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James Jordan
CW510 A001 Fall 06
Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War by Bruce Levine
Despite his not offering any new interpretations for the causes of the Civil War,
Bruce Levine, author of Half Slave and Half Free, presents an impressive synthesis of the
field’s major scholarship. Viewing the war as “the second act of America’s democratic
revolution,” Levine advances the prevailing, although not fully accepted, notion of an
“irrepressible conflict” between two ideologically antagonistic societies (15). The singlegreatest source of enmity between North and South was simple: the latter believed slavery
was right and ought to be extended; while the former believed slavery was wrong and ought
to be restricted.1 Thus the terrible war in which over 600,000 Americans lost their lives
could have been avoided only if “one or the other side had been willing to abandon the
values and interests of its distinctive type of society” (xi). Unfortunately, as the author
expertly demonstrates, neither society was willing or able to surrender its way of life to the
other without a fight.
Levine’s dissection of antebellum Northern society draws heavily from Eric Foner’s
methodology and conclusions; it also integrates a detailed discussion of larger market forces
and their impact on interregional/sectional development. Owing to significant changes in the
early nineteenth century’s global economy, Levine argues that the free states underwent a
“momentous transformation” in the period following the successful war for independence
(69-70). Industrialization lay at the core of this revolution and was primarily responsible for
the far-reaching societal convulsions related—but not limited—to family, gender roles,
religion, immigrants, and the ways in which “diverse groups of northerners perceived and
Taken from the United States’ President Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Alexander Stephens, Vice President
of the Confederate States of America (233).
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responded to the nature of life in the slave states” (94). In slavery, the North’s free white
workers saw a system of oppression embodying “all the evils that they strove to avoid—the
loss of personal independence, mutual respect, political equality, the rights to the fruits of
one’s labor” (156). Furthermore, they saw slavery’s expansion as representing a clear and
present danger to their view of what the nation ought to be; to Southerners, however, the
peculiar institution was the very cornerstone of their society
Slavery inhibited industrialization; therefore, the South developed along different
lines, resisting, and even changing, the evangelical Protestant wave that swept through the
North. Borrowing much from Kenneth Stampp, Levine defines slavery as “first and foremost
a way of obtaining and controlling the workers” whose efforts produced the wealth on which
Southern high society rested (26). It was not just a case of people working for free:
slavery—and the culture of deference it promoted—defined the South’s social and gender
hierarchy. Slaveholding Southerners measured their social status in slaves. Even so, simply
because one did not own slaves did not mean one did not have a stake in the system: Nonslaveholding whites aspired to slave ownership and reveled in the fact that no matter how
poor, uneducated, or uncultured they were, they were at least better than a black. First
evidenced by the Missouri Compromise furor and culminating in their refusal to submit to a
Republican president dedicated to the eventual destruction of the peculiar institution, the
slave states were firmly attached to their way of life and seceded from the Union to preserve
it.
Because the nature of Levine’s project is to synthesize a diverse body of scholarship
encompassing a hotly contested area of American history into one holistic study, the author
must necessarily rely on the sources of others. At times, the lack of footnotes makes it
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difficult to efficiently follow exactly where Levine gets his information. However, the
inclusion of a lengthy bibliographic essay that evaluates the relevant secondary works allows
the reader to better understand the author’s conceptual frameworks and the methodologies on
which he relies. Nevertheless, there are a number of primary sources incorporated in the text
that include letters, testimonies, Census data, judicial reports, diaries, speeches, private
papers, congressional legislation, and travelers’ reports. Competently navigating a number of
historiographical hotspots, such as modern scholars’ refutation of Eugene Genovese’s claim
that most slaves accepted white planter paternalism, in addition to his own rejection of the
“ethnocultural school of political history,” specifically Michael Holt’s conclusions regarding
“members of distinct religious groups [voting] differently principally to express their
hostility for one another,” Levine demonstrates a superior understanding of the era and its
complex attendant issues (282-3, 304).
Between 1860 and 1861, a majority of the slave states seceded to protect their
peculiar institution they felt was destined to meet with extinction should they remain in the
Union. The men and women of the free states viewed secession “as a deadly assault upon
their own rights, welfare, and security”; they believed secessionists not only sought to nullify
the results of a presidential election but that they “intended to shatter a nation that was
liberty’s last, best hope” (236). It was, in the words of Senator William Seward, “an
irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces” (15). Bruce Levine’s Half
Slave and Half Free is recommended reading for undergraduate students interested in an
easily comprehensible and brief exposition on the causes of the Civil War. In short: if there
had been no slaves, then there would have been no war.