A lot depends on whether you’re talking about the Civil War or the War Between the States. The Civil War was a noble crusade by the North to free the downtrodden slaves of the backward South. The War Between the States was fought over a Constitutional issue, whether or not the Northern states could impose their will and impoverish the South, using an exaggerated Federal power to accomplish it. In other words, resisting the encroachment of Big Government.
This is a rational argument. It is not a reasonable argument, but it is a rational one.
That cite says nothing. It really doesn’t matter what the textbooks say, because we discuss, critique and modify the material every day in the classroom. Hell, I really like the senior Econ. textbook we use, but I still point out its weaknesses to the kids when we get to them. I don’t like the Govt. book, so I don’t base my lessons on it. The kids read it, do questions from it, but their main information is from my lectures and handouts. The book could be advocating Total World Fascism for all I care. By the time we get through deconstructing it, the kids would not only know all World Fascism’s flaws, but how to combat it and why they should care.
Never underestimate the power of a subversive teacher!
Couple things. I think you’re confusing The War Between the States with The War of Northern Aggression. TWBtS is a common alternate term for TCW. No biggie.
On the other topic, you’re not quite right. We didn’t go to war to end slavery. We went to war because the North tried to prevent the spread of slavery to the new states. However, even after Lincoln issued the EP, slaves in border states of the Union were not freed. Now both actions (the halt to the spread of slavery and the Civil War) resulted in (or would have resulted in) slaves being freed, but freeing the slaves wasn’t the purpose of the War. The purpose was to prevent secession.
Didn’t go to war to end slavery, “went to war because the North tried to prevent the spread of slavery”. Which would have resulted in the slaves being free, (“Now both actions…would have resulted in slaves being freed…”)
The slaves being free would effectively end slavery, no? So, how then is preventing the spread of slavery any different from freeing the slaves, if one is the necessary result of the other?
Well, if we went to war to free the slaves, why did the north wait until after the war to free its own slaves (in those states in the Union where slavery was still legal)?
Freeing the slaves was a consequence of the war, not a cause for the war. Had we passed the 13th amendment before the war, then it would be reasonable to say we fought the war to free the slaves. Be we didn’t. We fought the war to prevent secession.
If I punch you in the face to stop you from talking, and you go deaf as a consequence, it’s not accurate to say I punched you in the face to cause you to go deaf.
But the thing is, the concern of the North was, as John Mace said, to prevent the expansion of slavery into the new northern and western states.
California had been admitted as a free state, and Texas as a slave state, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had left the Kansas and Nebraska territories open to slavery based on the principle of popular sovereignty. That is, the inhabitants of those regions would decide for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery, without being forced either way by the federal government. The Compromise of 1850 had already done this for the Utah and New Mexico territories.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had said that slavery would forever be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36’30" line. This was what really got many Northerners het up about the whole thing, and it led to range wars in Kansas as Northern Free Soilers and Southern slavery proponents flooded into the region in an attempt to determine the future of the territory.
If the KS-NE Act hadn’t been passed, and if the Missouri Compromise had endured, there’s a chance things never would have gotten so heated. Most Northerners were not actually abolitionists, and their main concern was to prevent a Southern-style plantation economy from taking up all that good land in Kansas and Nebraska. They wanted the land reserved for free, white yeoman farmers.
It’s an important distinction, i think, because plenty of northerners, including Lincoln, were not really interested in stamping out slavery in the Southern states where it already existed. This is supported by the fact that Lincoln didn’t even issue the Emancipation Proclamation until almost two years into the war, and even then he only freed the slaves in the insurrectionist states, not in the border states like Maryland.
Counterfactual history speculation is always problematic, and i’m not arguing that the Civil War wouldn’t have happened without the KS-NE Act. It’s possible that other factors would have led to war anyway. But the main aim of many Northerners was not to end slavery where it existed in the South, but to prevent it spreading further. If the South had been happy to stick with what it already had, most Northerners wouldn’t have cared so much.
The addition of the article changes what he actually posted.
John Mace noted that two actions would have resulted in “slaves being freed,” which is true–some number of slaves were and would have been freed by actions of the Federal Government during the war. You changed that, in your paraphrase, to “the slaves being freed” which indicates that all the slaves would have been freed.
Had there been no 13th Amendment, even with the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery would have continued in the non-seceding border states, (as well as several Northern states such as New Jersey, that permitted slaveholder U.S. citizens to live in those states with slaves purchased elsewhere in the U.S.)
