Was the Civil War Fought Over Slavery?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University; (Claim B) John
C. Waugh, Independent Historian

Suggested Sequencing

• Use this Point-Counterpoint to have students analyze the argument over

what caused the Civil War.
Issue on the Table

Did the Civil War have many causes, including sectional differences over politics,
economic issues, culture, and slavery, or was the Civil War fundamentally caused
by sectional differences over slavery and its westward expansion?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question, paying close attention to the
supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison
questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal
views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

Claim A

It would be foolish to claim that the Civil War had little to do with slavery. In
many ways, slavery was the fundamental difference between North and South,
and many sectional divisions were at least partially rooted in the presence of
slavery in the South and its expansion elsewhere. Yet slavery itself did not cause
the Civil War. After all, slavery was a national, not southern, institution until the
early nineteenth century, and the Founders had been able to form a nation despite
differences over slavery. In fact, the growth of the New England textile industry
owed much to the profitability of plantation cotton grown in the South. Moreover,
if the Civil War was fought over slavery, why did Abraham Lincoln and a majority
of Union policymakers drag their feet until 1862 when it came to striking at the
“peculiar institution?” Why, indeed, were white politicians able to reach a series of
compromises over slavery and its expansion westward for the first seven decades
of the new republic before that process collapsed in the 1850s?

Other issues also divided white northerners from white southerners and gave rise
to the emergence of sectional identities whose roots can be traced back to the
colonial period. By the early nineteenth century, the American economy north of
the Potomac and Ohio Rivers was already diverging from that found south of
those rivers. In the North, manufacturing, and eventually industrialization,
evolved at a much faster pace than in the South, forging a diverse economic order,
while slavery (although not racism) faded away, despite remaining profitable for
those few slaveholders who unsuccessfully battled gradual abolition in the North.
Meanwhile, plantation slavery dominated the southern economy, although its
influence in the Upper South weakened over time and Appalachia remained
resistant to its impact. But emerging northern industries required protection from
foreign rivals, fostering a system of tariffs; relying as they did on marketing their
cotton abroad, most southerners protested what they claimed was economic
favoritism. Both sides looked to the federal government to favor their economic
interests: the same southerners who protested government action to protect
northern manufacturing did not oppose the use of military force to secure more
land for slaveholders, whether through the removal of American Indian tribes or
operations against foreign foes.
Slavery also was ever present in political debate, although those debates did not
always touch on slavery directly. The Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution,
increasing the representation of slave states in the House of Representatives and in
the Electoral College, was only one reason why southerners dominated the
presidency and the Supreme Court through the 1850s. Even as northern
population growth ensured that northerners would eventually come to control
Congress, the presence of a two-party system in which each party was divided by
section encouraged building alliances across the Mason-Dixon line. Only when
these alliances collapsed in the 1850s, and then only in part because of slavery, did
politics become truly sectionalized. The sectional debates over slavery and its
expansion rarely touched on the morality of slavery, and even those northern
politicians who held that slavery was an immoral institution, including Abraham
Lincoln, recognized that it enjoyed constitutional protection. Abolition remained a
minority movement among northern whites and it was not until 1860 that an
avowedly antislavery (and, more importantly, anti-Southern) political party won
the White House. That year’s Republican platform also spoke of the need to
protect free labor and offered an ambitious vision of economic development
fostered by the federal government.

Although they shared much in common, including an acceptance of white

superiority and black inferiority, most white northerners and southerners tended
to view themselves as different people, defined by sectional traits and stereotypes.
White southerners saw their lifestyle as more refined and leisurely (in part because
of the use of enslaved people), whereas northerners saw themselves as industrious,
hard-working, innovative, and practical—traits southerners saw as evidence that
northerners were greedy, mean-spirited, and prized money above all. White
southerners, particularly among the elite, viewed themselves as athletic men and
refined women as well as fighters ready to stand up for their rights, and they
expected northerners to quake at the very idea of a war, whereas their
counterparts saw their foes as hot-headed, irrational, and violent. Of course, such
stereotypes distorted a far more complex and diverse reality; yet they persisted
through the war itself.

