Why The War Was Not About Slavery

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org ^ | March 9, 2016 | Clyde Wilson

[NKP_Vet]

Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.

Two generations ago, most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.

I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.

Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation.

[BroJoeK]

ek_hornbeck: "Lincoln's biggest political mistake was the emancipation proclamation."

I've seen no evidence suggesting the Emancipation Proclamation was, net-net, a "mistake", much less "Lincoln's biggest political mistake".

Yes, into the fall of 1864 Lincoln expected to lose reelection, but not from Emancipation, rather from a string of Confederate Army victories, by Lee & Early in Virginia, Forrest in Mississippi, Kentucky & Tennessee, Taylor in Louisiana, Hoke in North Carolina, Johnston in Georgia and Shelby in Missouri, among others.

The news of Confederate Army victories did not begin to slack until September 1864 with Sherman in Georgia, Sheridan in Virginia and Blunt in Missouri -- enough to lift Union spirits and reelect Lincoln.

So how was the Emancipation a political "mistake"?
Did it elect more ant-war Democrats?
Did it delay the Confederates' Unconditional Surrender?
Did it reduce the size or fighting spirit of Union Armies?

I've never seen where it did, or seen it argued the Union would have been better off without the Emancipation Proclamation.

[dfwgator]

The biggest mistake was not picking our own damned cotton in the first place.

[Wuli]

“It was not until the 1930s New Deal that Federal peacetime spending first exploded and has never looked back since.”

FDR was Obama’s “guide post” in the political art of “never let a crisis go to waste”. The programs the Marxists obtained under FDR THEY did not need the depression or WWII as excuses for; but FDR politically did, and he used them as just that - excuses for PERMANENT agencies, not temporary measures for temporary conditions. He, like Wilson was a true progressive to whom a unitary national state with a supreme administrative state is their utopia - rule by the experts. “Elections” are merely for giving different political actors the reward of making new appointments, as needed, to the permanent and real government - the administrative state.

You can see exactly what I am talking about in the actions and language of the Democrats all during the “Russian collusion” mess, the “climate change” agenda, and many other events. The Democrats speak of “defending ‘democracy’ “ but that which they specifically are trying to defend in each case is the permanent government of the administrative state.

As far as I am personally concerned the true elements of “the U.S. government” are ONLY Congress, the President, and federal appointed judges. EVERYONE else is JUST an “employee of” that government, NOT “the government” and them and their agencies are always expendable without ANY harm to this republic or any “democracy”.

The permanent government has become occupied by rotating classes of persons who cycle back and forth between the private sector, academia and posts in the permanent government. THEY think of themselves as “the government” and Congress and Presidents are merely temporary figures that MUST listen to them. Obama and them were in sync. Trump is trying as hard as he can to not be in sync with them.

[BroJoeK]

Team Cuda to FLT-bird: "You are right, as far as you go – about halfway through Rhett’s address.
If you read the second half of Rhett’s address, you find it talks almost exclusively about slavery, and not taxes or tariffs "

FLT-bird: "I agree it was an issue.
I agree it was an important issue.
I just do not agree that it was THE issue....at least not for most."

Judging by the seven "Reasons for Secession" documents before Fort Sumter slavery was THE issue for some and an important issue for all.
In every such document slavery is discussed at greater length than any other reason.

And even for those who claim slavery was just "pretext", the reason given is quite telling:

"Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....
Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....
Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation."
North American Review (Boston October 1862)

This (alleged) quote is often posted by Lost Causers like FLT-bird to "prove" their point that it was all about "money, money, money".
But the quote actually proves something quite different -- it proves that average Southerners would not reject their own country only for "money, money, money", but rather they needed something much more important to their "way of life", namely slavery.

Nobody then much cared if average tariffs were 10% or 15%, but everybody cared a lot if slaves were arbitrarily set free by Washington, DC, and let loose on their former masters!

So it was "all about slavery" for average Southern voters, even if the top 1% of 1% also had greedy eyes on "money flows from Europe" and those so-called "Northeastern power brokers".

