Worse than “their culture” or “a way of life”, they had talked themselves into believing that African slavery was an absolute moral good, and that freeing black slaves was, per se, an offense in the eyes of God. They were offended by the very existence of freedom in the North. That is why they would not even accept Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty (letting each state or territory decide for itself) and instead split the Democratic party in two (ultimately three), even though it meant throwing the election to Lincoln. (Indeed, I know of one old-time Northern historian who maintained that they had done it deliberately, so as to force the war.) It wasn’t enough to be let alone by the North; the North had to be compelled to admit that it had been completely wrong, and by any means necessary.
There was no state’s rights issue in the war except the right of the state to impose slavery.
States had gotten into a high dungeon earlier and are still making noises today, but the Civil War was different. It was about one issue and one issue only, and that was slavery, and only slavery was irreconcilable.
That’s the first time I’ve heard the area around the source of the Ohio called “tropical”. =)
Out of curiosity, did they mean the confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela in Pittsburgh, or the source of the Alleghany near the New York border?
Powers &8^]
When the UK abolished slavery in the Empire the 1830’s, I believe we did it in 2 stages. I have no real idea to numbers, but I believe the cost was in the low millions Sterling. Maybe you can tell us , O masterful one.
P.s. note the absence of gloating in the above that we did it thirty years before you did!
A common misconception is that the Civil War was entirely about freeing the slaves. A simple buyout would not have addressed the underlying issues.
Seceding states did so, in part, because they believed that the Federal government was trying to interfere with their right to self governance, likewise that new states had a right to decide for themselves free of Federal influence whether they wanted to be slave or free, cf. Missouri. This is, of course, a story in a sentence of the “We conquered Europe” sort.
Neo-Confederates make much of this “States’ Rights” idea but, of course, it’s not that simple.
Yes, the Civil war was pretty much about slave ownership, but what kicked the whole thing off was when the South decided to secede and Lincoln decided that war was a better alternative than letting the Union come apart.
What you learned in school (are they even teaching American history these days, or is it all multiculturalism?) is possibly wrong, at best simplified to the point of a Cliff’s Notes version.
The war can be an emotional issue for some. I consider it interesting because I’m a Texan, and one of me great-something grandfathers spent the war forging cannon for the South in Louisiana. In any case, to those inclined to wave the stars and bars and beating their chests about how wronged the South was, it’s over.
We should all respect the dead of both sides, visit the battlefields, and never forget.
Cecil provided a great reading list, but of course there’s a ton of solid scholarly literature out there, much of it even well written.
I like to say that the North was fighting against State’s Rights, and the South was fighting against abolition. IOW, each side was fighting against what it was later claimed that the other side was fighting for.
Strong language. Unsubstantiated claim. *
The puzzle then becomes what made Southeastern Americans so different than the great number of other countries who gave up slavery without war. ** John W Kennedy (the poster) proposes an answer to this question: “Worse than “their culture” or “a way of life”, they had talked themselves into believing that African slavery was an absolute moral good, and that freeing black slaves was, per se, an offense in the eyes of God…” (See his post #21 for more).
More generally, I’d say the existence of slavery along with a founding document pushing human rights resulted in a sort of cognitive dissonance in a good chunk of the population. And there was a selection mechanism: slaveholders possessing a newly discovered conscience (yes they existed: Amazing Grace tells of one) could sell their human beings at something close to their investment value. Thus the pool of slaveholders became continually more rigid. But this effect should exist in other countries as well…
After war was declared, attitudes became even less flexible as Sampiro notes. I am reminded of the resistance to surrender among a segment of Japanese militarists even after they had lost 2 cities to atomic fire.
- Hey, you may be right. Just saying.
** FWIW here is one difference: there was a bull market in cotton that sustained itself for a remarkably long time. The price of that commodity only succumbed to greater world supply after 1865 IIRC. I’ll speculate that if the Southern slave economy was grounded on a commodity that had a 15 year price runup, rather than a ~60 year one, attitudes may have softened some.
I’m not the “masterful one” but I am Cecil’s Gal Friday. When Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it set aside 20 million pounds to compensate slave owners. Even though it was not enough to fully compensate the owners, it still represented a staggering 5% of the British GDP in the 1830’s.
Source: Goldin, Claudia Dale “The Economics of Emancipation” The Journal of Economic History 33.1 (1973): 66-85.
Edited: added source.
I think the American situation was exacerbated by several factors. There was, as MfM says, a strong cognitive dissonance; we know that it happened in individuals like Thomas Jefferson. And there were politico-religious aspects going back to the English Civil War, with the South identifying with the Anglican cavaliers and identifying the North with the Puritan roundheads. (The Southern “cavalier” self-image continued into and well beyond the war.) So the South was already predisposed to reject whatever it saw as a “Yankee” notion.
