Why Did the North Fight?
Background Information on why the North entered the Civil War
Before addressing the issue of why the North entered the war, it might be relevant to consider why the Civil War was fought at all. Kenneth M. Stammpp's The Imperiled Union suggests that two major theories exist as to what the Civil War was fought for. One theory is that the Civil War was fought over slavery, with slavery either as the single cause of the war, or as representative of the cultural difference between the North and the South. This theory has been articulated by such historians as Henry Wilson, James Schouler, and James Ford Rhodes, and more recently by Allan Nevins. According to this view, the cultural differences between the North and South, which centered around the issue of slavery, made conflict "inevitable." (Stammpp 193)
Stammpp suggests that a separate "inevitable" interpretation of the Civil War's beginning was the Marxist view that the Southern slaveholders "decision to secede was both a recognition of the threat of the bourgeois wolrd and their ultimate protest against it." (Stammpp 195) Stammpp suggests that this inevitable economic view was articulated most prominently by Charles A. Beard. Another partially economic "inevitable" interpretation, articulated by Stammpp and by Lewis P. Simpson in Mind and the American Civil War, is that some Northerners perceived their non-slave dependent, industrialized society as superior to the "unredeemable barbarism" (Simpson 52) of the South. Stammpp suggests that this argument would conclude that the North had to cause the South to "give way before the onslaught of the modern world." (Foner in Stammpp, 195)Both of these sectionalist views are less believed today, according to Stammpp. The author argues that economic differences, and that cultural differences, apart from the slavery issue itself, were not a "substantial basis for the idea of an irrepressible conflict."(198)
The other major view that Stammpp argues prevails today is that the Civil War
was not inevitable, and that it was caused by a series of accidents. Stammpp
calls this the "revisionist view," and explains that prominent Civil
War figures like Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan believed that "exaggerated
sectional differences" were agitated by radical Republicans and others
who stirred the conflict, "and thus brought on a needless war." (Stammpp
204)
Summary
To summarize the above arguments, one might consider at least three possible
reasons the North entered the Civil War:
1) because they wanted to end slavery,
2) because they felt their culture was superior to the South's, and they had
to bring that culture to the South, and
3) because they were led by radical Republicans and other war-mongers into a
war they did not choose to fight.