consequently it developed differently from the
rest of the country which brought about differences which could not be resolved. Another
prominent nationalist historian was Edward Channing who argued that two distinct social
organization represented by the agrarian slave economy of the South and industrial wage
system of the north had emerged which could not indefinitely live side by side under the
walls of one government.
By the early 20th century the dominance of the nationalist school of civil historiography was
challenged by the rising Progressive school. They began to study American history in terms of
conflict between democracy and aristocracy and between the have nots and the haves in
America. Prominent among them include Charles M Beard, who emphasized on the emergence
of economic slavery in the post civil war period. According to Charles and Mary Beard, in their
publication ‘The Rise of American Civilization, 1927’, the resort to arms in 1861 precipitated by
secession was merely a façade for much more deeply rooted conflict. For them the Civil war
was essentially a ‘Social War’ ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in
the government; where the capitalists, laborers, and farmers in the North and the west drove
from power in the national government the planting aristocracy in the South. The progressive
school of historians condemned the results of the civil war. According to Matthew Josephson,
the post war period saw the rise of what he calls the ‘Robber barons’ as the rich capitalist
class exploited the poor masses for their own benefit.
A more radical economic interpretation of the civil war came about in the period of the
economic depression in the 1930’s which saw the emergence of a new group of Marxist
scholars who went far beyond the Beards in stressing the importance of economic factors.
However unlike the Beards, these new group of Marxist Historians were not critical of the
results of the war. They argued that the war had destroyed the slave power and prepared the
grounds for the triumph of Capitalism which is a necessary concomitant to the inevitable
triumph of the Proletariat.
Two other schools of historical approach also arose. The first of these schools came out of the
resurgence of native southerners in their own section, which generally took the form of a
loosely define Romantic Movement. The Movement attempted to portray the Southern way of
life as being far better than the urbanized and industrialized way of life that seemed
characteristics of 20th century America. Native historians like U.B Phillips, Charles W Ramsdell
and Frank L. Owsley belong to this school. The second dominant school of historiography in
the 1930’s was the ‘Revisionist School.’ Their basic assumption was that war in general and
the civil war in particular was evil. Even more significant was their underlying belief that the
war had been avoidable and that there were genuine alternatives for political leaders on both
sides. The most mature formulation of the revisionist hypothesis was provided by scholars like
Avery Craven and James G Randall. For Craven, sectional differences – economic, political or
social cannot explain the causes of the war as many other countries had pronounced sectional
dissimilarities without social strife. Similarly, Randall rejected the approach that romanticized
war. For him also the war was a ‘needless one’.
Though this approach of understanding the civil war remained dominant throughout the
1940’s and 1950’s, several scholars like Samuel Elliot Morrison began to challenge its basic
premises. A group of scholar argues that though war could never be good in themselves,
sometimes not to go to war in certain cases was a far greater evil. However the criticism of
Anti war historian were most cogently put in an influential article by Arthur M Schlesinger. He
criticized the revisionist historians by arguing that if war could have been avoided, what
alternative course American leaders should have followed. According to him, there were
three other alternatives; South might have abolished slavery all by itself, slavery might have
died because it was economically unsound , or that North might have offered some form of
emancipated compensation.
At the same time a shift is historiography was evident from the works of a new group of
school led by scholar like Allan Nevis who combined elements from both the Nationalist and
revisionist traditions. Conceding that economic factors were important in the coming of the
war, he nevertheless rejected an economic interpretation. He argues that the civil war should
have been avoidable. It was in the 1960’s that the traditional approaches and questions
began to be undermined and there was a shift from the somewhat static conceptual of
framework. The rise of the ‘new political history’ deemphasized the issue of slavery In terms of
its relationship to the totality of American society. In one of the most recent works on the Civil
War, Eric Foner has argued that it was regarding the question of extension of slavery in the
newly occupied territories that became the major source of contestation between the North
and the South. He has further argued that the causes of the civil war cannot be isolated from
the nature of the American political system and the social and economic values that became
the foundation of competing ideologies. The civil war, concludes Foner, however accomplished
the goal originally envisioned by the founding fathers of the constitution; i.e. the creation of a
single nation.
To conclude it can be said that though the debate on the causes of the Civil War remains a
highly contested one till date, it is now generally accepted my most scholars that it was highly
complex one and it will be inadequate to single out a particular factor. It I also now generally
accepted that it was a watershed moment in the history of US that led to the creation of a
single unified nation that paved the way for its unhindered progress and prosperity in the
subsequent decades.