I think many slaveholders had a conscience, but they just had no idea how to extricate themselves from the system. There are very few people now or back then who would voluntarily bankrupt themselves for a principal. (Modern analogy: if you had major moral qualms about your job, BUT no other job would pay remotely as much and would mean a major downsize of lifestyle, you’d be in a very slim minority if you left it anyway; in fact that’s the plot of several John Grisham books [highly paid corporate/tort lawyer leaves six figure per year firm to work at subsistence level].)
There were a few who did. Dolly Madison’s father, was a well to do planter in North Carolina and later Virginia who liberated his slaves when he became a Quaker and moved to Philadelphia even though it ruined him. Ironically he was banished from the Quakers due to having many bad debts as a consequence of freeing his slaves; he died in near poverty.
The most amazing abolitionist slaveowner was Robert Carter III. One of the richest men in Virginia, he owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime. Beginning in 1791 he gradually emancipated every slave he owned (450+) other than a few who were too old or infirm to work and to whom emancipation would have been a disservice (those he “gave their time”- i.e. didn’t formally manumit them but did provide for them). Some of his many children thought him insane or very unfair for this as it reduced their inheritance to a single digit fraction of what it would have been otherwise. Virginia strengthened its disincentives for freed blacks, making it difficult for them to remain as free people of color, in part as a consequence of outrage over Carter.
I agree with others that the South wouldn’t have gone for it anyways. Slaves were a valuable part of the economy at that time. Imagine if the government offered to buy your car at market price, and you were unable to buy another. Would you be for that? Hell no, you couldn’t get to work, to the store, to the kids school, etc. It would turn your whole world upside down and you would have to reorganize your whole life to be close to things that you needed. This was exactly why the South fought for slavery so vigorously.
Note: I, in no way, believe that slaves are like cars, or support the Southern slavery beliefs, but the law and the prevailing belief at the time treated them as such.
Lincoln did support an amendment that would prevent Congress from abolishing slavery. The Republicans were antislavery, but most weren’t radical abolitionists. They simply wanted to limit the expansion of slavery into the territories. The thinking was that given time slavery would disappear on its own.
I’ll see if I can find a reference to that proposal.
Quoth harriswillys:
Incorrect. The believed that a state should be able to choose to have slavery, but vehemently opposed the notion that a state should be able to choose to not have slavery. Which isn’t really much of a choice. To the extent that “states’ rights” were a part of the South’s motivations at all, they were going to war against states’ rights.
I doubt that any but the most rabid of fire eaters in the South opposed an established state’s right to ban slavery within it’s own borders. What they opposed was any scheme by which a former territory would be admitted into statehood with slavery already banned. For example, not only did the South oppose declaring any territory ineligible to become a slave state, but they also looked with disfavor upon the way that California had essentially done an end run around the issue by briefly declaring itself an independent republic, banning slavery, and then being admitted into the Union as a free state. It wasn’t purely a state’s rights issue because the precedent had been established that Congress could make conditions that a territory would have to meet before it would be allowed to be admitted as a state*. The “southrons” believed that slavery should be the default position.
*Ironically, when Missouri petitioned for statehood and the federal Congress refused to admit it so long as it’s state constitution banned free blacks from residing in the state.
It was the so-called “Corwin Amendment”, passed by Congress just before
Lincoln took office. He said in his inaurguration speech that he would support
its ratification. However, by that time (May 1861) seven states had already seceded, and Virginia and Arkansas seceded before the first state
ratified it (Ohio, May 13).
The documentaries I’ve seen on Jefferson & Washington indicate they strongly wished to end slavery. They couldn’t find a way to make it economically possible. Large scale farming at that time required massive workforces.
I think slavery would have been needed less after farming became mechanized. The Cotton Gin, Tractors, and other machinery would have eventually set the stage to end slavery. A Federal slave buyout plan would work then to end it permanently.
That would have meant continuing a horrible institution at least another 60 years. Something unacceptable to the majority of Americans.
Could you please explain further?
This is all what I was saying earlier. The South’s efforts to justify slavery to the world and to itself had finally risen to so hysterical a pitch that Southerners honestly (for a certain meaning of the word “honestly”) believed that it was sinful not to own slaves, assuming, of course, that one was rich enough. They further believed that they had a moral duty to compel the North to accept that same belief.
I know it sounds insane. But look at the political speeches. Look at the newspaper editorials. Look at the official statement issued by South Carolina to justify secession. Read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, and notice how most of the slave owners are “nice” slave owners—Augustine St. Clare, in particular, feels like someone who wandered in out of an Oscar Wilde comedy—, and how the chief “nasty” slave owner is a transplanted Northerner—and yet the book made the South burn with white-hot fury, not because it was attacking them, but because it was attacking the cornerstone of their religion.
Moral flakes such as myself might have sold the farm, sold the slaves, and entered into another business. Of course in practice that might have involved breaking up families. That was the safety valve I had in mind, not emancipation, which I assumed would be practiced by a small number.
I found this article from the Historian