It seems that the major reason for opposition to the draft was the provision allowing some to buy their way out of it,
The number of actual draftees was actually quite low,[
](http://www.civilwarhome.com/draftriots.htm)so only 37,500 “real” draftees,[
](http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAcivilwar.htm)5 times more black soldiers than draftees.
CMC fnord!
Indeed, this was the actual causus belli.
**
633squadron** Although Shelby Foote is a very entertaining writer, he is a well-known Southern Sympathizer, and can’t be trusted with things like "quotes an unidentified Northern Congressman "- either his has a legit cite or he doesn’t. He doesn’t. Foote quoting "an unidentified Northern Congressman " is BS. In actuality, it was a pro-secessionist from N. Carolina who said that:
"Secessionist attempts to redefine the campaign in terms of self-defense were not successful. Answering the charge that disunion meant war, secession supporter A. W. Venable (1799-1876) of Granville County declared that he would “wipe up every drop of blood shed in the war with this handkerchief of mine”; this may have been the most memorable statement of the convention campaign. "
Or, perhaps, you misquoted Foote. 
There’s a joke I’ve heard about a Southern politician who campaigned for the coming war, stating “They can’t stop us Southerners! Why, we’ll beat 'em back with just cornstalks!”
After the war, he tried running for office again, and while he was giving a speech, someone in the crowd shouted, “Smith, you bastard! Why should be trust you? You said we’d beat those Yankees with cornstalks!”
And Smith sighed regretfully and said, “Yes, I did say that. And I still believe it. Problem is, they didn’t want to fight with cornstalks.”
As others have stated - while some Northern soldiers joined up to try and end slavery, the vast majority signed up because they felt that the South was betraying the Constitution, destroying the Union, and pissing on George Washington’s grave.
There were also a great number of immigrants who were pushed into joining the Army on the promise of quick citizenship and political patronage. While this inflated the strength of the Union’s armies in numbers, it also brought its own problems - there were regiments so full of immigrants that they had to be given orders in German (one New York regiment required its orders to be shouted in six different languages, including Italian and Portugese); it also meant that the German-American and Irish-American politicians who could arrange for their countrymen to join up could wrangle higher positions in the Army, and the of the most notable few - Schurz, Sigel, and Schimmelpfenning - only Schurz turned out to have the capacity to be even a mediocre general.
There had been about 80 years of people being brought up with the sacrifice of “The Founding Fathers” in the War of Independence in mind. The generation of that era wanted to prove itself worthy of living up to their grandparents’ generation.
I also think people had a more intense interest in politics back then as compared to today. A few years ago there was a book on Congressman John Quincy Adams’s 9 year battle to revoke the gag rule which prevented discussion of slavery in the House and the refusal to receive petitions (pro or con) from constituents. Petitions were real big things back in the 19th century. The author (whose name escapes me) said he told people he had read 9 years worth of debates in the Congressional Record and their answer was “that must have been terribly boring>” He said no, it was actually quite stimulating. People back then would follow Congressional debates quite closely much as people follow sports or TVs and music today.
Few people thought the war would go on for 4 years or be so bloody. Sometimes when these things happen both sides are reluctant to quit for fear of make the lives lost as “meaningless”. The South narrowly missed winning to. If one of Lee’s regiments hadn’t lost orders just before Antietam wrapped up around several cigars that allowed a mediocre general like McClellan to sort of win at Antietam and force Lee back to Virginia with England and France deciding not to enter the conflict, perhaps things would have been different. Or if the election of 1864 was in April and not November when 1)Sherman had captured Atlanta and was marching thru Georgia 2) Farragut had captured Mobile 3) Grant had Lee pinned down at Petersburgh and 4) Sheridan< Merritt and Custer had severely damaged Confederate cavalry in Shenandoah Valley.
There’s a hidden assumption in the OP that’s also found in other threads here questioning the Civil War. The OP writes as if the Civil War just somehow suddenly happened in 1861.
The war was inevitable, almost an anticlimax except that it lasted far too long and in too bloody a fashion, because it was about the one thing that dominated all of U.S. history from the moment that the colonies won their freedom: slavery.