[itsahoot]

So they do sometimes acknowledge other motives than money, but only for their own Confederate ancestors and those they tie back to our Founders.

People have to be motivated to go to war and continue to support it, the government will defend their position by whatever means it requires. It doesn't always work by the way so they must resort to more conventional ways like Decimation or a modern equivalent method, Treason.

Whoever wins gets to write the history but only if they choose to do so, Republicans seem to not care so much or our school History books would be accusing Obama of racism instead of President Trump.

A new poll out today that says 57% of Democrats believe that Trump is guilty of treason and 37% of the general population believe that too.

There is always several truths in play, there is the undeniable truth, there is the truth a majority believe, a truth that the minority believe and of course that which we personally believe to be truth. We tend to take our personal version more seriously than the others no matter what we profess.

I recall vividly after WW II the Russians completely rewrote their history and I pondered if that were even remotely possible here. A few years later I saw it in action and no matter how many experts told me the single bullet theory was correct, I didn't believe it, still don't, never will.

Not even Superman believes that Truth and Justice are the American Way anymore.

[BroJoeK]

NKP_Vet: "No more reliable republicans voting states that the former Confederate states."

wardaddy: "Bro will need some iodine gauze and a lortab"

Reliable, sure... just as there were no more reliable FDR New Deal Socialist voting Democrats than the former Confederate states.
Now you claim to be conservatives who vote Republican, but really: you think, you talk & post like Democrats, beginning with -- what are the first rules of being a good Democrat?
You know them, right?

1. Lie.
   Lie with a straight face, lie with conviction, lie with passion.
   If your lies aren't convincing, then you're just no d*mn good as a Democrat.

2. When in doubt, attack, attack, attack!!
   Never back down, never admit you're wrong, never accept defeat.

3. When all else fails, reframe the issue.
   For example, if the Mueller Report says no collusion or obstruction, what do you, as a good Democrat do?
   That's right, you reframe, announce: "We have to impeach the President now, because otherwise he'll get reelected"!!

4. Corrupt the language however necessary.
   Words don't mean what they mean, they only mean what Democrats say they mean.
   Who's that jerk from Indiana running for President, telling us he's going to attack the President's lack of commitment to traditional marriage, because of the President's divorces?
   And that's because this fellow has only one "wife"!
   Or is it husband?

5. Don't argue facts or reasons, just make it personal -- accuse, insult, mock and it doesn't matter if what you say is true, just be as nasty as you can.

I could go on, but you get the idea -- Democrats by their nature never play fair...

NKP_Vet: "You see Southerners were states rights, God-fearing conservatives in the middle of the 18th Century the same way they are today."

Noooo… first, mid-18th Century was 1750, colonial era.
So mid-19th Century was 1850, antebellum decades.
Now, from 1801 until secession in 1861 Southern Democrats ruled over the Washington, DC, swamp almost continuously, dominating Congress, the Supreme Court and even the Presidency through Northern Democrat allies like Doughfaced Presidents Pierce and Buchanan.

When Democrats were in charge they spent $10 million (a huge sum in those days) for the Gadsden Purchase, a Southern Route for the transcontinental railroad -- a project in which Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had a large personal interest -- hello swamp-man!
From 1850 to 1858 Democrats doubled Federal spending and from 1855 to 1860 they doubled National Debt -- hello Barrack Obama!

Even more to the point, Southern Democrats then, just as Democrats today adamantly opposed Putting Americans First and Making America Great by using protective tariffs to encourage American manufacturers -- hello Hillary!
Except, of course, when it came to Southern production of items like cotton, sugar & rice, etc.

NKP_Vet: "YankeeLand was liberal land.
Big government, bleeding heart liberals that thought Southerners were not as smart as a Yankee, and in that regard not much has changed in the last 150 years."

