There were various trading and tariff disputes, for example 1832 Nullification Crisis. But I find it pretty hard to imagine any of them would have lead to war without slavery.
Saying the war was only about slavery is a bit short sighted and oversimplifies a fairly complex event.
The southern plantation owners wanted to keep their slaves. Freeing the slaves would not only cost them money (since they no longer had a free labor force) but they also feared that if the lowest class of society wasn’t controlled through slavery that they could rise up and cause social and economic chaos, as the lower classes had done fairly recently in Europe.
Also factoring into it was blatant racism. There were many who feared that allowing the black man to be free would allow him to interbreed with whites, and since blacks were thought to be inferior and less intelligent, they saw this as diluting their great white race and making their race less great as a whole.
The smaller independent farmers in the south actually were often opposed to slavery. These farmers couldn’t afford slaves, and had a hard time competing with the plantations. Not only did the plantations benefit from cheap labor, but the plantations also had economy of scale working in their favor. If the Civil War had only been about slavery, many of these farmers might have joined the abolitionists. However, these farmers saw the northerners as trying to destroy the entire southern agricultural way of life (which, in all fairness, they were) and therefore allied themselves with the plantation owners.
On the northern side, things were much more complex.
There was an abolitionist movement that had been gaining strength for decades. Many of these abolitionists saw the black man as inferior, but thought it was wrong to keep him as a slave. Anti-slavery sentiment in the north however was nowhere near strong enough to go to war over. While the abolitionists did factor into the north’s motivations, it was not the primary reason for war.
Northern industrialism was a major factor. The northern industrialists saw the southern plantations as slowing down “progress” and holding back industry. Instead of trying to settle their differences, whichever side happened to have more votes in Washington beat the other side into submission (just as we do today - we still haven’t learned the lesson, have we?). Decades of back and forth politics served to fuel the hatred on either side, and without all of this built-up hatred, it isn’t clear that the entire country would have actually gone to war over their disputes. By the late 1850s there was so much built up hatred on either side that a peaceful settlement to the situation was all but impossible. If the war was only about slavery, and decades of angry politics hadn’t factored into it, then a peaceful settlement of the situation probably would have been possible, and Lincoln’s concessions before the war may have worked.
There were many in the North who also just thought the southerners had no right to split the country in half, and fought to preserve the union, no matter what they thought of the other issues. Patriotism was a very strong thing back then. War was also portrayed as glorious and romantic, and many young men went off to war with their heads filled with all sorts of romance novel types of ideals.
Some people like to completely dismiss this argument since they think state’s rights is an excuse the southerners made so that they wouldn’t have to admit that they fought the war over slavery. However, there is a legitimate issue here, and that issue is control over the country. For several decades, the balance of power had been somewhat even, with the southern agriculturalists and the northern industrialists fighting back and forth in Washington. The western territories became a big issue though. The southern agriculturalists wanted the western territories to become slave states, and the northern industrialists wanted them to become free states. Neither side really cared what the people in the west actually did, but what they cared about was how those states would end up voting. If they were slave states, then they would tip the balance of power in Washington so that the agriculturalists could pass laws, trade tariffs, etc. that would benefit the south, and industry would suffer. If the western territories became free states, then the balance of power would shift to the northern industrialists, and agriculture would suffer.
Remember, Lincoln did promise that the South could keep its slaves if it stayed in the union. That wasn’t good enough for the South though. They seceded before Lincoln even took office.
The main issue of the day though was slavery. It’s very difficult to point to anything that the South wanted to do that wasn’t related to slavery. However, there was an overall control issue also present here. Slavery related or not, the South was sick and tired of northern industrialists telling them what to do, and forcing them to do it through majority votes in Washington. One easy example though is trade tariffs. The northern controlled congress enacted trade tariffs that benefited the northern industrialists but made it harder for the southern plantation owners to sell their goods to Europe. So, South Carolina promptly said that the tariff’s didn’t apply to South Carolina and ignored them, creating a big stink in the 1840s. Then the northern industrialists said that the states can’t ignore something that Washington does and the southern states had to abide by it whether they liked it or not, and the southern states said that they could do whatever they wanted and Washington wasn’t going to tell them what to do. That sort of thing is the underlying control issue related to state rights.
Lincoln had no constitutional authority to eliminate slavery in states still in the union. He did have the authority to seize the property of residents of states in open rebellion, though. It clearly required a constitutional amendment to truly eliminate slavery for all.
We’re not discussing the situation in 1750 or even 1800, but rather the situation in 1860. The slave trade had been ended as part of the Constitutional compromise long before.
We must also distinguish southern states from Confederate states. The Mason Dixon line ran across Maryland’s northern border, remember. Border states that stayed in the Union did so for pragmatic reasons.
There were many issues, but ultimately all could be linked to slavery because pretty much every single socioeconomic facet of the South in 1860 (even things like clothing fashions and cuisine and railroads) could be directly linked to slavery.
While what you state is a factor in exacerbating tensions between the regions, it cannot by any stretch of terms be considered a states’ right issue. There is hardly anything more national than tariff matters which by definition cannot be state issues. Nobody denies that the regions disagreed over tariff policy, just as nobody should deny that the South’s policy was engendered entirely by its reliance on a plantation economy based on slavery. But tariffs can’t be states’ rights.
If you want a states’ right issue, there is only one that was truly a proximate cause. The South did everything in its power to deny the northern states their right to set their own rules over slaves. The Dred Scott decision, in which 7 southerners outnumbered 2 northerners, was an imposition on states’ rights, but opposite the usual thinking. Of course this merely followed many other similar Southern claims imposing their needs over other states, including the seemingly incredible surpression of debate over slavery in Congress.
