A prominent “rationalist” explanation for war concerns commitment problems created by the anticipation of rapid shifts in power (see also here and here). When a state expects that the 
mere passage of time will lead it to fare worse in a potential future war against its rival, the rival’s inability to credibly promise not to exploit its future power by demanding a revision of the status quo can lead tempt the first state to attack so as to forestall (or at least slow down) the shift in power.
The canonical example of this was provided by Thucydides, who wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” But today’s international relations students, alas, have little interest in antiquity. Nor are they particularly impressed by systematic evidence that wars occurred more frequently between 1816 and 2001 in the presence of observable indicators that a substantial shift in the bilateral distribution of capabilities was on the horizon (which I nonetheless provide in class). For better or worse, our students view as immediately suspect any theoretical claim that cannot be illustrated with an example they’ve actually heard of.
For that reason, I now discuss the American Civil War after explaining the general logic of commitment problems induced by an anticipation of a future shift in power.
Why the American Civil War? Is it because the Union was growing more rapidly than the Confederacy? No, the reason I like this example so much is because of this working paper by Paul Poast, which argues that Lincoln’s decision to invade the South (which was not how he originally intended to respond to the secession) was motivated in no small part by a desire to prevent British recognition of the Confederacy.
I can’t do Paul’s argument justice in this post, but, in brief, his argument is:
- we know that as late as April 25, 1861 (weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter, in other words), Lincoln remained committed to pressuring the South to return to the Union via naval blockade;
- it was only later that same month that Lincoln decided that the invasion he’d long opposed, and promised would not come, was necessary;
- Lincoln and his cabinet were deeply concerned about the possibility of British recognition;
- key members of Lincoln’s cabinet believed, and/or received credible information indicating, that the British would grant recognition if and only if the US did not invade;
- therefore, the desire to prevent an outcome that would increase the effective power of the Confederacy can be seen as playing a key role in leading Lincoln to abandon the blockade strategy in favor of invasion.
This not to say that fear of British recognition was the reason for the war, but I think Paul makes a compelling case that it was an important consideration. When discussing the causes of the American Civil War, most people tend to focus on what the war was fought over. But, as I repeatedly tell my students, if you want to explain (a) war, it is not sufficient to identify what (the) actors disagree(d) over, because most disagreements don’t end in war. If we are to explain war, we must explain why a more efficient means of resolving the disagreement was not chosen. In this case, that means explaining why, after 75 years of doing just that, it was no longer possible for the North and the South to manage their disagreement about slavery peacefully. Lincoln’s election is surely part of the answer to that question, as is the secession, but even then, we know that Lincoln believed the crisis could be resolved short of war. Thinking about commitment problems induced by the anticipation of future shifts in power helps us to understand why Lincoln changed his mind, and thus pointing to the American Civil War helps me to convince my students that commitment problems are a thing. Perhaps you will find this example useful as well. At any rate, I encourage you to read the paper, because Paul does a much better job of fleshing out the argument than I did above.
Lincoln did not invade the South. He sent Federal forces there to suppress a rebellion. What evidence do you have that the UK was going to recognize the CSA in the Spring of 1861?
Feel free to pretend that everywhere I refer to invasion, I instead referred to sending Federal forces to militarily suppress a rebellion. Nothing about the argument changes. Nothing.
As for the evidence that the UK was going to recognize the CSA, I refer you to the paper that I referred you to in the post. It discusses the matter at length.
I read the paper you reference. According to the author, the confederate attack on Fort Sumter was a meaningless event. I suggest that you need to consider something beyond power politics calculations. Saying the decision for war and peace lay only with Lincoln in the spring of 1861 is nonsense.
No doubt “power politics” was a factor in Lincoln’s decision-making in the spring of 1861, but if history was any guide he must have understood that the UK would not make a decision on recognition lightly or quickly. This gave him some “breathing space” to pursue the goal that events had forced on him — to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union by force of arms. This was the essence of his rhetoric at the time, and why my great-great uncles in northern Illinois signed up to fight — “The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah!” (May also have had something to do with wanting to reopen the Mississippi River to facilitate export of their abundant crops — very rich soil they plowed up there.)
Sorry — this has turned out to be a long comment.
First, a side note, which the linked paper (which I haven’t read) may well discuss: The prospect of British recognition of the Confederacy did not completely end when the war began (though the *immediate* possibility of British recognition might have been forestalled). One of the reasons the battle of Antietam (which the South called something else — the name is escaping me right now) was a key moment in the war is that after Antietam the British realized that the Confederacy was not going to win, or at least decided that recognition didn’t make much sense (I’m recalling this from McPherson, ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’).
