If the south had won the civil war or even just held off the north...

Great Debates
41

That’s the spirit, Kniz! I believe that otherwise good men owned or leased slaves. It is horrible to think that we would be so blind to slavery’s immorality now. But the treatment of women before the 1970’s had much in common with the treatment of slaves. And certainly, the mindset was and is similar.

RexDart, were most of the Confederate soldiers slave-owners? Weren’t there slaves in parts of the North? I seem to recall reading about slaves being roasted alive on the streets of New York City, but I can’t remember the source.

Aren’t many Southerners today still concerned about states’ rights or did that fade with Civil Rights legislation?

I am not a historian and my questions are sincere.

I think that it would be fair to add that the influence of Southern intellectuals would not have been absent if the South had won the war.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the youngest surviving grandchild of a Confederate soldier. (I don’t mind being corrected if I am mistaken. But you’ll have to tell me that person’s age before I tell mine!)

My grandfather told my father that “it would never have done for the South to have won the war.” I know that Grandfather had no slaves. And I don’t believe that any of his brothers did either. I just wondered how common it was for non-slaveholders to fight.

Oops! I’m ready to submit my reply and I see that you have already addressed one of my questions.

42

Might I add that it doesn’t seem logical to me that so many men who didn’t own slaves would be fighting to the death to maintain that institution…

43

Well, looking more closely at the numbers, perhaps more like one-quarter of Southern families owned at least one slave. If you define “the South” by the most expansive definition, the 15 states where slavery was still legal in 1860, then by my calculations of the numbers from the 1860 census given here it works out to about 26%; for the eleven seceding states, it comes to just over 30%. For the seven Deep South states seceding before Fort Sumter, it comes to nearly 37%.

I’m not quite sure what your point is–that only a minority of slave owners were stereotypical big plantation owners with lots of slaves would seem to indicate that slavery was more entrenched in Southern culture. In other words, it wasn’t just a tiny handful of vastly wealthy people tricking the great non-slave-owning majority of the population to go fight a war for the rich folks. Big plantation owners were only a small minority in the slave states, but there were lots of slave owners in the South.

44

A point about non-slave-owners supporting slavery: Non-slave-owners might have economic interests in supporting the economic system of slavery (a non-slave-owner might have aspirations of someday becoming a slave owner, or might consider his economic interests tied to cotton and slavery in the same way a Cadillac dealer in East Texas might consider his economic interests tied to the oil industry). But slavery was not just an economic system of unfree labor; it was also a social and political system of white supremacy. Pro-slavery ideology explicitly tied maintaining the equality of all white men with maintaining the subjugation of blacks.

45

Depends on what you mean by “the North”. Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware were slave states that never seceded: Representatives from pro-secession would-be governments from Missouri and Kentucky were seated in the Confederate Congress. Martial law was declared to ensure that Maryland did not secede. Slavery was very weak in Delaware by 1860, and although pro-slavery documents referred to the “15 slave states”, there was little prospect of Delaware joining the Southern cause. Few Delawareans owned slaves, and there were far more free blacks in Delaware than there were slaves.

Several Northern states enacted plans of gradual emancipation when they abolished slavery in the decades before the war (in which children born to those then enslaved would be freed), so there were still some slaves in many Northern states at late as 1840 (54 in Connecticut; 331 in Illinois; 3 in Indiana; 16 in Iowa; 1 in Massachusetts; 1 in New Hampshire; 674 in New Jersey; 4 in New York; 3 in Ohio; 64 in Pennsylvania; 5 in Rhode Island). By 1850 there were 236 slaves remaining in New Jersey. By 1860 the only slaves recorded outside of the 15 slave states were 2 in Kansas and 15 in Nebraska, the consequence, I suppose, of the struggles over the fugitive slave laws and “popular sovereignty” in the territories.

There were serious draft riots in New York City in 1863, in the course of which a number of free blacks were lynched.

46

Right. The crucial question was about the extension of slavery into the new territories in the West. If they were not slave states then the states that eventually became the Confederacy could see their political power slipping away. And it seem to be a fact that slavery wasn’t going to be extended to those new states. Hence, the need for their own country from the southern planters point of view.