To be sure, the presence of slavery in one part of the country and its absence
elsewhere shaped these debates, sometimes in fundamental ways. But, although
secessionist advocates freely admitted that their primary goal in seeking southern
independence was to defend slavery as an institution and as a labor system,
northerners who went to war in 1861 did so to preserve the Union their fathers had
forged against a reckless attempt to destroy it. As President Lincoln wrote in 1862,
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to
save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I
would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Decades of resentment over political domination, disregard for northern economic

interests, and southerners’ smug sense of superiority did as much to spark conflict
as did any debate over slavery, and even those debates concerned the impact of a
slavery-dominated society, economy, and political order upon the lives and futures
of northern whites.

Claim B

The question of whether the Civil War was fought over slavery has set northerner
against southerner and historian against historian since the whole catastrophe
began. It hangs in the air still, an ever-floating controversy. But it is very difficult
to make a valid case—as many southerners tried to do, and still try to do, along
with several historians—that sectional differences over slavery and its threatened
expansion into the western territories were not the fundamental cause, the
bedrock cause, of the Civil War. Let us examine several different arguments that
are usually put forth and see what they tell us about slavery as a cause.

Perhaps the most common cause of the war argued by southerners is that the
North was threatening states’ rights. In those times, in many minds, the powers of
individual states trumped federal powers, no matter what the U.S. Constitution
said. This was the reason that when the war began and people had to decide which
side to fight on, southern officers in the U.S. Army and Navy overwhelmingly
resigned to fight for their individual states in the Confederacy. But the right most
important to the South, most necessary to southern lives, culture, and economy,
most threatened, and most important to defend, was the right of the states to
protect slavery.
Another argument concerns slavery in the territories. The South ardently desired
to expand slavery into the Louisiana Territory in 1803 as well as those territories
wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War in 1848. The North just as
ardently opposed and derailed this expansion. Without question, this is
considered one of the tripwires that caused the Civil War. And it was about
slavery.

Viral abolitionism in America, anathema to the South, awoke in the 1830s, when
William Lloyd Garrison established his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in
Boston. Centered in New England, Philadelphia, and New York, abolitionists had
steadily grown in numbers and influence over the next three decades. By 1860,
abolition was seen by southerners as a monstrous threat, because what
abolitionists wanted to abolish was slavery.

The Compromise of 1850, which tightened the Fugitive Slave Law, obligated those
in the North to return fugitive slaves to their masters in the South. Despite stiff
penalties, some northerners defied the law, creating a relay system, the
Underground Railroad, to pass runaway slaves from house to house to freedom in
Canada. This blatant defiance of law by northerners looked to slaveholders like a
reason to secede and, if necessary, go to war. And it had everything to do with
slavery.

Northern aggression was to become another strong argument as to why the South
seceded and went to war against the North. Indeed, throughout the war, many
Southerners called it “the war of Northern aggression,” and some still do. And, in
the final two years of the war, a large reason the North was aggressively invading
the South was not just to win the war and save the Union, but to blot out slavery.

Finally, another argument often proposed as a cause for war is the election of
Abraham Lincoln. By 1860, the southern states believed that if the “black
Republican,” Abraham Lincoln, was elected president it would be a sign that they
were in mortal danger of invasion and an end to their way of life based on slavery.
At the first sign he had been elected, they would secede. South Carolina, the most
radical of the southern states, left first, in December 1860, followed by five other
Deep South slave states (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana) in
January 1861, and then Texas in early February.

But Lincoln had no desire to invade the South, and he told them so. His sole
objective was to save the Union. In his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, he told
the seceded states, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not
in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.
You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” However, the
South did not believe him. And so they went to war, not so much as to leave the
Union but to save slavery. In late 1862, believing it had become essential to win the
war, Lincoln signed an Emancipation Proclamation freeing all the slaves in the
Confederate states. The war then became not just a war to save the Union but a
war to end slavery.
These six reasons make it clear that whatever the causes were thought to be, they
all connected back to slavery. There would not have been a civil war if slavery had
not existed.