Second, is this really a ‘commitment problem’? The Confederacy had already seceded and was already committed to changing the status quo by leaving the Union, so of course the CSA had an “inability to credibly promise not to exploit its future power.” Unlike what I think of as the typical ‘preventive war’ situation, where A attacks B before B has made any really consequential or irrevocable move (but A thinks it might), here the CSA had already moved by seceding. It said it would prefer peaceful secession but the core states of the Confederacy were clearly prepared to fight by the time they passed their secession resolutions. Thus the ‘commitments’ were already clear. This isn’t a case where B promises to be peaceful but A doesn’t find this commitment credible (for whatever reason). This is a case where B was clearly prepared to use force to further its aims and A was faced with a decision about strategy (blockade versus movement of ground forces). The desire to forestall British recognition (and thus a likely increase in the CSA’s power) might well have contributed to the decision to invade (or send forces to suppress the rebellion, if one prefers that phrase), but I don’t really see this as a commitment problem. (Perhaps I am just misunderstanding. That’s v. possible.)
My sense is that by the time the core states of the Confederacy seceded, it was too late to resolve the issue peacefully or by a naval blockade. The degree of bitterness and hatred (esp. in certain factions on both sides) that had been building for decades and culminated in secession suggests that by that point a negotiated settlement was no longer possible. The ‘moderates’, esp. those in the South, had lost. It was too late to cobble together yet one more rickety legislative compromise about slavery. Lincoln might have hoped or thought that a naval blockade would bring the South back but I don’t think that was a realistic hope. Eventually it would have been necessary to send in the soldiers to preserve the Union, even without the British recognition factor.
I find it difficult to look at the U.S. civil war as just another instance of power politics and bargaining. There was no ‘bargaining space’ by the time the South seceded because there was nothing left to bargain about. After the 1860 election, the key actors in the South concluded that the only way the South could extend and preserve slavery — and the territorial extension of slavery, either into the western U.S. or into Cuba etc., was essential to its long-run preservation — was to leave the Union. Lincoln was determined not to permit the breakup of the Union. These positions were irreconcilable. At that point, barring some miracle, a war was as close to inevitable as it gets. (At least, that’s my view based on what I’ve read about the period. I don’t know what the current historiographical consensus is exactly, or even if there is one.)
Hi LFC,
The paper doesn’t discuss the fact that concern for British recognition remained important even after the war began. That’s an excellent point and I think helps explain (in part!) why the war ended when it did.
As to the second point, I see how the fact that the South had already seceded seems to call any supposed problems regarding the credibility of their commitment into question, and I probably could have worded things better, but the idea is that if the South and North both believed that the South’s ability to resist attempts by the North to get it to rejoin the Union (either under force of arms or otherwise) would be increased by British recognition, then the war can be said to have resulted (in part) from the inability of the South to say “There’s no need to worry so much about British recognition; even if they grant it, and threaten to break your naval blockade by force, we’ll still negotiate with you as though we’re in the same position we would be if you instituted a naval blockade and the British chose to respect it.” Of course, if you don’t think there was any room for negotiation, then the point is moot. (I’ll get to that point in just a moment.) But the story I told (which might be wrong!) *is* a story about a commitment problem, though I see now that I could have been clearer about that.
Finally, as for whether “[t]he degree of bitterness and hatred” meant that “a negotiated settlement was no longer
possible”, all I can say is — they eventually did negotiate. After years of bloody fighting that gave everyone still more reason to be bitter and to hate the other side. So it’s hard for me to see why I should take that objection seriously. If the war happened because the two sides had staked out positions that couldn’t be reconciled, how did they ever get reconciled? Why was there a South to be Reconstructed left standing at the end? Why wasn’t this an absolute war rather than a limited war (in the Clausewitzian sense — yes, I am aware that it’s extent was not nearly so limited as many hundreds of thousands would have liked)?
Phil,
Thanks for the reply.
I’m going to offer a first-cut answer (or answers) to the interesting questions you raise in the last paragraph (reserving the poss. of adding something later once I’ve had more of a chance to think about it).
“If the war happened because the two sides had staked out positions that couldn’t be reconciled, how did they ever get reconciled?”