But there was no truly Big Government until the Solid South voted solidly for socialist FDR's New Deal and increased the Federal non-debt spending from its historical peacetime average of ~2.5% of GDP to 17% in 1936 and pretty much 20+% of GDP ever since.
As late as 1956 (yes, I remember it!) you guys voted solidly for an Illinois socialist named Adlai Stevenson over Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
Yeh, sure, some of you jumped off the socialist train in the 1960s, but hardly because you didn't want any more "free stuff" from Washington.
Rather, it was because your fellow Southern Democrat Lyndon (Bird) Johnson loved his black voters more than you!

So don't give me this "we're the real conservatives" crap, you're not.
You're not, you're just G.D. Democrats which means pretty much everything you say is a freakin' lie.

[ek_hornbeck]

There would have been no need for a draft, nor so many attempts to evade it, if fighting the civil war were as uncontroversial among northerners as you claim it to be. A good deal of reluctance stemmed from the fact that (especially towards the end) it was perceived as a war on behalf of liberating slaves rather than preserving the union. Other than some foaming at the mouth radical abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens (who were seen as clowns even in their own party), nobody wanted to sacrifice his life or that of his sons for “freeing the slaves.” The Emancipation Proclamation added to that perception.

[OIFVeteran]

That is one of the saddest things to me. That more Americans weren’t “foaming at the mouth abolitionists”. I know we’re not suppose to judge people by today’s standards, but there were people with the moral clarity to see that slavery was wrong. Why wasn’t it more! It should have been 90% of Americans!

In fact the south took the opposite path. They went from the founding fathers generation of slave owners who knew slavery was wrong and incompatible with “all men are created equal”. Who may not have had the courage to say it in public but many did express it privately in their letters. To the 1840s and after slave owners (and even none slave owning southerners) who proclaimed slavery a positive good.

[ek_hornbeck]

The issue isn’t whether people thought slavery was wrong - the consensus seems to be that in the non-slave states, the majority of people disliked the institution in the abstract. That doesn’t mean that they were willing to see the nation torn apart and have hundreds of thousands of their countrymen die in order to end slavery.

[NKP_Vet]

In his 1961 book The Legacy of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote that “the greatest danger to slavery was the Southern heart.” This certainly reflects Robert E. Lee’s statement, “The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of
slavery, and were quite willing to see it abolished.” (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier, pg. 38)

In the same book Warren also said this about America’s fabricated “treasury of virtue:”

“The official story that the war was about the South’s desire to protect and expand slavery and the North’s determination to abolish it is not merely an error in academic history. The evidence against it has not been ignored so much as it has been suppressed. It had to be suppressed because it contradicts the legitimizing myth of the centralized nationalist regime that emerged after the war. Having been repeated so often it has come to be believed because of repetition.”

Robert Penn Warren

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

There would have been no need for a draft, nor so many attempts to evade it, if fighting the civil war were as uncontroversial among northerners as you claim it to be.

You do know that the south went to a draft first, had a higher proportion of conscripts in their army, and a much bigger problem with desertion, right?

[OIFVeteran]

No, but southern fire eaters were willing to tear the nation apart to protect slavery. Luckily there were enough loyal Americans, both north and south, to insure this didn’t happen.

One of my favorites is Rear Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee, cousin of Robert E. Lee. When he was asked about his loyalties during the secession winter he stated, “When I find the word Virginia in my Commission I will join the Confederacy.”

[Team Cuda]

Well, I was in the process of preparing a response to FLT-Bird, when I find that BroJoeK pretty much said everything I was going to say. I would like to expand on a couple of items, though:

1. Since none of the participants are around to talk to, we are pretty much forced to rely on what they said in their various writings. There are a lot of personal letters, editorials, etc. around, so the question is, what documents do we rely on as being the most authoritative as to what the decision makers actually thought. For me, this is the Articles of Secession that the various southern state legislatures published. These were written by those who voted to secede, and were meant to be their official position. If anyone has a reason to assume these were not their words or their position, I would like to know why.

