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Was Slavery the Cause of the Civil War?
The great American tragedy is raising its ugly head once more, as it does occasionally. People on both sides are viciously accused by people on opposite sides, sometimes justly, sometimes not, as America divides along fault lines remarkably similar to the one that ruptured in 1861. My contention is that the horrible war could only be justified by the victorious side by making it a moral war. Was it?
In GFHandle’s piece, “Should We Honor Lee?,” several of us discussed that question, i.e., whether slavery was the cause. I contend that, in fact, the American Civil War was a cultural war, a refight of the English Civil War of the 1630s. Members of each side fled England to escape the other during the seventeenth century, one side to Massachusetts to seed northern culture, the other to Virginia to seed southern culture — and maintained both their cultures and their animosities to such an extent that they would fight again in the 1860s.
During the discussion, I promised a longer piece defending my assertion that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. As promised, here it is, but focused on America, not the English antecedents to that war. Though discussed on the other thread, I also don’t get into the fact here that the reason the slave-owning plantation elite in the South opposed secession (a fact generally ignored by slavery-as-cause advocates) was because that would end the Fugitive Slave Laws, without which slavery would certainly die on its own. There was nothing moral about the anti-secession position of the plantation elite. They simply recognized that Union protected slavery so they supported Union in order to protect their livelihood.
Over two centuries had passed since Puritans and Cavaliers had fled each other – Puritans to Massachusetts and Cavaliers (along with Borderers) to Virginia – around the time of the English Civil War. A century and three-quarters had passed since that first civil war had culminated in the Glorious Revolution – glorious because it was relatively peaceful, revolutionary because it made the Rights of Man, not those of king or tyrant, the ruling principles of government. Nine decades had passed since those principles had united Puritans, Cavaliers, and Borderers in a fight for freedom on a new continent. And now, a second Puritan-Cavalier war had just ended, like the first, in total victory for the educated mercantilist Puritan side over the hierarchical agricultural descendants of Cavaliers and Borderers.
While the founding generation still led the nation, revolutionary fervor kept the Enlightenment ideals of the Glorious and American Revolutions burning strong both north and south. But with the second and third generations, ancient prejudices began to reassert themselves. Authoritarianism within the ruling classes strengthened in each section and set the two parts against each other. In terms of geography, the Puritan North gravitated more towards Hamilton’s Federalist Party, while the Borderer South gravitated towards Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. In terms of class, the rulers, north and south, gravitated towards Hamiltonian Whigs; while shippers, workers, and free farmers, north and south, gravitated towards the Jeffersonian Democrats.
Party names would change, but the Hamilton-Jefferson split would define American politics throughout the nineteenth century. The Hamiltonian parties (Federalist, then Whig, then Republican) would support the authoritarian ideals of a strong centralized government dedicated to a mercantilist/corporatist state. The Jeffersonian parties (Democratic-Republican, then shortened first to Republican and then to Democratic) would support the libertarian ideals of a weak decentralized government dedicated to the protection of rights.
However, as the parties could not survive as purely sectional parties, each nurtured strong constituencies in both sections in order to remain viable national parties. Federalist-Whigs were strongest in the North, but had solid southern support. Democrats were strongest in the South, but had solid northern support. Liberty-loving New England shippers and upcountry small farmers, for example, went Democratic, partially balancing the strength of puritan industrialists, who sought government protection of their interests. Liberty-loving small farmers in the South likewise went Democratic, partially balancing the same Federalist-Whig desire for control among the slaveholding elite.
Neither party, however, was uniform in beliefs throughout the nation. Democrats of the North supported, along with their southern brethren, states’ rights, small decentralized non-obtrusive government, and super-low or non-existent taxes. But, fearing the competition of slave labor, they opposed it’s spread to territories; while southern Democrats, though generally non-slaveholders, supported its expansion as a psychological bulwark against the puritan oppression they could almost feel breathing down their necks. (However, they stopped supporting slavery in the territories when they migrated, say, to California, and had the chance to farm without competition from slave labor.)
Southern Whigs shared with northern Whigs an ideology of support for government-business collusion and authority, but they wanted power firmly in the hands of state governments dominated by themselves, large slaveholders. They saw the strong centralized national government of northern Whigs as a threat to their feudalistic fiefdoms.
In 1854, the Whig Party imploded. The northern remnants combined with disaffected antislavery Democrats, antislavery but anti-black Free Soilers, and anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant Know-Nothings from the North to form the Republican Party. These reincarnated Whigs were now stronger than ever in the North, but they were no longer a national party. Anti-southernism was almost one of the new Republican Party’s founding tenants. Southern Whigs could in no way join the new party and still call themselves Southerners, so they joined either a new party for southern Whigs – the Constitutional Union party – or switched to the Democrats.