Interview: Emi Nakamura, macroeconomist

In which we talk all about macro.

Noah Smith

Feb 21

50

23

If you ask any macroeconomist to tell you who the stars of their profession are
right now, Emi Nakamura’s name will surely be at or near the top of the list. In
2019, Nakamura won the John Bates Clark medal, one of econ’s two most
prestigious awards — and one that very rarely goes to a macroeconomist.
Originally from Canada, and now working at the University of California,
Berkeley, she continues to amass top-journal publications at a fairly stupendous
rate.

I first met Nakamura in 2011, when I was still a graduate student. She came to
Michigan to gave a talk about her paper “Fiscal Stimulus in a Monetary Union:
Evidence from U.S. Regions,” with frequent co-author Jón Steinsson. That paper
provided some of the best evidence that fiscal stimulus boosts growth, and had a
big impact on the academic debate then raging over whether to use fiscal policy to
boost the economy out of its post-2008 doldrums.

Since then, Nakamura has continued to turn out work that’s highly relevant to
current policy debates. As just one example, her recent paper with Hazell,
Herreno, and Steinsson, “The Slope of the Phillips Curve: Evidence from U.S.
States” has been the main paper guiding my own thinking about the current
inflation. I’m also a big fan of her working paper “A Plucking Model of Business
Cycles”, which I think has the potential to help us understand the current
recovery. Her 2016 paper about China, with Steinsson and Liu, lent strong
empirical support to the popular suspicion that China’s government cooks its
books in order to make growth seem more consistent than it really is. Another
recent paper of hers shows that when people are forced to move (in this case by a
volcano), their economic situation improves; this has obvious implications
regarding America’s declining geographic mobility. And so on.

Meanwhile, Nakamura has also been working to improve macroeconomics itself.

The macro field was in deep crisis after 2008; the financial crisis and recession
showed that something was wrong, and many people (myself included) pointed
out how divorced from empirical reality the theories had become. But instead of
complaining about it, Nakamura simply started working to fix it. She’s done work
on how to identify monetary policy shocks with high-frequency data, how to tease
out the effects of policies by looking at their different effects on different regions,
and other methodological innovations that allow macro to be more scientific. In
2018, she and Steinsson wrote an overview paper about new empirical macro that I
think will end up having a very big influence on the direction of the profession.

In the following interview, I talked to Nakamura about inflation and what to do

about it, about how theory and evidence interact in macroeconomics, and about
the future of macro.
N.S.: I guess we should start out by talking about inflation, which is kind of the big
macroeconomic topic on everyone's minds right now. What do you think is the
main cause of the inflation we're now experiencing in the U.S. (and to a lesser
degree, in other rich countries)? Can we expect it to just sort of go away on its
own, or do we have to take some kind of policy steps to get rid of it?

E.N.: The recent increase in inflation is much more than historical experience
would have predicted (which is about an increase in inflation of 1/3% for every 1%
decrease in unemployment). I think several factors have been important.

First, after a long hiatus from playing a major role in inflation, supply shocks are
back! The most dramatic of these is the disruptions to the labor market. US labor
force participation is down by roughly 1.5%, and so far the decline is pretty
persistent. And the shocks to labor supply go far beyond that: many workers are
out sick, or quarantined (or are at risk of this). The decline in labor force
participation is much larger than in the Euro area, and this may be partly because
Euro area countries implemented a lot of policies that kept workers in place at
their jobs during the pandemic. https://venance-
riblier.shinyapps.io/Employment/. Few people anticipated the persistence of the
pandemic effects on labor force participation, and it's really hard to tell how this
will play out over the next year or two. Some of these workers may come back to
work, but others, particularly those who have retired, may not. There have also
been other important supply shocks: it's more expensive to operate a daycare or a
factory than it used to be due to safety restrictions due to COVID. It used to be
hard to come up with good examples of negative supply shocks in teaching
undergraduate economics classes, but COVID certainly counts as one!

