Is the Civil War only about Slavery?

Great Debates
21

Wow, several new insights in both directions here for me. I didn’t know Lincoln was elected exclusively by northern states, or that Mississippi was better than 50% slaves, with others close behind.

Another interesting item from Walloon’s site on Georgia being sharply divided:

There was a “Secession convention” in Georgia, and at the convention, the pro-Union side was led by Alexander Stevens, who was later Vice President of the Confederacy. There, he said

A lot of intricacies to the whole issue.

But I must say that comments above such as “War of Northern Aggression,” and “History written by the winners,” etc. are really rationalizations, masking the reality that at core the war was fought over a principal that time has shown to be black and white (so to speak) in terms of morality.

22

Is anyone else reminded of that Simpson’s episode where Apu becomes a citizen?

Tester: What was the cause of the civil war.

Apu: (starts long winded explanation about various causes)

Tester: Just say slavery.

Apu: Slavery.

Sorry, I know this probably doesn’t apply, but I couldn’t help thinking of it.

23

Frankly, if slavery had been profitable in the North, the Civil War would either never have happened, or would have taken much, much longer to arise. There were slaves in all the original colonies, you know, and slavery was only outlawed in the Northern states well after it was shown to be unprofitable.

Even in the South, where the long growing season made it economically feasible, people thought and talked and argued about the morality of slavery. There was debate about whether certain Bible verses endorsed slavery.

The Civil War was fought over money, really. The North wanted to enact a policy that would have economically devastated most of the South, so most of the Southern states seceded. Having to pay import taxes on all the agricultural goods they got from the South would have greatly impacted the North, so they invaded to preserve the Union. The Confederacy, being invaded by the armies of a foreign country, fought back.

I don’t really see how anyone could say that the Confederate Army was fighting to keep their slaves when the vast majority didn’t own slaves (or anything else, for that matter.) In the pre-War South, roughly 7% of the population owned roughly 90% of everything–land, slaves, businesses, everything. (These figures are things that stuck with me from high school history, so I don’t have exact numbers.)

24

Ditto. It was the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title.
:smiley:

25

CrazyCatLady wrote

Cite please.

Though I don’t doubt that there were plenty of unscrupulous people in the north as well, I find it very hard to believe that free labor is unprofitable in any industry.

26

CrazyCatLady wrote

Yeah, they wanted to illegalize all their free labor. The nerve. And of course as you say, the south had the right to form their own sovereign nation over this travesty.

Frankly, that sounds just silly. Cite please, of high-level union discussions backing this up. Not some daughters of the confederacy opinion statement; something of substance.

Yep, the Northern Aggressors strike again.

27

CrazyCatLady wrote

That sounds accurate (I’ve read only 6% of the population were slave holders), but is completely irrelevant.

Only 6% may have owned slaves, but that doesn’t change the idea that slavery held their economy together. You don’t need to own a slave to benefit from slave ownership. If you work for a slave owner, and all of a sudden he has to pay his slaves, guess what that does to your wage?

And all the economics don’t hold a candle to the social state of things. You may be a poor man on the southern totum pole, but you were way above the slaves. Now the slaves are to be your peers?

28

You may find this hard to believe… but slave labor is oftentimes distinctly unprofitable. In the south, all that kept slavery going was the availability of easily grown crops around the coton seasons - otherwise it apparently would have been prohibitavely expensive to have slaves. Some of the older plantations back east simply never made a dime.

One of the problems is motivation. A free man can hope for promotion, reaises, or may want to save. A slave has no such dreams (well, they have dreams, but no feasible way of accomplishing them). Hence, he or she has no reason to work unless forced, and even then will do the minimum needed. Only when a positive goal is induced are people encouraged to work hard. Slaves commonly broke tools at an exceedingly high rate, loafed, and in some places would run away for a season or two and then come back, to show to themselves they were more than mere chattel.

Of course, this partly depended on the humanity of Southern slaveowners. They were willing not to use the most heinous methods of control and brutality to enforce their will. Such is life.

29

Though I don’t doubt all that, smiling bandit, I do completely doubt the conclusion.

If in fact, owning a slave put a plantation owner at an economic disadvantage from his neighbor who didn’t own slaves, why did he buy them? Why was there a flourishing slave trade, in which traders risked their lives to deliver slaves to a hungry market?

30

Well, no, the plantation owner was better off than his neighbor who didn’t own slaves. However, in absolute terms, slavery wasn’t very profitable, for the reasons Smiling Bandit mentioned.