Democrats also split into northern and southern factions. That was the opening the Republicans needed. Despite winning less than 40 percent of the national popular vote and being absent from the ballot throughout much of the South, the new Republicans were able to take the presidential election in an electoral landslide against two regional Democratic parties and the Constitutional Union Party.The five Gulf States, plus South Carolina and Georgia, reacted to having an anti-Southern party lead the Union by voting to leave it. The more populous and prosperous Upper South also voted on secession, but all chose to remain in the Union.
At first, northern mercantilists were giddy with the possibilities. With half the obstructionist southern states departed, crony capitalists in favor of government-business collusion were in firm control of the national government. Right off the bat, Congress passed sky-high tariffs, the centerpiece of an activist agenda that would protect northern industries and finance the public works they were certain national greatness depended on.
Euphoria was short-lived, however, killed by a shocking realization. The Confederacy’s constitution made the new nation a virtual free trade zone. Economics would dictate that Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans would replace Boston, New York, and Philadelphia as gateways to the continent. This would not only cripple the northern economy but make the fine new tariffs almost worthless. Mercantilist puritans had at last securely grasped the ring of political power, but at the cost of economic power.
And then came war. Modern historical understanding makes slavery the cause of the war. It was not. You could make a case that slavery caused secession, at least in the Deep South. Slavery-as-the-cause advocates, though, conveniently forget that secession is not war; causing one does not equal causing the other. Slavery-as-the-cause advocates also ignore the fact that the Upper South chose against secession so neither slavery nor tariffs were the cause of secession, or of war, in the Upper South. Secession there came later, and clearly for a different reason.
The South had no interest in making war on the North. If there was to be war, the North would have to wage it against the South. Yes, the Southern attack on Fort Sumter was the technical beginning, but only because the North wanted war. If it had not, that nearly bloodless battle would not have been enough. A peacemaker like, say, Martin Van Buren, would have found a way to peace, even after the attack. Debaters, lawyers, and war-makers use events that are technically true in order to win their case, and getting the other side to fire the first shot is a key technicality often used by war-makers. But simply being right on technicalities is not enough to justify war. That war was impossible unless, for whatever reason, the North wanted war.
In 1861, though the North wanted war, it had no desire to make war over slavery. So slavery can hardly be called the cause of war for the North, either. The North made war for something else. You could call that something else Unionism. Unionism was certainly supported by more people than abolitionism – but not by enough people, at first, to push the nation to war. The upsurge in Unionist sentiment strong enough to lead to war followed straight on the heels of the realization of what a free trade South would mean to northern industry. A simplified version of the cause of war, then, would look like this:
First, the Deep South seceded over slavery.
Then the North made war over free vs. protected trade.
Then the Upper South seceded over states’ rights.
This sequence of events is hard to deny. Rather than even try, modern historians prefer to ignore it. They take simplification one step beyond reason and say slavery caused the war. History, though, shows that the North made war on the South, and not over slavery. Lincoln’s dilemma at the beginning of his term was how to preserve his agenda in the face of a free trade South. His solution was a war that would, as a side effect, destroy slavery. But, as we are now seeing once again, it didn’t destroy it cleanly and left multiple legacies that America is still struggling with.
One of those legacies is that the war is still being fought, and war always involves a search for good guys and bad guys. Proponents of the Northern Explanation make the North good and the South bad; proponents of the Southern Explanation make the South good and the North bad, or at least mitigate southern culpability. They are both wrong. There are no good guys in this story. It was a struggle between warmongers in the North and slave drivers in the South, each side intent on preserving personal power and wealth, with the common man serving once again as cannon fodder.
Liberal history is generally quite cynical (and rightly so!) about the causes of war, often finding economic motivations. But they make exceptions. War conducted by fellow liberals for liberal agendas, i.e., for centralized government and governmental solutions, is generally given a noble veneer. The only way to make the Civil War noble is to make slavery the cause. It’s a tough trick, though, that can only be accomplished by tying war and secession into a single indivisible lump. But it’s only a trick. War and secession are not the same, and the cause of one is not automatically the cause of the other.
If, for simplicity’s sake, you insist on a single cause for the war, there actually is one, an exceedingly common one. The Civil War was a war about money and power. The ruling northern elite wanted tariffs for the sake of money and power. The ruling southern elite wanted slavery for the sake of money and power. Once secession had been effected, that desire by the two power elites left no solution short of war.