Second, there has been a historic shift in demand from services to goods:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=LnYU. In the Great Recession, the fraction of
expenditures spent on goods fell. The opposite happened during COVID: the
fraction of spending on goods rose pretty dramatically. This is another tectonic
shift in the economy that I think is putting enormous pressure on supply chains
among other things. Many more people are working from home, and they all need
computers, and the semi-conductors needed to build those computers. All those
goods have to be shipped to the United States and to people's houses. This is a
supply "pressure" but not really a "supply shock" because its ultimate cause is an
increase in demand (at least for certain kinds of goods). But a recent Jackson Hole
paper points out that secular shifts in demand can lead to the same inflationary
pressures as supply shocks. Again, I have a lot of uncertainty about how long it
will take for people's consumption patterns to return to normal. I think some of
these shifts in consumption are related to the changes in labor supply I mentioned
before: when you go to work, you buy services complementary to work-- the coffee
on the way to your office, and the salad for lunch-- to the extent that people shift
to a lot more work from home (and less people are working at all) this could make
some of the changes in demand patterns quite persistent.

Third, there has been a very rapid recovery and a lot of government support for
spending. Households have a huge buildup in savings
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Lo1j, and spending this down is no doubt
contributing to demand. Conceptually, one might expect these demand pressures
to be captured by the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is still
somewhat higher than before the COVID crisis. But, there is a lot of evidence that
the unemployment rate is providing an incomplete picture of labor market
tightness right now: vacancies and quits are quite elevated relative to pre-COVID,
despite higher unemployment, and lower employment rates.

One graph that strikes me as interesting in assessing the role of these different
factors is this one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Lo1x. This graph shows
the inflation rate for the shelter and non-shelter components of the CPI along with
the unemployment rate. I graphed these series back to 1990 because that's roughly
when long-run inflation expectations started to stabilize in the US. Here you see
very clearly the fact that the shelter component of the CPI is quite cyclical, whereas
the non-shelter component is much more volatile (for example, the big
commodity-driven fluctuations in 2008). Even during the COVID period, the
shelter component of the CPI has a reasonably stable relationship versus the
unemployment rate whereas the non-shelter component has increased pretty
dramatically. It's important to recognize that the shelter component of the CPI in
the US is based on rental costs: so this isn't exposed to either supply chains or
labor market shortages. So one interpretation of this graph is that it suggests a big
role for the first two factors I emphasized, as opposed to only conventional
aggregate demand factors. However, some are predicting a big catch-up in rent
inflation soon, and perhaps some of these patterns also have to do with demand
shifts related to housing. We have to be humble in extrapolating past
relationships to the present given the fundamental shifts that COVID has imposed
on the economy.

One thing that hasn't contributed much to inflation so far is an unhinging of

longer run inflation expectations. Both survey and market-based measures of
longer run inflation expectations look pretty stable (see below). So far, the Fed has
been very successful in stabilizing long run expectations and this is a big
achievement. The goal is, of course, to avoid these supply shocks and shocks to
relative prices becoming the kind of self-fulfilling high inflation we saw in the late
1970s. There has been a notable uptick in longer run inflation expectations in the
very recent past, but so far it is small. It's one of the Fed's primary goals these days
to keep it that way.

N.S.: I'm a little confused about the labor supply shock story...If reduced labor
supply is a big part of the inflation story, then shouldn't real wages be rising?
Usually when there's a shortage, prices rise, but instead real hourly compensation
has been falling. How can we explain that?

E.N.: That's a very good point! The hourly (not real hourly) compensation has
gone up a lot (5.75% year on year) but not enough to adjust for inflation, and
cause real wages to rise much. We haven't seen much daylight between the
nominal and real hourly compensation series over the past couple decades (see
this graph) but it has really opened up over the last year. Other measures of
nominal wages, such as the Wage Growth Tracker, which looks at changes in
wages for the same workers over time, look similar.
One important point is that real wages have gone up the most at the bottom of the
wage distribution-- see this plot (and select “wage level” at the top to see things
disaggregated by quartiles of the wage distribution). This speaks to the unequal
nature of the COVID shock. One positive thing about the COVID recovery is that it
seems that it has somewhat narrowed inequality. But even in this plot, the lowest
quartile of wages have not increased much in real terms. One would expect this
pattern if wages are particularly "sticky" in response to macroeconomic shocks,
particularly relative to more flexible prices such as food and energy. The older
academic literature on wage rigidity was critiqued a lot for predicting
countercyclical real wages, but perhaps we are actually seeing this as part of the
COVID recovery.

