We’ll never know. But the reason the South wanted to secede is crystal clear, despite their lame attempts at revisionism at this late date.
Virginia was unionist until Lincoln called up troops to attack the South.
Slavery was one issue of many, although slavery contributed to most of the other differences that led to the war, such as the agrarian-industrial split. There were Northern abolitionists who were truly men of conscience, but most Northern whites opposed slavery, particularly in new territories, because they thought it would depress wages. In fact, most wanted neither slaves nor free blacks to be allowed in any new territories. These were not people who were fighting for “equal rights.” The issues are not as “crystal clear” as LasMa would suggest. South Carolina, for example, went through numerous secession crises prior to 1860. The fact is that all of the Southern states chafed under the idea of a strong federal government, which is not what they thought they signed on for.
All I would want is for the full story to be taught. Where did these slaves come from? Who captured and sold them? (Answer: black Africans to start with, followed by Northern slave traders). What states insisted that the importation of slaves be continued until 1828? Students need to be taught about the Corwin Amendment, so they will know Lincoln and many or most Northerners were more than happy to enshrine slavery into the Constitution in order to woo the Southern states back to the fold. They need to be taught about how Lincoln kidnapped and jailed legislators in order to keep them from casting votes against his radical Unionist agenda. They need to know that Grant owned slaves and that he refused to free them; they gained their freedom only when the 13th Amendment became effective. And why don’t our schools teach about the million or more Europeans, including Americans, who were kidnapped and sold into African slavery? If we are going to teach history, let’s teach it all, and not just things that support the anti-Southern position.
@PurpleTitan Some historians say that McClellan and other generals intentionally did not prosecute the war effective for about 18 months because they believed there would be a diplomatic solution. These people, on both sides, attended West Point together. They were friends. They thought the politicians would work it out.
Also, I found a copy of a letter home to his wife written by my great-great-grandfather the other day (a portion is quoted below). Indeed he was tired of war, although in mid-1863 he reported that the Western (i.e. Tenn.) troops were in very good health and spirits. He was aware that 1.5 million additional troops were coming to field, but he also expressed hope that the war would end if Lincoln were defeated in 1864. He did not survive Chickamauga.
From his letter: “Our army is in good fighting condition at this time the health of the troop is good at this time all seem to Be hopefull and confident of Success, the war is not at an End yet, the conscrip law has past the federal congress they will put 1 ½ million more men in the field by that law. So you see that we will have fighting fighting yet if they continue to prey upon us as you say if the Lord is with us all will be well if not to the Reverse. My Prediction is that the war will continue during Lincoln administration at least. But I am no prophet. I hope it will cease soon. I am tired of war. I hope we may all get home soon. With our dear ones at home I prefer the quiescence of a Peaceful home to that of the Bug of war.”
@earlvandorn, I don’t see preserving the Union a radical agenda. Call me an American patriot if you like.
While it is correct that most in the north were not initially concerned about abolishing slavery, it was still the case that slavery was by far the biggest reason (not a “side issue”) among the various ones that the states in the south seceded, based on what their governments wrote in 1860 and 1861.
Really, when you dig a little deeper on stuff like slavery and racism leading up to and during the civil war, the north looks worse, but so does the south.
"All I would want is for the full story to be taught. Where did these slaves come from? Who captured and sold them? (Answer: black Africans to start with, followed by Northern slave traders). "
So what? It doesn’t change the fact that the very declarations of why you all were seceding indicate that you were willing to secede over slavery. The fact that black Africans may have started the slave trade and/or that Northern slave traders benefited from it – so what? What does that have to do with it? It’s like the little kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar who points at the cat and notes that the cat turned over the vase. What’s your point, other than deflection?
It’s a shame your great-great-grandfather fought for the right to own slaves (whether or not he was a slaveowner - I don’t particularly care either way). It’s no shame to say that our (collective) ancestors did things we aren’t proud of today. I’m quite sure that some of my ancestors fought some of the others for what are silly reasons in today’s eyes. Why cling to the past?
"There were Northern abolitionists who were truly men of conscience, but most Northern whites opposed slavery, particularly in new territories, because they thought it would depress wages. In fact, most wanted neither slaves nor free blacks to be allowed in any new territories. These were not people who were fighting for “equal rights.” "
Who said that the North was motivated by noble “equal rights for all”? No one’s said that. It’s just that you all get hysterical because it’s embarrassing to admit you seceded over slavery and so in order to deflect that, you say “well, you Northerners weren’t perfect either.” Well, duh.
