# Civil War Was Not Over Slavery? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 3, 2011, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779 "2011-11-03T20:40:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 16
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2011, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/301 "2011-11-15T20:26:17Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > Less of a stretch than imposing our own ideas about their motivations 150 years after the fact. By your logic, [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Tokio_Kid_Say.png/250px-Tokio_Kid_Say.png) proves that the Americans who signed up in WWII only did it because they really hate Japanese people. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2011, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/302 "2011-11-15T20:38:48Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > By your logic, [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Tokio_Kid_Say.png/250px-Tokio_Kid_Say.png) proves that the Americans who signed up in WWII only did it because they really hate Japanese people. And you think desire for revenge against the Japanese didn’t motivate people to sign up? You do understand the point of recruiting posters, right? To make an emotional appeal that will get young men into enlistment lines? If the poster’s appeal didn’t work, why would they use it? ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2011, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/303 "2011-11-15T21:12:31Z")
BTW, I should point out that the poster you linked is not actually a recruiting poster. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/304 "2011-11-16T07:37:55Z")
> [@](#): > > **Tom** :Oh, feel free to be as bigoted as they are–and receive the same respect for your actions. Did you say that as a Moderator or a regular participant? I don’t need your permission to feel free here. What specific statement have you heard me make that you thought was bigoted? Do you think I have said anything in this thread which deserves disrespect? I believe your statements to me are worded in such a way that they could be interpreted as being bullyish. After all, what was really wrong with what I first posted? I WAS talking about personal motives. As I’ve said, young men go to war because that’s where the fight is. You can give them an idea to rally around like “Freedom is on the march” or some such vague nothingness, and the next thing you know these women and men with genuine feelings are ready to do battle for their country even if the storyline is a little murky. I know the reasons the South went to war and I knew them before you were born. I learned them from a bigoted fifth grade teacher. I was startled at what she had to say and I asked her if she was glad the South lost the war. She almost bit my head off. That was the first time that I knew that there were people who weren’t glad that the slaves were freed. As for the comment to **Exapno Mapcase** , since it was directed to him and on the thread topic in general (as were the comments I was addresssing), I didn’t think it necessary to provide links. **Spoke** , I think it’s a stretch to think that all of the men had only one reason for going to war. Thanks for the link to the recruiting poster. My grandfather went just to be with his brothers. He was the youngest and actually under age. He was sick at Shiloh and didn’t fight, but he did fight at Stones River. After that, someone found out his age and sent him home. When he had another birthday, he was on his way back to join his brothers and he was caught by Union soldiers and sent to Fort Douglas where he almost starved to death. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/305 "2011-11-16T12:59:19Z")
> [@Zoe](#): > > **Spoke** , I think it’s a stretch to think that all of the men had only one reason for going to war. I didn’t say that, **Zoe**. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/306 "2011-11-16T14:09:27Z")
What I _would_ say is that the best evidence we have of why young men went to war for the Confederacy is the [recruiting](http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a74/spoke-/Confederatepropagandaposter.jpg) [posters](http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tnweakle/1861poster2.jpg) [designed](http://6thgeorgiacavalry.weebly.com/unit-history.html) [to appeal](http://www.americancivilwarhistory.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/northcarolinacivilwarposter.gif) [to those](http://rlv.zcache.co.uk/confederate_naval_recruiting_poster-rb4b6873b4b9b47c893a6ee21de73c1bb_gvv_400.jpg) [young](http://www.dixie.be/web/content.php?article.1000120) [men](http://store.ushistory.org/images/medium/men-virginia.jpg). The reasons offered up by those posters are: 1. Defense of homeland 2. Cash bounties 3. Avoidance of the draft 4. Regular pay and food To that list, I suppose we can add this reluctant group, not reached by the posters: 1. Got drafted The only poster which makes even an oblique reference to slavery is the last one, from Virginia, which calls on volunteers to repel an invasion by “your Abolition foes.” So I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility that some went to war specifically because the invaders were abolitionists. I really think “invaded” is the key word in that poster, though. (Again, I am talking about the reasons young men went to war. That is a different question from why the South seceded. The South seceded primarily over the issue of slavery. That is not open to serious dispute.) ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/307 "2011-11-16T20:26:34Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > BTW, I should point out that the poster you linked is not actually a recruiting poster. Yeah, it was a dumb argument. Never mind. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/308 "2011-11-16T20:55:59Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > (Again, I am talking about the reasons young men went to war. That is a different question from why the South seceded. The South seceded primarily over the issue of slavery. That is not open to serious dispute.) While I certainly agree people have diverse motives, trying to separate slavery from anything in the South in intellectually troublesome. Slavery divided the North from the South and the South from itself. Everything depended on it. No slavery, no war. Even during the war, leaders constantly harped on the theme that 'Lincoln’s Abolition Hordes" would make Southerners into slaves themselves, force them to breed with blacks (a weird obsession of that era), and otherwise debase their pure society. Simply put, you can’t take slavery out of the equation, because slavery IS the equation. Everything else is tacked on or resulted from slavery, and they acknowledged this repeatedly during the war. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/309 "2011-11-16T22:04:14Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > No slavery, no war. No question. And yet, there were sections of north Georgia which had very few slaves, which voted heavily against secession, and which _ **still** _ contributed a lot of soldiers to the Confederate cause. So you have to ask why they fought. I think the most obvious answer, and the one supported by the evidence of the recruiting posters, is that they fought (as they understood it) to repel an invasion. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/310 "2011-11-16T22:14:49Z")
The funny thing (and I think **Sampiro** has noted this phenomenon before) is that I spend half my time arguing on these boards that the Civil War was more complicated than Evil Slavers versus Noble Abolitionists, and the other half arguing on other boards against people who insist that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/311 "2011-11-17T04:28:06Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > The funny thing (and I think **Sampiro** has noted this phenomenon before) is that I spend half my time arguing on these boards that the Civil War was more complicated than Evil Slavers versus Noble Abolitionists, and the other half arguing on other boards against people who insist that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It’s a phenomenon I call Dixiephrenia. (I’m on a self imposed abstinence from heated Civil War threads because of the frustration of those who see only absolutes.) ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/312 "2011-11-17T04:49:29Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > And yet, there were sections of north Georgia which had very few slaves, which voted heavily against secession, and which _ **still** _ contributed a lot of soldiers to the Confederate cause. So you have to ask why they fought. I think the most obvious answer, and the one supported by the evidence of the recruiting posters, is that they fought (as they understood it) to repel an invasion. You have ignored my point which noted that both pro-secession opinions, volunteering for the army, and support for the Confederacy tracks almost perfectly to slaveholding. Sure, there are always a handful of demographic oddities, but if you can’t leave that out. If you ignore slavery, you’re simply ignoring the histiory of the Confederacy. It had no reason to exist except to promote and protect slavery. No other reason. _Not one_. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/313 "2011-11-17T05:30:20Z")
> [@Zoe](#): > > Did you say that as a Moderator or a regular participant? I don’t need your permission to feel free here. What specific statement have you heard me make that you thought was bigoted? Do you think I have said anything in this thread which deserves disrespect? I posted as a regular poster who considered your little sidebar about Maher and Matthews to be an unnecessary bit of silliness. Your claim was that they were permitted to display their prejudices against the South, but that you were prohibited from displaying yours because you were from the South. I simply noted that to the extent that they do display such prejudice, I think that they display ignorance, but IF you wish to display a similar prejudice, (which I have not claimed you have done), then you are free to do so with the same consequences. You are going out of your way to take personal offense where none was offered and I am teasing you for that. > [@Zoe](#): > > I believe your statements to me are worded in such a way that they could be interpreted as being bullyish. After all, what was really wrong with what I first posted? I WAS talking about personal motives. So, you responded to a post by Exapno by changing the subject from the _casus belli_ to personal motives for enlistment and then decided to be sarcastic when you were called on it, pretending that I implied that you could not know what you were talking about because you are from the South–something that cannot be found in my posts–and now you want to accuse me of “bullying” because I was not sufficiently apologetic for sticking to the topic of the thread when replying to your hijack. Whatever. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/314 "2011-11-17T12:00:34Z")