Published in History
Matty Van
Your cause and effect chain begins with slavery, which you rightly attribute to slavery as witnessed in the Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas declarations of secession. What you do not cover in your analysis is the poisoned political atmosphere caused directly by disputes over slavery. In the Congress the Gag Rule and the Beating of Preston Brooks serve as examples. In civil violence, Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s raid ratcheted up the level of tension in political discourse. All four of these examples were directly related to slavery. In the courts, the Taney decision in Dred Scott was directly about slavery. Culturally, Uncle Tom’s Cabin focused directly on slavery. Your arguments about free trade and the origins of northern and southern tribes from England is interesting but shades the “Slavery was the cause” case rather than overturning it.
Do you have some debates from state legislatures, articles and letters written at the time of secession that supports your theory about the reasons for secession of the Upper South? Unfortunately, I have only read about the slavery issue, the fear that free black slaves would inter-marry and have conjugal relations with their white women, and other slavery issues being the basis for secession.
Do you have records of the debates and discussions from the Virginia Secession Convention that support your column?
I worry that your column supports revised history and historical theories that emerged in the post-reconstruction 1880s and as a part of justification for Jim Crow laws. However, a movement to Civil War / Revolution is more emotional than rational. The Declaration of Independence documented why the 13 colonies chose to leave the UK. Please show us what was said as part of getting Virginia to leave the Union.
At the risk of misstating Matty’s argument on the upper South, it is the timing that is critical. The Deep South states seceded between mid-December and mid-February. The final four, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia all left between May 6 and June 8, after Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s subsequent call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Though slavery was an underlying cause, these states had tried to stake out a neutral position between the Confederacy and the Federal Government and opposed all efforts by force to restore the Union.
Dr. Jekyll, my cause and effect chain begins with slavery only because we have to begin somewhere. You could certainly begin with the poisoned political atmosphere that you mention. I would say all of the sources of the poison – the caning, the gag debate (and I love J Q Adams’s brilliant turning of the gag debate against the South), and even Taney’s Dred Scott decision (which contradicted the character, experience, and brilliance of a younger Taney) – were all *emotional reactions derived from the deeper cause. Slavery was the most sensitive contact point of the deeper cause, but the cause itself was the cultural conflict that led to horrible civil wars in two countries.
*Emotional. They’re Southerners. They can’t help it. Jefferson often wrote about the struggle between the head and the heart. And, as did Taney, as did John Calhoun, and as did Jefferson himself, their tears spoiled their aim, thus helping to prolong our national tragedy for centuries.
Werst Member, excellent question. However, despite how things might appear in this discussion, inquiry into the causes of the Civil War is not something that I am strongly focused on. I haven’t gone into it deeply enough to search out legislative debates. But excellent suggestion for someone who does want to purse this line of inquiry in more depth.
And no, there’s no justification of Jim Crow or anything like it here. As I said in the OP, there are no good guys in this story of northern industrial warmongers vs. southern plantation slave drivers. I do have my theories (slightly alluded to here and there) on the self-serving motivations of what I call the Northern Explantion and the Southern Explanation. But I’m not a proponent of either.
Many thanks Gumby. Exactly. Better than I would have phrased it myself. If my thesis is a bit light on the evidence that Werst asks for, timing is a powerful compensating indicator. However, I’d nuance a bit the notion that I think slavery was an underlying cause. In the Deep South, of course. Actually, in the Upper South, also. But in the Upper South it was a negative underlying cause, constraining Upper Southerners from following their severe antipathy towards the North to secession, since they knew that only Union kept slavery alive. Sometimes economics trumps emotions.
Sounds like you’re saying that you agree with me but you don’t agree with me.
Entire Maryland legislature jailed. Newspaper editors that disagreed with him.
Suspension of Habeas Corpus is intended to keep dangerous people out of war, not silence dissent. There is a reason Lincoln was portrayed as tyrannical. It’s because he was.
I’m feeling really troubled tonight over the toppling of statues going on and the mass insanity. Although I wish that the role of the abolitionists were emphasized more, I would never do so by denigrating the South or the Confederacy.
We really need some cool heads to speak to the American people.
And I am sorry if I have offended anyone here.
Jefferson Davis’ first inaugural address doesn’t even contain the word slave, though he does hint at “the rights of person and property have not been disturbed.” His focus appears to be economics, which is what so many people today claim had nothing to do with the war.
So which one (head or heart) was telling them to hold on to slavery?