2. Not all of these documents actually list the reason for secession but, of those who do, all list slavery as the reason for secession. Note that I am using the single word “slavery” as shorthand for; a) maintaining slavery in the existing slave states, b) expanding slavery into the territories, and c) enforcing the fugitive slave act (I don’t want to hear the specious argument that “It can’t be about slavery as they already had slavery BS)

3. None of the Articles of Secession mentioned that high taxes or tariffs were a reason for secession. Only slavery was mentioned. If these other items were major concerns, don’t you think they would have mentioned them in their official articles?

4. The mere fact that Lincoln, and the Union government, claimed that they were not going to war for slavery does not mean that the war wasn’t about slavery. The South seceded due to slavery and the North, if it wanted to maintain the Union, had no choice but to fight. The fact that the Union claimed that they were not fighting for slavery in no way obviates the fact that the war was about slavery.

5. There were other issues that concerned the South other than slavery. The whole tariff issue goes back to 1828, if not earlier. But, and this is an important but, we were able to work through it. What changed in 1860? To my knowledge, there was no bill in Congress to increase tariffs or anything, so why did they wait till 1860 to secede? I contend that no one decides to do something as momentous as seceding without a triggering event. What was the triggering event in 1860? It was the election of Lincoln and the concern that he and the Republican party would impact slavery (remember my shorthand).

6. Even though there are other items that irked the southerners, the prime element was slavery. I liken it to a divorce. If you ask the wife why they are divorcing, she will undoubtedly give you a long list, but the fact that her soon to be ex-husband slept with her sister was the triggering event. Without that, they might have stayed married forever. I contend that slavery was the sleeping with her sister event in secession.

[DiogenesLamp]

Forcibly conscripted men going to war solely to end involuntary servitude has always struck me as an odd thing to believe anyway.

Yup. Another thing I eventually realized didn't make any sense was Lincoln's Gettysburg address. That "Four score an seven years..." statement refers to 1776 when a group of slave owning states was attempting to break away from a Union, (United Kingdom) and had their armies led by a slave owning General from Virginia.

Total cognitive dissonance.

[DiogenesLamp]

Derp! He walked right into that one.

DoodleDawg is a "she", and yes she did! :)

[BroJoeK]

NKP_Vet: "We are in the middle of a culture war in the US.
The socialists have pitted each culture against the other."

That's a great post, I agree with almost every word of it, but would replace "the South" with something like "red blooded America" -- the 95% of America outside the boundaries of our biggest cities.
Near as I can tell, there're only two red states with no blue and only three blue states with no red:

[DiogenesLamp]

The consequences of losing a war.

You said that Lincoln forcing states to vote for Constitutional amendments is a consequence of losing a war. I may be slow, but didn't the Union actually win the war? So why would they put up with this sort of dictator sh*t where a President can't simply overturn constitutional requirements for passing an amendment?

Lincoln broke the constitution, and nobody seemed to care.

[DiogenesLamp]

lavery had been ended in the North.

This is incorrect. Slavery ended in the South in April of 1861, but it took until December of 1861 to end it in the North.

Slavery lasted 8 months longer in the Union than it did in the Confederacy.

The South choose violent secession to preserve it.

That is just cognitive dissonance. Slavery was completely safe in the Union. I've heard this claim of "secession to preserve slavery", but staying IN the Union would preserve slavery.

The claim is nonsense. The South had all the slavery it could want while in the Union. The South didn't secede to "preserve" what was already preserved by Constitutional law. This is just a made up propaganda claim that doesn't even make sense when you actually think about it.

[DiogenesLamp]

The South had made it clear they were not going to allow the fort to be resupplied. That meant the ships would be engaging them. Everyone on both sides knew this was going to immediately turn to force. Nobody had any illusions that they were simply going to step out of the way and allow something they had been preventing for 3 months already.

Warships meant war. You talk about Toombs, now go read what the members of Lincoln's cabinet told him. Lincoln had the advantage of at least five other people telling him this was going to start a war. And it did.

Lincoln started the war. He did it with the full knowledge that it would cause a war.

[Bull Snipe]

Never said Lincoln did anything. Andrew Johnson was President when the XIII Amendment was ratified.