Dred Scott inflamed the country, needlessly. It was inevitable, however, because the South could brook absolutely no compromises of any sort. They set up their own destruction over an issue that was exclusively theirs. Slavery was that issue. That’s why all these feints about tariffs or states’ rights are as counterproductive today as their behavior then. All they do is show how badly the South acted and why over this one subject that was of paramount importance to them. Just don’t try to pretend that anything - anything - else was the issue.
First of all, the Civil War was not a civil war. A civil war is defined as a war between citizens of the same country. The Confederate states used their right to secede and formed a new country. A more accurate term would be The War of Northern Aggression.
The southern states seceded because they felt that slavery was being threatened by the federal government. Several posters have pointed out that Lincoln planned to follow a more or less ambivalent slavery policy. So when the Union initiated war on the Confederacy it couldn’t have possibly been to end slavery. He said so himself. Even in the Emancipation Proclamation years later, he didn’t free slaves in the Union.
So the Union was the aggressor in the conflict. This stirred up sentiment in the South to defend their new country. Southerners were more loyal to their state than to the federal government, this is true even today. So the reason most confederate soldiers fought was for patriotism, not slavery.
So what do we have here? We have the Union fighting to preserve the Union. And we have southerners fighting to preserve their sovereignty.
So, while southern secession was about slavery, the war was very much about states’ rights, specifically the right to secede.
Exactly. The way they so aggressively sat there and took it when Fort Sumter was being shelled, they were asking for it.
It wasn’t about slavery.
Until those Killer Whales showed up.
Slavery was but one reason, there were many foremost was industry and economics. The cotton gin caused a significant dispute in itself. The war cannot truly be summed up as having just one cause. As are most wars.
No, not the right to secede. And no, not “states rights”. The south seceeded because they saw that the rough balance between slave states and free states could not be maintained. If free states outnumbered slave states, then slavery would inevitably come under attack. And since slavery was the cornerstone of the southern economy, and the overwhelming source of income for the southern ruling class, any threat to the preservation of slavery was intolerable.
They seceded because Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, had been elected. They seceded before he took office, before any sort of anti-slavery agression had started.
And of course, it’s a funny sort of states rights that the slave states uniformly insisted that free states were obligated to track down and return fugtive slaves to their owners. So slavery was not a state issue, it was a national issue, because a slave remained a slave even in a free state.
They were firing on foreign troops on South Carolina soil.
Brilliant satire, sir!
Exactly. They felt slavery was threatened so they seceded. Just as I stated. Lincoln refused to recognize their right to do that, so the Union initiated a war.
I agree. The free states should’ve been allowed to provide refuge to runaway slaves. If the federal government hadn’t enforced the fugitive slave law there would have been a more peaceful end to slavery. Similar to the situation in Brazilian quilombos.
I guess the War for American Independence was a civil war?
Wait, how does the cotton gin cause a war?
“Those dastardly Southerners are down there using mechanical means to quickly and easily separate cotton fibers from their seeds.”
“Apalling! The honor of Yankeedom demands we attack them at once!”
The way the cotton gin helped cause the war was by making large scale production of cotton easier and more economical. And cotton was produced using slave labor. Thus, the cotton gin helped entrench large-scale slave-produced cotton for the global export market as the foundation of the economy of the Deep South. That’s the “agrarian economy” people keep talking about.
And of course, for all this talk of clashes between the “agrarian” south and the “industrial” north, very agrarian places like Iowa were staunchly Unionist. Lots of places in the North (Northeast and Midwest) had economies where most people still were farmers; what the North (Northeast and Midwest) didn’t have was agrarian economies using slave labor.
I think an analogy is to say that the war in Afghanistan was over religion. In a way, yes, absolutely it was predicated on a religious belief, a bastard subsection of Islam, that takes war to innocent civilians, and without this religious belief, 9/11 and the Afghan War would not have happened. Regardless of other causes, there is really no way to separate what happened on 9-11 from religion. Much like you can’t separate the civil war and slavery.
But, to simply say that the Afghan war was over religion (or the Civil War over slavery) is a gross oversimplification that ignores important factors, most of which have been outlined above.
One problem that evolves from the oversimplification is that it paints the picture of the north begging the south to do what was right and free their slaves, but the big mean old south said, “Hell no” and split off. Then here comes the Lord’s Army fighting to “make men free” and end the evil barbarity of slavery.
For all of that political nonsense (and the freeing slaves switcheroo in the middle of the war was an attempt to keep Britain and France from joining the southern cause) the north didn’t give a whit about slavery in Maryland and Delaware.
To keep the South from succeeding, Congress passed and submitted to the states a constitutional amendment PROTECTING slavery forever and made the amendment one that could NEVER be changed.
Those two facts alone call bullshit on this Grand Army of the Republic scenario wiping out the evil south and its slavery.
Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Original Constitution:
[QUOTE=Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Original Constitution:]
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
[/QUOTE]
Disagree. The South had every right to insist on free states returning runaways. They bargained for the provision in the original constitution and would not have joined otherwise.
The Northern States, again, refused to abide by the Constitution and enacted “Personal Liberty Laws” not allowing state officials to return runaway slaves. Yet another grievance the South had.
[moderating]
Moved from General Questions to Great Debates.
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Yeah that’s true.
That would be another reason to let the South secede, other than it being their right. The North could’ve been a refuge from the Confederacy for runaway slaves. They would have no obligation to return the slaves to a foreign country.
Probably an extraordinarily basic question, but it seems a very direct cause of the unpleasantness:
Why did they want to stop the expansion of slavery into the new territories?
I’m sure it wasn’t because Northerners felt slavery was evil and they were on a moral crusade. So, why did they bother?