Trying to quote Bruce Catton from memory: “The Union and the Confederacy disagreed about a lot of things, but one thing they did agree on was that, whatever the civil war was about, it was not about slavery.
“Except, of course, it was.”
(From The Coming Fury, if I’m remembering it correctly.)
The original seceding states did try to leave the union specifically to try to preserve slavery. With the free states dominating the House of Representatives, and gaining a majority in the Senate, they viewed the election of an abolitionist president as one crack too many in the wall, and felt the slavery within the United States was doomed.
One legislator, arguing against secession in Georgia (if I’m remembering it right) did say something like “Let us not break the constitution because, forsooth, he may.” This view did not prevail; Georgia was not going to wait for an unconstitutional action by the new president. They figured that the writing was on the wall. To preserve slavery, they needed to leave. Everyone tried to talk about other issues at the beginning of the war, but I don’t know that anyone was actually fooled by them. It is true that, once the “gulf squadron” enacted their bills of secession, that added another issue to the table. Once secession was attempted, the question of state versus federal power became a live issue. You can fairly say that the second wave of secession was launched by states which wanted to preserve their own freedom to leave if they wanted to later on. It was not a coincidence that they were all slave states, though. They were mainly concerned with having the right to leave, in case anti-slavery laws became too onerous. No free state even considered leaving to preserve state independence, and not all slave states did.
In the real world, the free states actually were enforcing the fugitive slave laws, and the clause of the constitution that allowed one state to extradite from another. That’s why escaped slaves did not stop when they reached a free state. They kept going to Canada or Mexico, which would not generally extradite escaped slaves.
Many people in the free states were sympathetic to the escaped slaves, and looked the other way as they passed. That reduced the ability of law enforcement to recapture the slaves. Every law is less effective among people who are opposed to that law; this was not a valid ground for breaking the constitution.
By the way, Lincoln did not choose to start a war. The civil war started when South Carolina enacted her ordinance of secession, just as an invasion starts when the first soldier steps across the border. In both cases, the fighting may come later, but as soon as someone tries to slice off part of a sovereign power’s territory by force, that’s war. Under the constitution, both the states and the federal government are sovereign. For a state to try to remove part of the territory of the United States from United States law, is war. It would also be war if the United States tried to remove part of a state’s territory from the state’s law. (With the overreach of federal power since the Roosevelt days, an argument can be made that we are already there, but that’s another topic.)
I disagree with all of that. Neither secession nor the war were “about” slavery.
The original 7 seceding states....at least the 4 that issued declarations of clauses did list the violations of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution as well as the Northern states’ obvious bad faith in refusing to prosecute those who financially supported John Brown’s terrorist attack on Harper’s Ferry among other causes.
That they went way out of their way to go on at length about how the Northern states had been economically exploiting them via high tariffs to protect Northern industry, via Northern states gobbling up the lion’s share of federal money for internal improvements (railroads, canals, dredging for harbors, etc) and how they got practically all of the corporate subsidies makes it clear how upset they were by all of this. That is particularly so since none of this was unconstitutional unlike the Northern states’ refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution.
By the way, Neither Lincoln nor the Republicans in 1860 were abolitionists. They made it quite clear publicly and repeatedly that they were against abolition.
State vs federal power had been a hotly contested issue along with the tariff for well over a generation. The Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis of the late 1820s through 1832 were a dry run at this. Secession and the war were over the same issues bubbling up again a generation later.
Another factor here is that “slavery” in this time in America was also shorthand for the economy. That is, the states that still had it were mostly agricultural and most of their economy was focused on producing cash crops for export. Far more of the states that no longer or had never had slavery had their economies focused on industrialization. That meant they first needed and then merely wanted high protective tariffs which were horrible for the agricultural export based states. They also wanted more centralized government to pay for things like the building of canals and railroads to facilitate their industrialization. The Southern states again objected that they were not only paying most of the tariffs and paying higher prices for manufactured goods, but they were also not getting their fair share of federal infrastructure money.
Its true that the underground railroad did run to Canada and an escaped slave could not be 100% safe unless they made it all the way out of the country but several Northern states did both enact laws as well as have multiple instances of local people work to thwart the slave catchers. Morally laudable to a modern audience but this is not the deal they made with the Southern states when they ratified the Constitution. The Southern states had a very legitimate gripe about this.....and the economic grievances they cited.
It was not the case that it was just individual action in the Northern states. They enacted laws to that effect too. How many of the financiers who openly provided money for very expensive Sharps rifles to equip John Brown’s terrorists knowing full well they intended to launch an attack on Virginia were ever prosecuted in New England? The answer is zero. Think how America would have reacted had say, the Saudis refused to prosecute or hand over wealthy people inside the kingdom who had openly financed the 9/11 terrorists. People would have been absolutely apoplectic here about that. That’s how Southerners felt.
By the way, Lincoln did choose to start a war. He sent a heavily armed fleet to invade South Carolina’s sovereign territory. The one trying to invade a sovereign power’s territory was the Union under Lincoln. South Carolina had a perfect constitutional right to unilaterally secede as do all states.
“It was not a coincidence that they were all slave states, though.”
That is an interesting comment.
During the Revolutionary War, how many of the 13 states were slave states?
And how many of the original 13 states voted to ratify slavery into the United States Constitution?
And finally, when did the principles of the Declaration of Independence cease to be valid?