47

While I agree that slavery was the cause of the war, I do not agree that the average foot soldier was fighting to defend slavery. Only a small percentage of Southern soldiery owned slaves. (Many slaveowners who were drafted hired substitutes to serve in their place. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.)

The average soldier fought to defend his state from invasion, as illustrated by a Shelby Foote anecdote in the Ken Burns Civil War series. Foote described a bedraggled Confederate soldier being interviewed by his Union captors. He was poor, and it was obvious he owned no slaves. His captors wanted to know why he was fighting. His answer: “Because you all are down here.”

[MEBuckner, I’m not sure how much your slave ownership stats tell us. Slave ownership was not evenly-distributed across the South. While it may have been the norm in the lowland South (South Carolina, eastern Virginia and North Carolina, southern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi) it was very much the exception in the Southern mountains. Few slaves were to be found in the mountain counties, and most residents of the upland counties in the South were initially opposed to secession (recognizing that they had little economic interest in the slavery debate).

(Even today, there are few blacks residing in the mountainous parts of the South.)

Nevertheless, when the Southern states seceded, the mountain couties sent their sons to die for the Confederacy. Did they fight to preserve slavery? (What would have been their stake in that fight? If anything, mountaineers would have been better off economically if slavery were ended.) The answer is that they fought to defend the South from invasion, and to defend (as they saw it) their state’s right to declare its independence from the Union.

So, yeah, the war was about slavery, inasmuch as it would never have been fought except for the slavery issue. But that is not the same as saying that the individual soldier fought to preserve slavery.

48

It actually depends more on when than where. There were slaves as far north as New England in the 1700’s. You can see some of the graves still on Plymouth plantation.

49

I think it was too expensive to have slaves. You have to clothe, feed, and shelter them. Unlike in industrial areas, you can just underpay immigrants and let them fend for themselves.

Read Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, and you’ll be surprised who suffers and is exploited more. Although your conclusion may not be “politically correct”.

50

Hubzilla, my conclusion might be, “Hey, these are works of fiction! Why am I looking to them for historical accuracy?”

Is that politically incorrect?

51

“Wage slaves” were no fiction, though they certainly don’t justify the existence of actual slavery.

The system:

I set up a factory or a mine. I build a town on company property where my workers can live.

I pay my workers not in cash but in company scrip. With this scrip, they can pay rent for their company house, or buy food and other goods from me at the company store (at inflated prices). Don’t have enough scrip to pay for this week’s groceries? I’ll give you credit. Of course, I’ll have to charge interest…

Result: workers wind up so far in debt that they are basically working for food and shelter only. And once they have children, they can’t afford to quit working, lest the children starve.

Not to belittle the evils of outright slavery, but at least under that system an owner had some financial incentive to insure the safety of his slaves. You’d think twice about putting a valuable slave in a potentially deadly work environment. But a company employee? Nah. If he gets killed in a mine explosion, you can always go down to the docks and find a replacement.

Point being, the North had at least a mote in its own eye, which it largely ignored until late in the 19th century.

Again, none of that is to justify the evils of slavery, but rather to point out that the North might have dealt more successfully with the South (and possibly have avoided the war altogether) if it had not climbed onto a high horse. As other posters have pointed out, the South was not immune to moral suasion. (Indeed, there were Southern dissenters to the slavery system.) Ah, but the abolitionist movement had no truck with moral suasion. Moral indignation was more their style.

The indignation was justified, surely, but it was not politic. Railing against evil slaveholders only cause Southerners to dig in their heels. It was the stridency of the abolitionist movement that led to the ludicrous justifications of slavery offered by Stevens and Calhoun.

If coooler heads had prevailed, a way might have been found to end slavery gradually, and to avoid war altogether. For example, by a law making all persons born after a given date free, and also providing for a transitional (and equitable) sharecropping system, so that the South’s farms would not be left with no one to work them.

But of course, cooler heads did not prevail on either side.

52

IIRC, such plans were routinely circulated in the North, and shot down by Southern legislators.