It seems that there was a recent book in which an historian looked primarily at the letters that Confederate soldiers sent home. IIRC, her conclusion was that an overwhelming number of the soldiers WERE fighting to keep the peculiar institution in place: it was central to their racial identity, central to their conception of proper social order. And they were afraid that if slaves were ever freed there would be a holocaustic reaction against white people. Is anyone familiar with this book? ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 12:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/315 "2011-11-17T12:17:44Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Is anyone familiar with this book? No, but I would be interested in looking at it. Cite? Without having seen such a book, I will say that it sounds like a project prone to cherry-picking. Start with a provocative thesis and then look for only the letters that seem to support it. I did a quick Google search of Confederate letters home, and the second letter I read talks about the sacrifices the writer is willing to make for independence. Nothing about slavery. [Second letter on the page](http://americancivilwar.com/kids_zone/soldiers_letters_civil_war.html). ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/316 "2011-11-17T17:11:44Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > You seem to be going out of your way to talk past **Spoke**. Not at all. I’ve stated my agreement on his basic point. My argument is that you can’t cut slavery out fo the picture, precisely because so many Southerners either didn’t fight, fought for the North, resisted fighting until conscription, or deserted when they had a chance. In a society so based around slavery, it touches and conditions everything. Southerners speaking publicly at the time linked slavery to everything they were doing. The reason that they started the war and continued to fight, was slavery. Whether they appealed openly on that basis is, to me, irrelevant, because it underlay everything that was done start to finish. I can understand if you think that’s being overly technical, though I would disagree. The South had deevloped (particularly in the lower South) a society based almost entirely and exclusively on slavery. To defend your state and its society was to defend slavery, and Southerners themselves seem to have alrgely agreed. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/317 "2011-11-17T19:03:54Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > No question. > > And yet, there were sections of north Georgia which had very few slaves, which voted heavily against secession, and which _ **still** _ contributed a lot of soldiers to the Confederate cause. So you have to ask why they fought. I think the most obvious answer, and the one supported by the evidence of the recruiting posters, is that they fought (as they understood it) to repel an invasion. The thread started with a basic question: Was the Civil War about slavery. The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. What you’re complaining about are answers to the question, why did individual people and groups support and fight in that war? That’s so distant from the original that a “moving the goalposts” can’t be applied to it. It’s historically related, true, but most things are historically related and yet driven differently on the individual level. Once a war is started - any war, anywhere, any time - the dynamics change. After the Japanese started WWII, Roosevelt seized upon the lucky break that Hitler declared war against us to start a two-front war of equal importance. Why the war started is a complex question that goes back centuries and has political, economic, and sociological strands. But why Americans chose to enlist after the war started had a lot to do with “repel[ling] an invasion.” Both are true simultaneously, but one doesn’t supersede the other. Almost nobody sees them as a single question and a single issue. The Civil War is different. For reasons of ideology and pride and ancient grievances, the answer that doesn’t include defense of slavery as the overwhelming cause gets argued a lot. But that’s just a distraction to try to make their position palatable. It should never be allowed to do so. The Civil War started over slavery. If you want to dispute in this thread why the war started, then have a go at it. But you don’t. As far as I can tell, you agree that the reason is slavery. For me, the topic ends there. Yeah, this is the Internet and topic drift happened and people got to talking about why individuals fought and that answer is not entirely slavery. So what? The main person who is conflating those two entirely separate threads and topics is you. > [@Spoke](#): > > The funny thing (and I think **Sampiro** has noted this phenomenon before) is that I spend half my time arguing on these boards that the Civil War was more complicated than Evil Slavers versus Noble Abolitionists, and the other half arguing on other boards against