So, no, without a specific amendment to the Constitution, preventing slavery in all new territories and fighting the Civil War, inlcuding the Emancipation Proclamation, would not have ended slavery in the U.S.
= = =
Lincoln believed that slavery was a grave injustice. He held a belief that with changes in economy and agricultural practices, slavery would simply shrivel up and blow away on its own.
However, he always also held that slavery was enshrined in Law in the Constitution and that nothing short of a Constitutional Amendment could change that. Further, he believed that any effort to amend the Constitution in that way would lead to Civil War. That the War came anyway did not change his views regarding the practical aspects of attempting to amend the Constitution: to prosecute the war he still needed sufficient Democrat support in Congress as well as holding the border states in the Union and he was persuaded that any effort to change the laws regarding slavery would have cost him both. The Emancipation Proclamation was an effort to guarantee that European nations wuld never recognize the Confederacy while simultaneously cutting at the Confederacy by depriving it of slave labor and simultaneously allowing the Union Army to recruit former slaves in conquered territory, initially as laborers and later as combatants.
Lincoln did want an eventual end to slavery, but he did not prosecute the war for that purpose and did not expect that universal abolition would be a consequence of the war.
If anyone is interested, please read the article by Barry Weingast in Analytic Narratives. You can find it, in part, here. Weingast links the outbreak of the civil war to the failure of the balance rule, somewhat as mhendo suggests. This is just a remarkably good article and I try to share it when I can.
To people who say stuff like “The War Between the States”, the war was about a Constitutional issue.
To people who call it the Civil War, it was about slavery.
I have no faith in either proposition, I think the war started because people behaved stupidly. The South thought Lincoln was a sworn abolitionist, and he wasn’t. They panicked and started a war they had almost no chance to win. And the North went to war because they were already at war before they had any time to consider it as an option.
The fine and noble casus belli draped over the slaughter is nothing more than ducks breaking wind.
Better the right thing for pragmatic reasons then not at all. The war was bloody but slavery was a treasonous slur against those self evident truths America was founded on. Slavery was the catalyst and the blood of the war falls solely on it’s supporters.
I’ve lived in the South for 2/3 of a century. I have never heard it used seriously. I had never heard it at all until 1957 when a new friend from Georgia used it as a joke. I have heard it used only in a joking manner since then – sometimes very straight-faced in the presence of Yanks.
This may be a regional difference, but here in West Tennessee and Middle Tennessee, we use the terms interchangeably. I thought it was the “Silver War” until I was ten.
John Mace, as a teacher, I’ve been aware of the Texas influence on the nation’s school books for a long time. And I’ve been following the proposed changes in the social studies textbook for months. I’ve even posted about it previously.
We want our textbooks written by historians and not by political advocates. This committee has voted to have a textbook that has information in it that has not been vetted by historians.
You wouldn’t like it if the liberals had written a textbook that was from the left point of view and changed some facts around to make glorify their point of view beyond anything close to the truth. And it shouldn’t be that way.
Neither should things be twisted from the right. And that is what has happened. And it has happened in a BIG way. They have rewritten history. And if you don’t believe me, ask a historian.
You see complains now about how “my teacher told me wrong.” Wait until these kids grow up. And whether you realize it or not, you do learn things in school.
As mentioned in an earlier post on this thread, no new textbooks will be appearing very soon. The State of Texas can’t afford them. The Texas Observer pins blame for our budget shortfall on Governor Perry (although he had help). Bill White, his Democratic opponent, has a pretty good shot this year. Again from The Observer:
Governor Perry, friend of the Teabaggers & bleater about Secession, appointed Don McLemore, one of the most ardent extremists, as chairman of the SBOE. But our own legislature declined to extend that appointment. And McLemore lost his bid to run again–to a Republican who proudly admits to believing in Evolution. So this latest rush to push through Social Studies standards was the action of a lame duck & a few others who fear their power might be waning. Day to day reporting here, if you’ve got the stomach to bear it.
Back at the Texas Freedom Network, some of my other favorite Texans have detailed reports on topics of interest. The State Board of Education: Dragging Texas Schools Into the Culture Wars is a giant .pdf file explaining exactly how different states pick their textbooks. And how they select their school boards. A few years old, the report already mentions how new publishing technology will allow more flexibility. The dark history of textbook censorship in Texas is detailed. And you can read mind-melting quotations from the leading nutcases, including McLemore–back before he was on his way out.
You probably know most of this, but I was hoping some of our other posters can be distracted from the Civil War highjack.