The most famous of these was, of course, Lincoln’s 1860 platform: to restrict slavery to the fifteen existing slave states, while leaving slavery untouched where it was. This would have likely led to the end of slavery at such distant time as the slave states were reduced to being only one-fourth of the states in the Union. (Since we don’t yet have sixty states, it would have been a long time coming.)

This initial step toward the gradual passing of slavery, put forth by one of the North’s ‘cooler heads’ who, by his election, clearly represented Northern sentiment, was completely and utterly rejected by the South, which responded by seceding and going to war.

Conclusion: with respect to slavery, the South may have had some ‘cool heads’, but there were too few of them to matter on this issue, at any time.

That might well be so, but IMHO, it is of no consequence. The questions of “what made this war happen?” and “why did the average soldier fight?” have often been different, right up to Vietnam and Gulf War I.

53

Yes, by 1860, the South had been radicalized on the issue of slavery. (John Brown helped this process along.)

Ah well, water under the bridge. I wish Washington or Jefferson had exhibited more leadership on this issue. War might have been averted.

For reference: The 1860 Republican Platform.

54

No kidding, you were there?
Your cite is famous since it was the plan that the south rejected fearing they would lose control in Congress (which was true). Since Lincoln was elected with that in his platform, it was the major trigger in starting the war.

It would be nit-picking to point out that there were 29 in Utah but if you count the 1798 in Delaware, then so should the 3185 in Washington, D.C. be counted.

here

or from acooler head

Same song, different verse

55

Please spare us the rhetorical martyrdom. There were racists throughout the United States, but the “South” was defined as a region by the subjugation and enslavement of black people, and sought to destroy the Union and was willing to risk civil war in order to preserve that system. And by 1860 Southern opinion seemed pretty unabashedly in favor of slavery. We know these things and other facts of history not because any of us are 140 years old but because we can read the letters, diaries, transcripts of speeches, newspaper editorials, and public documents that both Northerners and Southerners left behind.

Slavery was a grave injustice. Lots of great societies throughout history have been marred by grave injustices (including slavery in many of them). “Everyone else is doing it too” is a pretty weak rejoinder, though.

56

The term “IIRC” was used and then the only example cited was commonly known. So, I should have said “CITE”. Sorry.

All of your quotes, cites, etc. are concerning the south. My point is that it was not entirely one-sided.

Show where I said otherwise. No doubt about it, but the hands of the northerners aren’t as clean as you’d like people to think.

This is a case illustrating why in mid-post I lost it earlier in this thread. I knew that no matter what was said the answer would be “Don’t confuse us with any facts, just let us rant about the south.” I didn’t know that debates were supposed to come only from one side.

57

funny…imagine how much our civil war changed this country and look at how many we are interfering with overseas…korea…and the middle east…

58

The original book on this topic deserves mention: If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor. Originally published 1960-1961.

I read it so many years ago in high school, I don’t remember what year he had the independent Confederacy finally getting rid of slavery—I think it was the beginning of the 20th century.

Its premise started with General U.S. Grant gettin killt when his horse done threw him in 1863. Next thing you know General R.E. Lee is winnin battles all over the damn place. One twist that Kantor threw in was that Texas had a falling out with the rest of the Confederacy (I forget why), and late in the 19th century seceded again on its own. The book ends with all three republics kissin & makin up, and going into World War I as allies.

59

I believe that the South seceded primarily for economic reasons. The Northern States used their political muscle to force the South to sell them raw materials rather than allow them to sell them to whom they chose. This allowed the Northern textile mills to sell the more profitable finished goods to the world. Basically they wanted to keep the South effectively in slavery to the North. Also factors were railroads, prevention of the South from manufacturing the goods themselves by various means, and various other methods of economic oppression. The South believed that the Consitution meant what it said, that the Union was composed of the various states, and all powers not specifically granted to the Union were reserved to the states, or the people.

60

Maybe so. The south was going to be selling raw materials to somebody as long as it continued an economic system based on producing raw materials instead of building up industries. Would it have been better for the south to have sold raw materials to British textile mills which could then be sold as more profiable finished goods?

The planters of the south were relatively few in number but they had the politcal and economic power. They were the sole beneficiaries of an essentially feudal economic system and they insisted upon maintaining it even at the utimate cost of their own downfall.