Whatever emotional position you have on abortion, cube that and you have an idea what emotions slavery aroused.
Slavery meant that men and women were bought and sold, literally as property. They could be whipped, branded, mutilated, or killed, all legally. They were forbidden to learn how to read and white. They could be put to death for trying to escape. Their children were slaves from the moment of their births. Families could be broken up and moved and sold at any moment. Women were sexually owned, to be raped by white owners and then forced to bring up their mixed-race children as slaves that could be sold for more money.
And every bit of this was justified from every pulpit in the south by use of the exact same bible that the anti-slavery crusaders used to preach abolitionism. Remember that the anti-slavery forces were as fundamentalist in their approach to Christianity as modern day anti-abortion Christians are. Slavery represented a schism in the most central beliefs of the country. Whenever people today try to claim that the U.S. was born as a Christian nation, this is what they really mean although they never say it.
Slavery almost kept the U.S. from forming in the first place. At the Constitutional Convention, every last decision came down to a split between southern states, with their economies based on plantation slavery, and the northern states, with their economies increasingly tied to cities, commerce, and manufacturing. This is the basis for the notion that “state’s rights,” the “tariff,” and “King Cotton” were the real causes of the Civil War. They’re not, though. All of these are secondary to the fact of slavery and the way that economic and political decisions were forced given that axiom.
The South had a larger population and more money than the North in 1787 and it was obvious to them - although it is dubious in hindsight - that no lasting nation could be formed without the southern states. So the South drew a line in the sand and “compromised” by winning every single battle. They kept slavery legal, and pushed off the end of the slave trade until 1808. They won political power in the House of Representatives by being able to count a slave as 3/5 of a person for census purposes when the North wanted slaves, who were property in every other legal sense, to be counted as zero people. They won by getting a weak federal government which could not interfere in state powers. They won by making amendments so difficult that the South could veto any amendment that would ever affect slavery.
Slavery did not go away afterward. For the first 60 years of the 19th century, battle after battle over slavery shook the country. There was a huge uproar in 1808 when the slave trade was finally made illegal. The Compromise of 1820 ensured that territories would only become states in pairs, one slave, one free, so that the South could maintain its even number of states with the North. South Carolina tried passing a Nullification Act in 1832 to nullify the tariffs that benefited the northern industrial economy but not its state’s economy. The Compromise of 1850 allowed the newly gained territories to put off a decision about slavery, but at the price of the Fugitive Slave Law, which affected all blacks in the North. The Dred Scott decision affirmed this law in 1856.
In the meantime there were huge battles in Congress almost every day. Mention of anti-slavery bills was officially prohibited. Members were literally beaten on the floor during sessions.
The rise of the Republican Party and the death of the Whig Party was about slavery. Buchanan was a southern sympathizer and is considered the worst president in history for siding with the south on every issue during his presidency, allowing a festering wound to pulsate. Seven states seceded before Lincoln became president but after his election because everybody in the country knew that the 1860 election was a referendum over slavery and that the issue would be settled one way or the other.
Nobody was surprised by the Civil War. Everybody knew that the country was being torn apart by the issue. Everybody understood what the issue was, even though they tried to disguise it as “states’ rights” or similar nonsense. The only right the states wanted was to keep slaves. But by 1860 it was no longer possible to keep putting off the future. Change was smashing them in the head. No further compromise was possible after a century of futile and ugly compromise. To let the south go was to invite a hostile and malignant nation literally ripping the country apart to compete for the vast empty spaces of unimaginable wealth in the American west, to compete with the north for economic livelihood with the other nations of the world, and to compete with the American notion of what a free country might be. This was impossible in every sense and everybody in the north understood it, no matter what they thought about “niggers.”
The Civil War was complex because the world is complex, and history is complex, and people are complex. But it is one of the very few cases in which we can pinpoint a single cause with complete accuracy. Slavery was the cause, and everybody knew it then just as they know it today. It’s too ugly a thing for some people to say directly, so they hide it behind other words, but the slave issue sums up almost every moment of American history up until 1865. Slavery had to end. A war was necessary to do so. A war occurred.