Not the entire legislature, only the pro-Confederate members, and they were debating a bill calling for secession, which is tantamount to treason. That goes well beyond merely “disagreeing” with him.
Of course there were economic reasons for the war, there always are. Japan had economic motives for bombing Pearl Harbor, too. Doesn’t mean I’d be happy if someone wanted to put up a statue of Admiral Yamamoto in Honolulu.
Marci, really? No 1, the Ricochetti don’t offend easily. No 2, you are about the least offensive person around here, and I say that with great respect.
Hey Valiuth, you kind of caught me off guard with that question! Let me think. First of all, it’s understood that Jefferson means “emotion” by heart, not good-heartedness, right?
I’d say that before Calhoun made a tactical decision (IMO) to turn slavery from a necessary evil into a positive good, head ruled the decision to hold on to slavery. Slaveowners, not being puritan mercantilists but true anti-mercantilist Southerners, were notoriously bad with money and constantly in debt to English banks. Much as many wanted to give up slavery, they couldn’t afford to, and few had the moral fiber to do it even if they couldn’t afford to (including Jefferson). With 1) the passage of time, and 2) as a reaction to puritan pressure (they still tellingly called northerners puritans up to the Civil War), and 3) in response to Calhoun’s reformulation of slavery, it became also a question of the heart. With head and heart united on the issue, positions hardened and there was no more chance of a solution without it being forced on them. (By either war or removal of the protection offered by the Fugitive Slave Laws.)
Before that shift, in response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Virginia legislature debated the issue (are you still reading Werst Member) and came within a whisker of ending slavery in the 1830s. But later, with head and heart united, that was no longer possible.
But should the Japanese be forbidden to put a statue of him in Hiroshima?
Forbidden by whom? I don’t have that kind of authority. I might question their motives for doing so, though.
There are a couple of things here that make absolutely no sense.
Being afraid of northern armies would be a point agaisnt secession, not for.
Sherman had the opposite effect of what you suggest. His methods helped convince the rebels the war was over.
If you want to skip the histrionics and slander against Sherman you can suggest that some people joined up as a result of union action. Rumor has it that an ancestor of mine from Tennessee joined up with the rebels after the union army stole his donkey. That was earlier in the war, though. Sherman’s march to the sea had the opposite effect.
That doesn’t help.
Actually, though I don’t like Sherman, I don’t argue with his methods. The only moral war is total war and he understood that.
Yeah, that line illogic is absurd.
I am reminded of Sam Houston’s warning after resigning as Governor of Texas in 1861 for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy:
Interesting. Though I wonder how that squares with your expression of Southerners as emotional? That in their hearts they felt it was wrong, but with their brains they saw it as necessary, and in the end their brains won out. Of course it is impossible to reduce people so easily. Still. I wonder for how many Southerners it was not the other way around. It certainly feels like Calhoun and his ilk rather felt the necessity of slavery and then reasoned it out from there. You say it was a tactical decision, but to me it always sounded like the necessary rationalization of their inner most feelings.
Below is WT Sherman speaking with Prof David Boyle at Louisiana State Seminary 12/24/60.
“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. You people speak so lightly of war, you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing. You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people, and they will fight too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on Earth–right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”
Quite prophetic, no?
As a companion to @gumbymark
But note his premise: he declares that the southerners are destroying the country. He doesn’t even acknowledge that forcing a people into union is questionable.
Better than emotional, let’s use Sam Houston’s vocabulary (thanks Gumby) and say fiery and impulsive.
In any case, the point was not that the “head” won out over the “heart,” but that the heart shifted and aligned with the head as a reaction to northern attacks on southern ways. As for Calhoun, he came home from Yale and schooling in the North with personal and direct experience with northern arrogance and northern contempt for the South and southerners. That reinforced – or was possibly the source – of his attraction to the idea of separating from the North. Subsequently, his brilliant expositions of the political injustice and economic unfairness of tariffs came close to instigating the separation, but Jackson and the central government crushed that with the threat of force and the carrot of tariff reductions. It was then, I believe, that Calhoun shifted tactics from tariffs to slavery as the motivating issue to achieve separation.
Indeed, both Sherman and Houston. Thanks B and G.
Exactly. Government by consent of the governed was the reason secession was generally considered legal and legitimate before the Civil War. Even Lincoln knew that, until he became president.
“This statue is dedicated to the dude who got us nuked. Domo arigato, baka.”
The South wasn’t forced into the Union, they joined of their own free will. They (or rather their ancestors) voluntarily ratified a Constitution that contained a process for admitting new states but made no provision for leaving.