people who insist that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. That’s what you should be doing. If people argue that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, then they’re bigoted idiots who are trolling and deserve what they get. Even if they argue that the war was about tariffs or state’s rights or whatever, they are wrong, because we can show that those were manifestations of slavery. After the war started, then a complicated situation became hopelessly messy tens of millions of times over, because that’s how many people were alive and forcefully involved, even from a distance. That makes you right to remind them that a simplistic Evil Slavers versus Noble Abolitionists doesn’t work. What you don’t get to do is tell the rest of us that we’re wrong about separating the two separate issues. We’re educating those who conflate them. And criticizing both those who don’t bother to enforce that separation and those who complain that we do. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/318 "2011-11-17T21:46:11Z")
Out of curiosity, I have been reading some of the letters home from Confederate soldiers turned up by a Google search. Most are filled with regards for the home folk, accounts of battle, and mundane details of a soldier’s life. So far I have only found a couple which discuss reasons for going to war (from the soldier’s perspective). The first of these I already linked above. Honesty compels me to report this second one as well, [from Private Thomas D. Newton, 8th La Infantry](http://www.civilwarhome.com/newtonletter.htm): > [@](#): > > One may imagine something as to the ties that home has. Though, it is nothing compared to realizing the true state of things. I will tell you how much I think of home. That delightful home I have so often thought of the greater portion of my day in quietude enjoying the pleasures and comforts of life, and those that are dear to me. I think just enough of home to spend the remnant of my days, though they may be long, or short, in difference. There is of home a delightful place where one can have peace, and just rights with it. But, without those two items death is far preferable. **I will stay in the field forever before I will have my country invaded.** I will submit to the toils and hardships of camp. I will be found traversing the snow-clad cliffs of the Thoroughfare and the Blue Ridge Mountains first. **I will endure the toil, forbear the pain produced thereby, before thinking of submitting to such tyrannical vandals as those negro-thieving, undermining, careless, unprincipled band of demons, which are really beneath the notice of the Devil himself.** > > I say and speak from my heart that life is sweet, though give me death before submitting to any such. Never has history, even in the days of uncivilization, not even the heathen when committing their brutal acts regardless of care, or Gospel, had to disgrace her pages with such detestable, disgraceful, disdainful, unprincipled stuff as the present in stating the whys and wherefores of this war, if it is truly accounted for. If it doesn’t prove a disgrace to the Federals in the estimation of all nations, I can’t see why. In short, to this end give me liberty, or give me death. So Private Newton is fighting, as he sees it, to defend against invasion. But it is also telling that one of the adjectives of reprobation he uses against the yankees is “negro-thieving.” ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779/319 "2011-11-17T22:46:54Z")
And here is a [letter from a Confederate soldier](http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2010/dec/06/confederate-soldiers-letter-shows-feelings-ar-698165/#comments) a couple of weeks prior to Gettysburg in which he specifically denies that he is fighting for slavery: > [@](#): > > My lovely wife. I do so miss you, and the life we have there on the small plot of land God has given us. More and more, it seems that my thoughts are drifting back there to reside with you. Yet, as badly as I desire to be back home, it is for home for which I deem it best for my presence here with these other men. The proclamation by the Lincoln administration six months prior may appear noble. **Were I here in these conditions, simply to keep another man in bondage, I would most certainly walk away into the night and return unto you.** God knows my heart, and the hearts of others here amongst me. We know what is at stake here, and the true reason for this contest that requires the spilling of the blood of fellow citizens. Our collective fear is nearly universal. This war, if it is lost, will see ripples carry forward for five, six, seven or more generations. I scruple not to believe, as do the others, that the very nature of this country will be forever disspirited. That one day, our great great grandchildren will be bridled with a federal bit, that will deem how and if they may apply the gospel of Christ to themselves, their families and their communities. Whether or not the land of their forefathers may be deceitfully taken from them through taxation and coercion. A day where only the interests of the northern wealthy will be shouldered by the broken and destitute bodies of the southern poor. This my darling wife, is what keeps me here in this arena of destruction and death. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/civil-war-was-not-over-slavery/601779.md?page=15)