N.S.: Also, let's talk about inflation expectations. I've been basing a lot of my own
thinking on your recent paper with Hazell, Herreno and Steinsson, in which you
explain the 70s inflation as partly due to the oil shocks but partly due to a regime
shift in beliefs about Fed hawkishness. Which means I'm relieved that both market
expectations of inflation and longer-term survey expectations look contained.
Does that mean the Fed is doing enough right now? Or should they be actively
trying to push inflation back toward its 2% target?
E.N.: I am also relieved that longer-run inflation expectations remain contained
(see my graph above of the TIPS 10Y and SPF 5Y/10Y expected inflation rates).
There is a notable uptick at the end of the series, but so far, it remains small. But
market expectations are predicated on what the market expects the Fed to do.
There is a self-fulfilling prophecy element in this, as in many things in
macroeconomics. So long as the market expects the Fed will do what it takes to
contain inflation, we won't see much movement in longer run inflation
expectations. The Fed is working very hard to preserve this. But we can't take this
for granted. In other places, and other times, even in the US, longer run inflation
expectations have been much less anchored. A big challenge for the Fed is that
when you're successful-- like, say, if their current shift in policy manages to avoid
the “bad equilibrium” where people lose confidence about longer run inflation
expectations, then you never get to see the counterfactual---the crisis you have
averted never actually materializes. For example, the Fed liquidity policies early in
the pandemic may have averted a financial crisis. But we'll never see the
counterfactual.

N.S.: Now, a lot of people are talking about this Jeremy Rudd paper, challenging
the notion that we really understand how inflation expectations influence
inflation itself. What do you think about that? Do macroeconomists believe too
strongly in the power of expectations? After all, you have a paper, with McKay &
Steinsson, showing that forward guidance is probably less effective than people
think, because consumers and companies have limited power to respond to things
that happen far in the future. That paper seemed to fit with a growing theoretical
literature questioning the notion that everyone is making their economic decisions
based on very long-term thinking. Should this shape how we think about inflation
now?

E.N.: I think it's hard to make sense of really big inflationary episodes, without a
role for inflation expectations. How does inflation rise to be tens or hundreds of
percent per year, then fall back to zero, based on the Phillips curve slope alone?
From a theoretical standpoint, incorporating a role for inflation expectations just
means that firm managers think about the future in setting their own prices-- how
much will wages go up? How much will competitors raise their prices? How much
will suppliers raise their costs? These issues are quite salient in high inflation
periods, for example, in wage negotiations-- there's a great anecdote about this in
this interview with Paul Volcker, where Volcker recounts a meeting with a
businessman who has just come back from a wage negotiation in which the
businessman is excited to have locked in 13% wage growth for his workers
(presumably predicated on high expectations of inflation). .
When inflation gets really low, like in the US for quite a long time before COVID,
there's a lot of evidence that people do not pay much attention to inflation. After
all, it doesn't matter much for either firms or workers. This is something I notice in
teaching: American students often have very little idea coming into class of what
inflation means, but Latin American students seem to understand it almost
innately-- presumably due to the environment they have grown up in.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that our models probably overweight the extent to
which long-run equilibrium objects determine current behavior, along the lines
you suggest. There's a lot of value to thinking about how the predictions of the
models change with bounded rationality.

N.S.: Pulling on that last thread, what do you think are the most interesting or
important trends in macro theory these days?