31

I imagine that rich 7% of the south had more than enough power over the other 93% to make them fight.

32

Captain Amazing wrote

I’m sorry, but I really find this unbelievable.

a) if it wasn’t profitable, why was it done? Natural selection among plantations would’ve killed off the less profitable ones.
b) If it was even borderline, why were so many adament about keeping it in place? To the extent that hundreds of thousands died to keep it in place?
c) Why was there such a strong slave importation business? An estimated 10 million slaves were brought to the United States.

It just doesn’t make sense. And this isn’t just an isolated thing in the south in the United States. Slavery has existed for a long time across the globe. If something doesn’t work economically, it dies. And yet slavery didn’t die, it had to be stopped. And in this country stopping it came at a horrible cost.

33

Slavery is naturally less profitable than free labor. So you have the situation where the slave owners have the government (and via taxes, the non-slave owners) bear a portion of the costs of slavery. If you can get the government to track down and return fugitive slaves, punish people for teaching blacks to read, and generally enforce the whole apparatus of slavery and the racial caste system, then suddenly slavery becomes profitable for the slave owner, even though it is unprofitable for the society as a whole.

This is a common pattern for industry, to try to get the government or society to pay the costs of externalities. If you don’t have to pay for the pollution you dump into the water and air, if the government pays for injured workers, if the government subsidizes the transportation infrastructure, if the government loans you money because your industry is too important to fail, suddenly all sorts of industries can make money for the owners even though if you consider the cost of the whole system they are net money losers.

Slaveholders had the rest of society to enforce the racial caste system, fugitive slave laws, etc etc etc, the whole sordid infrastructure that allowed slavery to exist. And remember, people don’t always perform as perfectly frictionless economic actors. They may do things that harm their economic interests because of other factors. So someone might lose money owning slaves…but they are compensated in other ways. Like, say, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from owning other human beings, from being a tinpot dictator with the power of life and death over your property. Don’t forget sexual slavery too…what percentage of slave children were also the children of the owners of those slaves? And the white non-slaveowner also is psychologically compensated…he is a free man, not a slave, he belongs to the elite race, no matter what his economic station is.

So…many of the externalities are carried by others, there are other compensations other than economic. That more than explains why people might wish to maintain slavery even if the institution as a whole is a net loss for society.

34

Moderator’s Note: I think it’s time to move this sucker over to Great Debates, before manhattan comes along and bursts a blood vessel.

35

I believe the raw numbers of slaveholders as a percent of the population severely underestimate how widespread the institution really was, and therefore how much social and political power slaveholders would have in the semi-democratic racially based republics of the antebellum South. For example, in Mississippi only 3.91% of the total population of the state owned any slaves; in South Carolina, it was 3.79%. (All numbers are taken from the 1860 census data at the United States Historical Census Data Browser.)

But remember, in Mississippi in 1860, 55.18% of the population were slaves, who didn’t even own themselves, let alone anything else; in South Carolina, it was 57.18%. Obviously, they didn’t let the slaves vote on secession. Also, at that time women could not vote and had no voice in political affairs, except for whatever moral suasion they were able to bring to bear on their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, etc. Finally, children–even white male children–could no more vote then than they can today.

A more accurate picture of the extent of the slaveholding class is to take slaveowners (that is, all persons owning at least one slave) as a percentage of white males over 21.

A few caveats:
[ul]
[li]The census data for adults goes by decades; I’ve taken the summary of “no. of white males, 20-29 years of age” through “no. of white males 100 years of age and over”. I think the age of majority would have actually been 21, not 20, so that will introduce some inaccuracy proportional to whatever the number of 20 year old white males was.[/li]
[li]I’m sure there were at least some female slaveholders; widows and such.[/li]
[li]Finally, there were some free blacks who owned slaves; I believe this was most prevalent in Louisiana.[/li][/ul]
That said:

Slaveholders as a percent of the total adult white male population-

In the seven “Deep South” states which seceded before Fort Sumter:

South Carolina - 39.26%
Mississippi - 37.23%
Georgia - 31.05%
Alabama - 28.46%
Florida - 27.57%
Louisiana - 22.45%
Texas - 20.63%

In the four “Middle South” states which seceded only after the outbreak of war forced their hand:

North Carolina - 24.21%
Virginia - 22.21%
Tennessee - 19.48%
Arkansas - 15.57%

In the four “Border States” which did not secede:

Kentucky - 17.75% (claimed by the Confederacy)
Maryland - 10.74% (martial law declared)
Missouri - 9.08% (claimed by the Confederacy)
Delaware - 2.62%