And the rest of the full story is that by 1861, the North had moved to the right side of history, and the South hadn’t. Still hasn’t, according to Texas.
The irony was that if most of the people who fought for the south thought about it, they wouldn’t be fighting, for the same reason that those in the north feared slavery, that it depressed the wages of everyone else. Talking to folks about their ancestors who fought, you would have thought everyone was a a member of the genteel planter class, sitting on the porch sipping mint juleps, when most people who lived in the south had neither slaves, nor significant income, and slavery was one of the primary causes. The south never industrialized in part because with slave labor, concepts of making things in bulk didn’t matter much, when your slaves could produce what you needed, and cheaply. Farmers without slaves could not compete with what slave labor could do, either.
As far as the other arguments, how the north was really just as bad, it was the North who started the war, Slavery existed in Africa, how Africans enslaved europeans , are all just dodges to duck the issue of how insidious slavery was down south. Among other things, it leaves out that slavery down south spread to the children (so they would have plenty of product to sell into new territories), and that routinely families were broken up, sold apart, and the children of slaves had no hope because they were property, too, and no matter how much some try to dance around it, it makes a very big difference. More importantly, in most of the south, slaves couldn’t buy their freedom, and in many states an owner could not legally free their slaves, even if they wanted to. The one thing the south cannot duck is the brutality of slavery as practiced there. Saying that others practiced slavery is a dodge, because it ducks the nature of that slavery.
The biggest lie is in the idea that secession was legal, and here is why. The articles of confederation, the original charter of the combined colonies, did allow this option, in that confederation it was group of colonies hanging together, where each was sovereign. The constitutional convention did not amend the articles of confederation, the constitution that came out of the constitutional convention was very, very different, because it established that there was a central government of the US, and that it had powers the states did not have, which is radically different than the old confederation articles. Thus a state could not legally secede, because it did not have that kind of sovereignty, the constitution was not a loose confederation of states at all. Ultimately that was answered by the war, but if secession was to be allowed, to use an argument that strict interpreters use today, why didn’t the founders put that right into the constitution?
The point here is not that the North was this virtuous place full of holy holy abolitionists, but rather that the war and the runup to it was mostly revolving around the issue of slavery, it dominated politics for decades, it caused the end of at least one political party (the Whigs), and was one of the major issues of the election of 1860, that while Lincoln did not run on an abolitionist party line, it was still an issue many people were looking at, and the Democrats outright ran as the party of slavery being legal.
Actually, the vast majority of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were carried on Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch ships, with the Portuguese and British being the biggest slave traders by far, and with merchants in Liverpool, Bristol, and London beings particularly active in financing, outfitting, organizing, and underwriting slaving expeditions. Much of the wealth that Britain accumulated in the 18th Century came from the slave trade; the BBC has a new documentary on this called “Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.” Eventually a few American merchants got into the slave trade as well, and some of these were Northerners—Brown University in Providence and Faneuil Hall in Boston are named after prominent slave traders—but others operated out of Southern ports like Charleston. The Charleston firm of Austin and Laurens was said to be the largest American slave-trading firm of the pre-Revolutionary era, and Charleston was a principal slave-trading port.
Both the U.S. and England banned the international slave trade in 1808. After that there was some unlawful smuggling of slaves, but the internal slave trade took on far greater economic importance. The older, established slaveholding states like Virginia and South Carolina had sufficiently large slave populations that they could profitably become breeders and exporters of slaves to the newer states to the west, which were opening up large-scale cotton production and had a voracious demand for slaves. This highly profitable internal slave trade was run almost entirely by Southerners.
So to suggest that it was “Africans and Northern slave traders” who were primarily responsible for capturing and selling slaves is not telling “the full story.” It’s a deliberate distortion, designed to deflect attention from the moral abomination that was slavery in the American South. Yes, there was some Northern involvement in the slave trade, but it was not primarily a Northern business. Indeed, there was some slavery in all the Northern colonies/states in the 18th century, but never on the scale it would come to be in the South, and most Northern states had abolished slavery well before the Civil War. And that in itself must have struck terror into the hearts of slaveholding Southerners, judging by the sentiments they expressed at the time they seceded.
Slavery wasn’t the major issue or cause of the Civil War, but lke the Iran agreement, some people think (rightly so in their minds) that human rights issues far outweigh economic, states’ rights, and property issues.
Please read up on the King of Congo, though sites like this: http://www.blackpast.org/gah/king-alfonso-i-d-1543 make it seem that the European “need” for slaves “forced” the king to gather more and more slaves.
