@TatinG- the south was fighting to make it so states were the final arbiters in what laws were followed- most specifically laws about owning slaves. (They also has a real issue with tariffs- they almost seceded several decades before the war over those- if they had, they probably would have won)
@justonedad- our stated purpose in Vietnam was to prevent a communist takeover of the government. We didn’t need to surrender (as you point out- we never did “declare war” - though we ended up with Casualties than in some of the conflicts that we DiD declare war). Last time I checked- we did not achieve our goal…
Choosing to leave by fleeing in chaos by helicopter off rooftops, having failed to achieve your objectives and leaving your adversary in complete control, looks an awful lot like a defeat.
Sorry but ‘states rights’ was not the cause of the war. The confederate states had no problem with the fugitive slave law being enforced in the northern states against the will of the northern states. The southern states were all for “states rights” when it suited them and against ‘states rights’ when it didn’t suit them.
The southern states left the union to preserve slavery. No slavery, no war. Full stop.
Y’all need to read more than a few lines of text about the time leading up to the Civil War. I live in Texas, but I grew up in the North. (full disclosure)
Slavery is what an actual historian would call a precipitating event. If Slavery were the only issue on which the North and South disagreed (and it was a big one), there would not have been a war to preserve it. Slavery was just the best, easiest to understand example for the average citizen to get riled up about. Much like in modern politics, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what our Union is really about, but trying to explain it to the masses is an exercise in futility.
I am not opining on my personal thoughts on slavery here. I have the luxury of having read a great deal of original documents during my studies (in Wisconsin, not in Texas) and the best thing you can take away from most of what you hear is that history is much like a giant game of ‘Telephone’. By the time it runs through enough hands, you barely recognize it. Then you try to distill all of that into a few chapters of a book. Ludicrous.
Historians have another term…‘presentism’. That is when we judge the actions of the past by our values of the present. We take a very myopic view of a complex web of interconnected socio-economic/geo-political variable and try to distill it down to a single abhorrent cause.
Tatin G had it right. The North, for the most part, was trying to preserve the Union. They had the better of the political landscape and they needed the South’s resources to continue to build their manufacturing economy. There are many very clear positions about that (most famously by Lincoln himself).
Understanding that the Civil War was about much more than Slavery does not diminish the stain of that enterprise on our history. It simply looks at the reality of the situation from an objective viewpoint.
BOTH sides need to acknowledge the horrible racism and oppression by BOTH sides.
Lincoln, for example, did nothing to free slaves in the Union until late in the war, for political reasons. He was a terrible racist and even floated plans to deport African-Americans back to Africa. Segregation and brutality existed in the North, too.
The South is well aware of the horrible things that white Southerners did to African-Americans. The North needs to acknowledge its own deeds as well. After all that African-Americans in this country have gone through, I think that we who live in the North need to quit trying to wash our hands of past ugliness by just saying, “The South wanted to preserve slavery and the good old North wanted to preserve the Union.”
“Tatin G had it right. The North, for the most part, was trying to preserve the Union. They had the better of the political landscape and they needed the South’s resources to continue to build their manufacturing economy. There are many very clear positions about that (most famously by Lincoln himself).”
This opinion does not seem plausible. If the North wanted to go to war with the South to continue building on their manufacturing economy then the North shot themselves in the foot by contradicting their on rationale. The South already had a built in “free” manufacturing economy that created a significant advantage. If the North wanted to continue building their economy then they would have partnered with the South to continue slavery. Was it just happenstance that slavery ended after the civil war?
@justonedad - I don’t want to argue- and you are certainly right that objectives change during conflict. If you see the conflict in Vietnam as a success- you are entitled to your opinion. It is not mine, nor the texts I use to teach- but hey- variety is the spice of life.
On a larger note- the civil war is a really complicated thing- as are many wars. Reducing it to one issue (slavery - which was absolutely a primary issue, it just wasn’t the ONLY one) is worrisome- it takes away from larger meaning and impact of that war on US history
@toowonderful There isn’t enough substance here to have an argument. Each of the things I responded to were substantial mischaracterizations of fact, including your assumption that I saw the Vietnam conflict as a success.
@Proud3894 The reason it does not seem plausible is that you came at it from the position that the North wanted to go to war. The North was politically squeezing the South. The tariff and duties policies were very North friendly. The North wanted to ensure that the South could not reasonably sell their products anywhere but in the North. This restricted the South’s ability to earn money on those goods. (Artificially lowering demand through restrictive market practices had a depressing effect on commodity prices). The North wanted to maintain its ability to get a ready supply of cheap commodities which it could then sell. Great for the North, not so much for the South. It was decidedly not in the best interests of the North to go to war. The North simply wanted to preserve the status quo where they could dictate policy to the South. The primary reason they opposed allowing new slave states when they entered the Union was not about slavery, per se, but about maintaining political power. If more states had productive, cheap commodities, more states would want to vote to improve the tariff conditions and the North would no longer be able to dictate to the South. The North also had no collective interest in freeing the slaves in the South. Slaves did not count as much for population and thus representation in Congress.
The odd thing that they could not foresee was that slavery was going to end soon anyway. By the time of the Civil War, it was become less and less cost-effective and those very manufacturing interests were soon to come out with ways to further automate the cultivation and harvest of many crops. Of course, that would be no comfort to those enslaved, but many fewer people could have died if they understood the coming change and made a peaceful transition.