E.N.: I'm an empirical macroeconomist, so perhaps it's no surprise that I am

excited to see a stronger connection between theoretical work and evidence from
microdata, as well as quasi-experimental empirical methods in many parts of
macroeconomics. I think finding more ways to connect the theory to the data is a
precondition for making the normative implications of our models more
convincing, as Milton Friedman emphasized in his Nobel Prize lecture or in more
detail here. The more progress we can make in convincingly establishing the facts,
the better we will be able to evaluate what theories are most useful. This can also be
a real inspiration for new models and theoretical ideas, when we find empirical
results we don't expect.

N.S.: It's interesting that you mention Friedman's "Essays in Positive Economics"
as support for the idea of connecting theory to data. It was in those essays that
Friedman made an analogy between macroeconomics and the shots made by an
expert pool player. He argued that just as the pool player doesn't need to
understand physics in order to make shots, macroeconomists don't need to
understand the particulars of how economic decisions are made in order to model
the resulting economic behavior. In other words, he seems to be arguing that we
don't need macro models to fit micro data, only aggregate data. And yet in recent
years, the profession seems to be strongly turning against Friedman's idea. In fact,
your 2018 paper "Identification in Macroeconomics" is the best summary I know of
this trend toward checking macro models against micro data. So do you agree that
this has been a major shift?
E.N.: The pool player analogy has elements of truth, but I would not use it as an
argument to throw away data. If we had large datasets with lots of random
variation in the relevant variables, maybe we could focus on the macro data alone.
But in practice, we tend to have small datasets with a lot of non-random variation.
Macro data tends to be confounded by a lot of structural and institutional change,
and on top of that, there are all the challenges that come with assessing causality
because we can't use randomized trials. So, I think it makes sense, to try to
combine micro and macro approaches, because we have more confidence that
models with realistic assumptions will work in contexts where we have not been
able to previously analyze their effects than other models with unrealistic
assumptions, if the two models fit the observed data equally well.

To take an example from a different subject, if we want to convince ourselves of the

negative effects of lead on people's behavior it is useful to observe not just the
"macro" evidence on, say, crime in areas with more lead exposure, but also the
biological evidence on what happens to cells when they are exposed to lead.

I am sure I am not the first person to express this view. I don't know enough about
the history of economic thought to say how this perspective has ebbed and flowed
in the past. I think a lot of the debate has focused on theory: for example,
microfoundations for macroeconomic relationships. But there has been a huge
increase in our ability to access and use microdata in recent decades, and that is a
huge opportunity on the empirical side.

N.S.: Well, I'm definitely on your side here, and my impression is that most young
macroeconomists are too. Using micro-data to validate the pieces of macro models
seems like it could potentially lead to a golden age of rapid progress in macro.

So my next questions are: 1) What are some of the most exciting lines of research
that you see academics pursuing out there in the macro world?, and 2) What are
some important lines of inquiry that haven't gotten enough attention yet?

E.N.: Research on monetary economics has been particularly exciting in the years
since the Great Recession, because the policy questions are so important, there has
been a lot of new data, and the tools of monetary policy are changing. Regarding
the path forward, I often find myself an advocate for the merits of "boring" work
chipping away at basic questions. Just because a question has been studied before,
doesn't mean that we are all convinced of the answer. Multiple studies coming to
the same conclusion, using different, and hopefully increasingly convincing,
methods can have a lot of value in cementing our views on a subject (for example,
think of the many papers that have contributed to changing economists' views on
the marginal propensity to consume). I'm also a big fan of work on
macroeconomic measurement, which I think tends to be understudied.

N.S.: So if you could give advice to young macroeconomists at the start of their
careers right now, what would it be?

E.N.: When I was an undergraduate at Princeton, I remember sitting in the office

of one of my advisors, Bo Honore, and pondering the sign he had on the wall:
"Question Assumptions." When I came for my job interview at Berkeley a few years
ago, I was sitting in the office of the department chair at the time, Jim Powell. I
looked up and saw exactly the same sign: "Question Assumptions." After
recovering from the deja vu, I learned that the sign was acquired from a
counterculture hippie when Bo and Jim were strolling around downtown Berkeley.
I'm pretty sure the sign wasn't originally intended as research advice for aspiring
economists, but I still think of this as some of the best advice I've gotten, and some
of the best advice to pass on.