This is rather interesting and somewhat more balanced (with citations):
https://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/KingdomOfKongo_StudentsWorksheets.pdf
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Afonso-I-king-of-Kongo-kingdom
Everybody want money off of others’ backs…
@rhandco, the economic, state’s rights, and property issues were almost entirely about the ownership of other human beings.
^^ rhandco,
It was the seceding Southern states themselves who said it was all about slavery. The Northern states said it was all about secession and key Northern leaders like Lincoln said they could abide a continuation of slavery if it kept the Union together, but the seceding Southern states said no, they didn’t trust Lincoln and the North on the question of slavery and slavery was more important to them than keeping the Union together. Why do you not believe what they themselves said? Sure, sometimes political leaders offer self-serving rationales for their actions, smokescreens to deflect attention away from their true motives. But when they do that, they try to offer smokescreens that make them look good. Saying that slavery is more important to you than loyalty to your country just doesn’t work as such a smokescreen; it’s just not going to work with anyone who doesn’t already agree with you that slavery is a good and valuable institution, of which there were dwindling numbers in the North and in the court of global public opinion by the time of the U.S. Civil War. It’s what the lawyers call an “admission against interest.” Most lawyers would say that if a party makes a statement against their own self-interest, it should create at least some level of presumption that the statement is true; otherwise, what motive would they have to lie if the particular lie they’re telling is only going to hurt them?
The seceding states themselves wrote in 1860-1861 that slavery was the biggest issue for them.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html
For example:
If you do not think that keeping slavery was just a manifestation of States’ Rights for the South, inherently because slavery was NOT a human rights issue for those in charge, because they defined slaves as non-human, then you disagree with me.
Keeping slavery = keeping the right of a state to do what it wants, and significant economic benefit.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/statesrights.html
“Southerners consistently argued for states rights and a weak federal government but it was not until the 1850s that they raised the issue of secession. Southerners argued that, having ratified the Constitution and having agreed to join the new nation in the late 1780s, they retained the power to cancel the agreement and they threatened to do just that unless, as South Carolinian John C. Calhoun put it, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment to give back to the South “the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium of the two sections was destroyed.””
Just like keeping the Confederate battle flag flying is the same thing; no Southerner (in the mind of the flag supporters) should be told to do by a bunch of Northerners.
The North was not trying to abolish slavery, except in a few rare cases. The North, and the Government, was ostensibly trying to limit the ability for new states to have slavery, and that was a States’ Rights issue to the South.
I do not think anyone can support the idea that the North hated slavery so that’s why the Civil War happened. I can support the idea that the South wanted economic freedom and fairness in the US expansion, which would manifest through allowing slavery in some of the new states. But I cannot say that the first shots of the Civil War were fired directly because of slavery.
http://www.historynet.com/secession
containing slavery was the issue, NOT abolishing slavery. And that was all about power and telling states what to do.
One of the biggest lies in the posts I’ve read is “Northern slave traders”. I’ve read hundreds of records about slave trading companies in the domestic market, which is where all slaves were “traded” in the 19thC, and nearly all of them are Southerners. They were Southerners in part because Southerners were more comfortable selling to men who shared in slave ownership and slave-owning culture. Beyond that, the records of slave trading houses and of local auctions show that many slaves were traded not by third parties but by the owners themselves, who put slaves up for auction the way you might consign a piece of art or furniture, and then bought by local owners as often as by traders. Southerners ran the domestic slave trade.
As for the worry that slaves would depress wages … of course workers were worried about that. They had no power. There were no unions. They worked at least 6 days a week for long hours, possibly 7. As human beings they were worried about anything that could result in their families starving, including the threat of slaves being brought into the mines and mills.
Was Charleston the major slave port?
@rhandco, pedantic. Again, the economic, state’s rights, and property issues pretty much all concerned owning, buying, and selling other human beings. If there was no slavery, no Southern state would have split over any other economic, states’ rights, or property issues.
Note also that the majority of VA’s population likely did not favor secession. Obviously, the slaves would not vote for the Confederacy if they had a choice, and there was heavy Unionist support in the northwest and western counties (that would become WV). Note that the secession referendum was not a fair and free vote by secret ballot, so many Unionists did not vote for fear of reprisals (who voted for what would have been published) and the governor simply made up vote counts for some of the northwestern counties.
Secession in VA was a coup by the elites going against the will of the people.
I don’t understand the commotion over this. The Texas BOE is mandating that slavery be taught as one of three causes of the civil war. All three of the reasons seem supported by historical accounts. It starts looking like Northerners telling Southerners what to do again, and this time because they didn’t list the causes in the “proper” order.