The Confederacy and the American Civil War, 1861-1865: Greed Or Grievance?

Paul Hallwood

No 2018-18, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: A contribution to the literature on the causes of civil war, specifically the American Civil War, 1861 – 1865, looking from the secessionist’s side. A model is developed allowing for the quantification of greed (retention of income flows deriving from the system of slavery) and grievance (assertion of state’s rights) as causes of Confederacy secession. War costs and preferences over how quickly war costs needed to be recouped are central in the analysis. A key finding is, even if the Confederate states did not under-estimate war costs, there was still a strong case for attempting secession to protect the economic return on slavery. While in many scenarios this makes it unnecessary to invoke willingness to pay to assert state’s rights, this too is not ruled out, but it is reasoned that greed was quantitatively the stronger motive. Given sufficient data the methodology can be applied to quantify motives in other civil wars.

Keywords: American civil war; Confederacy; greed; grievance; secession. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F54 N41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2018-18

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