What the Hell *WAS* the Cause of the Civil War?
One Last Thought On McDonnell And Confederate History - National - The Atlantic
I don't want to differ with Coates, who is clearly my better in this matter, but I was doing some research about a year ago, and ended up reading transcripts of a lot of letters written by New England Union soldiers and their families. Having been raised in MI, I was basically under the impression that the Civil War was about abolishing slavery, and that whole "state's rights" line was Revisionist white-supremacist hogwash. So, I was surprised to see in those letters basically the same debate you see today: Plenty of contemporary Union soldiers and citizens argued that the war was over sovereignty and state's rights vs. federal stability, and plenty of their wives and brothers and husbands and pals shot back that they were being idiots, and the war was clearly over the fate of American slaves (and whether or not the bondage of those men, women, and children was worth the blood of their friends and neighbors).
All of which is to say: It seems a little absurd to expect us, as a nation 145 years removed from the blood and sweat and shouts and murmurs of the moment, to agree on what that war was *really* about, seeing as how the men (and a few ladies) who pulled the triggers at the time couldn't seem to agree what they were fighting over.
(Coates' earlier thoughts on VA Governor McDonnell's Confederate History Proclamation: Proud Of Being Ignorant - National - The Atlantic and Proud Of Being Wise - National - The Atlantic)
Comments
Regarding the cause of the ACW....the short answer is that why we were in it evolved for the North, but not for the South.
The thing was that, initially, it was about states and sovereignty versus the role of the Federal government. There had been a balance of power issue within the Federal Senate, between free and slave state Senators, which was broken at first when California entered the Union as a Free state, then again when the Kansas-Nebraska Act failed because Kansas refused to willingly become a Slave state to counterbalance the admission of Nebraska, a Free state.
This balance of power was also incorporated into the Presidency, because the Democratic party of that time knew that they couldn't win the office without the support of Slave states. So a typical President of the 1850s was a Northerner with a strong connection to the South, usually through slaves owned there. (Stephen Douglas, who was the creator of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and who, had the system been maintained, would have been President in 1860, owned slaves through his first marriage into a slaveholding family.)
The Dred Scott case further muddled things because it essentially opened the door to the possibility that any slaveholder, no matter where they lived, could hold slaves in their place of residence, potentially wiping out the entire idea of Slave versus Free states.
And that, in turn, REALLY freaked out working class white males, because one of their dislikes of slavery, even if they weren't so wild about African-Americans, was that it was just one more means of competition for work, which, given the boom and bust economy of America at the time, was always a delicate situation. (That's why most Northern states did whatever they could to push African-Americans out of their states - fear by association.) So, in a sense, state sovereignty was also involved from a Northern perspective because they HATED the idea of slavery killing off their chances for employment.
However, between Bloody Kansas and the Dred Scott decision, the Republican Party was bound to rise because it alleviated the fears of white working class Protestant males (the most extreme of which were in the Know-Nothing Party, which eventually merged with the Republicans for the most part), and gave a means of being angry with slavery with or without the attendant desire to see African-Americans freed from bondage or having to consider them deserving of equal rights.
For the South, states rights had always been about protecting slavery, period. It was how the powerful made their living, and there were lots of them, each a potential threat to their life, family and property. With the balance of power gone in the Senate, and with the President in 1860 a Republican (it didn't matter that he was a compromise choice within that political party) that was unlikely to give them new territories to convert into Slave states, cotton's ability to destroy the soil over time would eventually do the rest.
For Lincoln in particular, he eventually came to the conclusion that he couldn't reunite the states unless there was one and only one situation in place - a wage-based or a slave-based economy. And that meant freeing the slaves and having a Federal government that would enforce that decision.
Posted by: Rich | April 13, 2010 03:04 PM