In no state were slaveholders an absolute majority of the electorate, but if thirty or forty percent of the voting population shares a common interest, that’s a very strong voting block in a republic. Bear in mind also that the non-slaveholders would not necessarily have been opposed to slavery or in favor of abolition. Non-slaveholders were not permanently barred from ever acquiring slaves; many may have hoped (whether or not those hopes were realistic) to own slaves at some point, just as Americans have always tended to have dreams of bettering their economic status. Non-slaveholders may still have had an economic interest in the slave economy, just as in East Texas real estate agents, owners of Cadillac dealerships, and sellers of cowboy hats may all have an interest in the price of oil. Finally, given that in some states (Mississippi and South Carolina) slaves were an absolute majority of the total population; and throughout the Deep South, slaves were nowhere less than 40% of the total population (with the exception of Texas, where slaves were only about 30% of the population), many non-slaveholding whites had deep fears about the prospect of abolition based on economic and social interests (not wanting to compete with a suddenly emancipated black population on an equal basis), and simple outright racism. The slaveholding class certainly encouraged these fears. (See for example Governor Joseph Brown’s Open Letter to the People of Georgia.)

The proportion of slaveholders in a given electorate even seems to correlate pretty well with the intensity of secessionist feeling; South Carolina, with the greatest proportion of slaveholders (as well as the largest proportion of its population enslaved) seceded first, and had long been known as a hotbed of pro-slavery and pro-secession. Mississippi, where slavery was nearly as pervasive as in South Carolina, was the second state to secede. Most of the remaining early seceders had slaveholding classes which constituted around 30% of the electorate; outliers to some extent were Louisiana and Texas, but in Louisiana although slave ownership was not as widespread in the electorate as in other Deep South states, slaves still constituted 47% of the total population, which is pretty high even for a Deep South state, and which one would expect to cause considerable fear of abolition even among non-slaveholding whites. In Texas, only 30% of the population was enslaved, and only 20% of so of the population were slave owners, yet the state was an early seceder. By contrast, in North Carolina, nearly a quarter of the electorate owned slaves, and a third of the state’s population was enslaved, yet the state was the last of all the states to secede. I don’t know that North Carolina’s reluctance to leave the Union reflected any widespread abolitionist sentiment there, though–many Southerners were ardently pro-slavery and still anti-secession, arguing (correctly, as it turned out) that secession would be disastrous for the institution of slavery.

36

Where did you get this figure from? It is grossly exaggerated.

37

This figure includes Africans sold into slavery in Europe, South America, the Caribbean and all of North America.

This means that the slave trade began prior to the discovery of America.

It is sad that any were brought into North America. However, 1/2 million is a long shot from 10 million.

Importation of slaves into ports or any place under the jusisdiction of the Untied States was prohibited as of January 1, 1808

38

This is a mis-reading. 10 million is closer to the number ( perhaps slightly below, but a reasonable ballpark figure ) for the total number of slaves imported into all of the Americas. By far the biggest consumer was Brazil, where the mortality rate was staggering ( 5-10% per annum in the sugar fields, the time it took a slave to work off replacement costs varied from a low of 8.3 months in 1608, to 30 months in 1710 ). Followed by the British Caribbean, the Spanish America in toto, and the French Caribbean, in that order.

British North America/United States was farther down on the list, with ~500,000 slaves imported. Still a godawful lot, but well below 10 million.

  • Tamerlane
39

Yes, the Civil War was about slavery, in the sense that, if there had been no slavery, there would have been no war. There were other points of difference between North and South, but they all were rooted in slavery one way or another.

For instance, the North wanted high protective tariffs on manufactured goods, to stimulate American industry. The South resented this because it had very little industry by comparison, and such tariffs raised the prices that the Southerners, as consumers, had to pay for the relevant good. But the main reason the South had so little industry was because the pre-existing system of slave-based plantation farming froze out industrial development. Every white Southerner with money to invest, invested it in land and slaves, because that was more than an investment, it was what they thought of as the noblest way of life. The retarded state of industry in the South was, of course, also the main reason the South lost the war.

If slavery had been abolished sooner, and peacefully, in America, then I cannot imagine any chain of circumstances which would have led to a war of secession. Can any of you?

40

Darn nimble-fingered kniz ;).

I will note that slaves were imported illegally into the U.S. after 1808, but the number was comparatively small. Estimates range from 5,000 - 50,000.

  • Tamerlane