Abstract

This essay replies to critics of my earlier piece in Historical Materialism which looked at the origins of the American Civil War. The essay re-emphasises the importance of the shift to wage labour in the North, it re-asserts the need to incorporate slave resistance as a key factor in any causal account of the sectional conflict, and it argues that the ultimate northern victory in that conflict should be seen as constituting a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It engages specifically with the criticisms and some of the alternative interpretations offered by Charles Post, Eric Foner and Neil Davidson.