I may have erred in saying that it was “bitterness and hatred” that mainly prevented a negotiated settlement before the war; it was that, putting it in more ‘rationalist’ terms, the two sides were so far apart that there was no compromise position available that either was willing to accept. Then the two sides fought a long, bloody war and the South surrendered when it was no longer able to fight a conventional war because what was left of its principal army was on the verge of complete destruction (the South could still have fought some kind of guerrilla war, I suppose, but without any hope of defeating the North or achieving its main war aim of getting the North to accept the breakup of the Union). So I guess my answer is that it was the war itself that “reconciled” the positions and the way they were “reconciled” is that the South, in effect, abandoned its position (i.e., secession) by surrendering.
As for “why was there a South to be Reconstructed left standing at the end?” — in one sense, there was barely a South left standing: Atlanta was burned to the ground; Richmond’s population, iirc, was on the verge of starvation; much of the South’s railroad stock and industrial capacity was destroyed, I believe. My Clausewitz is rusty so I’m not sure *exactly* how a Clausewitzian ‘absolute war’ would have ended but it’s true the North accepted the surrender of Lee’s army and let his soldiers return to their farms etc., rather than imprisoning or executing all of them. Lincoln realized that if there was to be any hope of eventual reconciliation in a psychological sense if you will, reunification at the psychic level, that he had to take a non-vengeful approach w/r/t the ordinary Confederate soldiers and also (to some extent) their leaders. Of course, much of the South for decades never really accepted its defeat or its implications, which is why, after Reconstruction ended, the South restored as much of the prewar social order as it could (minus slavery) and you got, what, 80 or 90 years of Jim Crow. (And today, in 2013, the Confederate battle flag is still a divisive, controversial symbol, and when someone puts it up on the side of I-95, as apparently happened the other day, it makes the newspapers and people get upset, etc.)
I don’t know if you’ll find this answer satisfactory but it’s the best I can do right now.
Very good points, LFC. I may have oversold the extent to which the war was “limited” in even the Clausewitzian sense. And I agree with you that the war itself resolved the problem. I guess the point I was trying to make is that the end of the war demonstrates that the gap between the two sides positions is itself something that needs to be explained rather than the explanation for the war. Because the disagreement was not fundamentally irreconcilable. I don’t think the issue raised above tells us everything we need to know about why they adopted the positions they did — by any stretch of the imagination — but I do think it goes some way towards explaining why Lincoln didn’t attempt a blockade. Put differently, it’s entirely possible that war would have eventually resulted anyway (assuming the blockade proved unsuccessful, as it may well have), and we obviously have to look elsewhere to understand why the secession crisis occurred in the first place, but I think there’s a sense in which a commitment problem can be thought of as an important answer to the question of why Lincoln chose war when he did.
A very minor point here, and I agree that Lincoln surely did want “non-vengeful” reconciliation. But the extremely generous surrender terms that General Grant offered to General Lee came not from any presidential guidance that I’ve seen or heard of, but from Grant’s own beliefs and inclination. Language such as “…not to be disturbed by Federal authority…” did facilitate reconciliation and, yes, tacitly permitted the South’s restoration of much of the prewar social order. So Jim Crow may have been unavoidable. I’ve been grappling with this notion for years, particularly as issues like the Confederate Flag have resurfaced lately. (Of course the election of a black President has nothing to do with it!)
Huh. Looking at the title and intro, I would have guessed that the idea was going to be that the Southern states seceded to forestall the adverse shift of power to the North if the South lost its advantage in Congress. Tho the UK recognition issue is interesting too.
This is a really interesting and fun paper.
I have my doubts though about the discussion of alternative explanations. First, the 90-day volunteers are more of a concern than the paper acknowledges. On the one hand, Lincoln could not be sure that the 90-day volunteers were likely to reenlist, and he probably did not want to wait to see what would happen when their term ended. In point of fact, while many reenlisted, many did not; this caused a significant problem in McClellan’s Western VA campaign. I also find the argument that Lincoln could have simply coerced them to be a bit thin, esp. given that forcing enlistees to serve beyond their term was not practiced at this point in the war (and likely would have deterred enlistments).
More importantly, the discussion of the border states could be more nuanced. There was a significant concern that an ‘invasion’ would lead some border states into the southern camp. Kentucky in particular was a constant concern for Lincoln, and its little surprise that the attack happens after the June elections. Even Virginia played a role. While VA succeeded earlier, there was a still a question about whether western VA would support the north or south, and there was a general concern that an unprovoked attack would reduce support in the June meeting that created the restored government. In other words, there were important political events in mid and late June that may explain shifting decision-making between Fort Sumter and Manassas.
That being said, the project is really fun to read and think about.