I think this is the big one. If the South had either won the Civil War, or worse, been allowed to secede unopposed, it would have set a precedent that would have made our current America impossible. Think of the differences in needs and values and goals between, say, Massachusetts, Michigan and Southern California today. Why would they agree to be part of a single nation if it had already been demonstarted that they didn’t have to be?
Preach it, Exapno!
Only caveat I’ll add is to give the founding fathers a half-pass on their equivocation of slavery. It is clear that most of them thought slavery was an archaic institution that was withering on the vine. And they hoped that by putting off the question for another generation, the economic power of the plantation system would be so weakened that compromise would then be possible. Something on the lines of allowing the children of slaves to be born free.
Of course, they were disasterously wrong. Slavery became more entrenched, slaveholders became more fanatical in their defense of slavery, the political and economic power of the slaveholders increased rather than decreased.
And this was intolerable in a country founded on the principles of the enlightenment. A country cannot continue half slave and half free. If secession had succeeded, within a generation the CSA would be a republic in name only.
As long as we are looking at “what ifs”, I have long been curious about what would have happened if the South had had more patience and not fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had (according to what I have read) told the southerners that he was sending ships to resupply Sumter, but the ships were not supposed to start any fights. The South responded by attacking the Fort and thus began the war. Suppose they had not. There were, of course, other forts that could not be resupplied without stamping on southern land. Suppose the South had shown even more patience and allowed them to be resupplied, even, but not attacked anyone. Lincoln was abviously very reluctant to attack. Which is not to say he might not have anyway. But suppose he hadn’t. The situation might have lingered for decades and the separation would have been de facto until eventually some sort of agreement would have been reached and secesion would become de jure.
There were certainly grievances among the Union. The Dred Scott decision, the fugitive slave act, the Missouri Compromise, were all things that involved the South imposing its will upon the Union. Suppose nullification had been an accepted doctrine. Then the fugitive slave act would have been a dead letter, since southern states wouldn’t need it and northern ones would nullify it.
Cool heads thinking about the future didn’t cause secession. The South wanted a war. South Carolinians especially wanted one. There would be been an excuse and provocation somewhere. The South had to seize every single federal facility in it, including all forts, arsenals, and other military installations. Sooner rather than later they would have an armed confrontation and the war would have started from there.
Nullification was never a real issue. You can’t have both nullification and a federal government. Period.
Good point, and the CSA might have splintered early. In one of his famous “what if” alternate histories Turtledove postulates the President of the CSA deciding to outlaw slavery after the CSA won. Even if he had done so, having the Confederate Congress go along with it is extremely unlikely, and having many of the “seccess” states secede again would be certain, IMHO. I imagine what is now the USA being at least a dozen little powerless nation-states. WWI would have ground to a stalemate, and European Imperialism in South and Central America would have again become rampant. Wars between Mexico and parts of America- the nations of California and Texas for example- would be common.
Oddly, WWII might not have happened then- Japan, instead of being forced by the USA to open it’s borders to trade, might have been instead forced by GB, France and etc to give up territory and became like China, and Japan then never becomes a world power. Germany wouldn’t have been subjugated by an unfair and oppresive Versailles treaty, and might well have been allowed to keep territorial gains to the East, assuming it made concessions to the west, and also given up it’s African colonies to the Brits. This might have not allowed a Communist USSR. Germany turns to the East, the rest of Europe happily squabbles in Africa, the Middle East and Central/South America.
And yet, when I was growing up (in the Northeast in the 50s & 60s) we were routinely taught that the war was over secession and that slavery was simply one of many “issues”. Is this still the party line?
This continues to affect us today.
People often suggest that we should abolish the Electoral College, and have direct election of the President. They forget that the reason for not doing it this way originally was because of slavery. The Electoral College counts slaves as 3/5ths of a person, thus over-representing the slave states at the expense of the free states.
We’re not free of the taint of slavery yet, nearly 150 years after it ended in America!
No longer.
A friend of mine who’s a teacher has complained that something like this is still taught.
He recommended the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen, which is still on my history to-be-read shelf. However, glancing through it indicates that the book supports this notion. And there are also lines like, “The safeguarding of states’ rights, often mentioned as a motive for the establishment of he Confederacy, was for the most part merely an accompanying rationale.”