What many people tend to do is assume face value in what they see written in histories rather than looking for the context. The best way to learn about that is to look at modern events and see how things change as differing opinions chime in or how we reduce things to sound bites for a electronic medium. Some would have you believe that we went to war in Iraq over WMDs. Was that the case? Slavery, in some ways, was the WMDs of that generation. It was easy to get people riled up about it. Guess what? Back then, both North and South had a very uneducated, largely illiterate population. The power of politicians, media members, and pundits in general was a great or greater than it is today. Great ‘Orators’ could sway public opinion and people simply did not have enough facts and/or understanding of the situation to grasp them. Very few Southerners actually owned slaves. Slavery itself did not motivate the typical Southern rebel. One of the more interesting things to me, is that the Constitution does not say that states cannot leave…but that is an entirely different subject.
There are many examples of individuals in both the South and the North who abhorred the institution of slavery and fought to end it without bloodshed. The generalizations I have made are just that. As with modern politics, there were myriad variations on the approach. Be wary of the stated motivations of politicians of any stripe.
Ok. I’ll just take my 2 master’s degrees in history and 20 years of teaching it for advanced placement classes and go search out my substantial mischaracterizations. Must have done something right though- 80% of my apush kids scored a 3 or higher on the 2015 test…
While the above may be true, we are talking about the general population of school-age kids, who likely won’t get a very nuanced view of the Civil War. And it appears that many of them are emerging from high school with a black-and-white (in the metaphorical sense, no pun intended!) understanding of the war that doesn’t include an understanding of the great injustice of white oppressor humans owning black oppressor humans, lock stock and barrel.
Oh please. I know many with advanced degrees in history who know very little about the disgraces of our past. Either by accident or by willful ignorance.
My area of study is in American History but like most with advanced degrees, I have a specific area of focus. I wouldn’t presume to know an awful lot about US/Native American relations history, for example, simply because I have a degree in US history.
Most of those writing the history books have advanced degrees in history. That doesn’t mean they don’t have biases that cloud the presentation of “facts”
Given that I teach the entire spectrum of US history- I need to be more of a generalist than a specialist. I never claimed to known everything about anything- but I know a fair amount about what I teach. History is complicated- it is the over simplification of “the civil is about slavery” that offends me
In asking why the South started the Civil War or why the North fought the Civil War, you have to ask what were “the South” and “the North”. If it’s the government then I think it’s that yes, the South fought to keep slaves. The government of those states thought that entering into the Constitution was not a contract that could bind them forever. The government of the North wanted to keep the Union together for reasons of national power, pride and preserving the nation fought for in the Revolution. Lincoln said as much in the Gettysburg Address. That the United States “shall not perish from the earth”.
But if you take the “South” and the “North” as what individual soldiers fought for then the result is different. Most Southern soldiers were poor farm boys who never owned a slave. While some may have been concerned about having to compete economically with millions of freed slaves, most when you read their diaries, just didn’t want a section of the country that felt foreign to them telling their home state what to do.
As for Northern soldiers many were unwilling drafted and didn’t want to fight at all. See the Draft Riots of New York. Some in border states, even some who owned slaves fought for Union. Some signed up early because they thought it would be a quick frolic, a summer adventure. A notion disabused at Bull Run #1. Many Northerners had the same concerns about competing economically with freed slaves also and didn’t like the Emancipation Proclamation at all. Lincoln knew and feared it would be unpopular. By late 1863, the war in the north was so unpopular that Lincoln would have lost the election but for victories in 1864 that showed that the war might not last much longer.
School textbooks have to be oversimplied. High schools spend just a few days on the Civil War. They don’t get into this kind of depth.
“If more states had productive, cheap commodities, more states would want to vote to improve the tariff conditions and the North would no longer be able to dictate to the South. The North also had no collective interest in freeing the slaves in the South. Slaves did not count as much for population and thus representation in Congress.”
If the North had no collective reason to free the slaves based on representation in Congress as you say then why did slavery end after the civil war?
“The odd thing that they could not foresee was that slavery was going to end soon anyway. By the time of the Civil War, it was become less and less cost-effective and those very manufacturing interests were soon to come out with ways to further automate the cultivation and harvest of many crops. Of course, that would be no comfort to those enslaved, but many fewer people could have died if they understood the coming change and made a peaceful transition.”
Since no farming automation was developed when the civil war began, how could anyone know that something that was not developed until eighty years after the civil war ended would be forth coming? The first practical cotton picker was not developed until the 1940’s. Also no farming automation of any kind was even developed until after the war. I personally know of several people who picked cotton in the 1940’s and 1950’s to earn extra cash. Why didn’t the farmers who owned this land simply fork out huge capital equipment outlays and eliminate these unnecessary labor costs?
The premise of your argument that slavery was not the central reason for the civil war makes no sense. Every point that you and others have made supporting this point always goes back to slavery as being the primary reason for the civil war. All you have to do is go back and reread your posts.
@tatinG - the textbook I use brings up all those points and more. There is an entire chapter devoted to the lead up to the war. (I use Eric Foner’s “Give Me Liberty”- which I highly recommend) What gets cut these days are lots of battles etc- b/c while interesting is not really the key concept (which I say with apologies to the legions of civil was buffs who can name every commander etc of every battle fought during the war)