The Electoral College cannot be said to be a legacy of slavery, BTW. It was established because the Founding Fathers feared direct democracy and thought that majority voting would produce demagogues. Both the Electoral College and the election of Senators by state legislators were designed to move these offices a step away from the hands of the mob. The slave states were overrepresented, true, but that was an after-issue to the College not a reason for it.
Besides fearing demagogues, the Founding Fathers also thought once Washington, the only truly national figure of 1790, was done being President, there would not be any real national figures. There would be Adams of Massachusetts, Jeffferson of Virginia, Hamilton of New York, etc. People would vote for their own stae guy and few elections would have a candidate get 50% of the votes. So the House of Representatives "The people’s chamber "(direct elections every two years) which only the top three candidates (largest states) with each state’s delegations voting as a state (if New York has 30 Congreessmen and Maine has two, then each only has one vote. The small states delegations elect someone from the large states). But things seldom work out as planned.
I too have wondered about what would happen if the Confedearcy had not ffired on Fort Sumter. Maybe send some food and medicine to the garrison, a few baseball bats and gloves to second-in-command Abner Doubleday to teach him how to play baseball. But "the fireaters" prevailed as you saw in 1941 with JJapan and 2001 with Al-Qaeda. They underestimated how a democracy will respond with attacked. You did have the incident in Congress a few years later when abolitionist Senator Sumner viciously criticized slavery and a southern Congressman Brooks savagely beat him on the head with a cane. Brooks received a lot of canes from Southerners inscribed "hit him again". Makes today's politics look tame: Pelosi and Hastert don't do this ((although I would pay good money to see a no holds barred cat fight between Hillary Clinton and Ann Coulter).
Reminds me of one of my favorite Lincoln moments:
George McClellan: “We have pushed the Rebels off our soil Mr. President”.
Lincoln: “When will my Generals get it; that the whole county is our soil.”
Slavery had absolutely nothing to do with why the Civil War was fought! NOTHING! Read your history please!
AA
I’ve read lots and lots of history. You’ve seen my post about slavery.
Now let’s see your analysis of the situation.
Japan had already been “opened” to the west by the Perry expedition in the 1850s, and Japan was on the allied side during WWI, so I doubt Britain and France would have forced them to surrender territory.
Permit me a moment of psychoanalyzing.
If you read any of the contemporary accounts of Southerners in the years leading up to the war, you can’t help but notice how often they refered to a sense of being threatened. They constantly spoke of being under seige or surrounded or on the verge of being attacked. And they usually claimed it was the North or abolitionists or Republicans who were their enemy.
The thing was, there was really no reality to their supposed fears. The abolitionists were a minor faction who had no realistic chance of eliminating slavery nationwide. The Republican platform was to limit the spread of slavery in new territories - they repeatedly declared they had no intent to eliminate slavery in the Southern states where it had popular support. And the “North” barely existed as an entity - New Englanders and Mid-Westerners and New Yorkers and Westerners and Appalachians all saw themselves as distinct people who had no more in common with each other than they did with Southerners.
So why did so many Southerners feel they were the target of such hostility? Because they were. A Southern plantation owner and his family really was surrounded and outnumbered by a group of people that hated them - their slaves. A Southern plantation was an isolated rural settlement where a small handful of white people were alone in the midst of a crowd of black people who had every reason to hate them. Southerners of course publically denied this reality and claimed their slaves loved them and were happy with their lot - even when uprisings did occur they were blamed on outside agitators. But whatever the surface was, every slave-owner must have realized at some level that on any given day he and his family could be overwhelmed and killed and there was no defense except the threat of massive retaliation for their deaths. But unable to admit to how close the true threat was, they projected their fears on to distant and thus less worrisome enemies.
I think this situation also explains another characteristic of the ante-bellum Southern mind - the propensity to react. Southerners were noted for the refusal to let a slight go with response. They claimed that their honor demanded that any challenge must be met whatever the odds. This inability to allow for calm reflection, forbearance, or any admission of vulnerability or weakness was another characteristic caused by the peculiarity of the plantation existence. Slave owners knew that they had to strike immediately at the first sign of discontent and stamp it out completetly or risk losing everything.