Do you honastly think that Americans (on both sides mind you) went to war over slavery? I can just picture your emmotional triage.
Oh Johnny don’t go to war! Please don’t go!
Oh but I must Dear, I must—we must end slavery!
Tell little Billy to take care of the farm while I risk everything to end slavery!
Give me a friggin break!
Well, the first state to attempt to secede (South Carolina) gave that as the major reason in their “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/csa/scarsec.htm).
This document says:"The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor 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 labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
And it continues “But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations”.
Clearly, the major reason they give is the unwillingness to hand escaped slaves back over to their masters. That is the reason they give in their own solemn declaration.
And note that this document refers 5 times to “slaveholding states” or “non-slaveholding states”. Never to ‘Northern states’ or ‘Southern states’. They also published another document with this: “South Carolina’s Address to the Slaveholding States”. The decisive distinction in their minds was obviously over slavery. The reasons they give, in their own words, are all about slavery.
In the Secession documents of Alabama, they give as a reason the hostility to the ‘domestic institutions’ of Alabama. In that of Texas, they say the Federal government has failed to protect the “property” of their citizens. Both of these were code words for slaves.
So, yes, we do honestly believe just what the slaveholding states said: that they went to war over slavery.
That’s a whole different debate, but I don’t see how much would have changed with Japan.
When I served in Panama and the 1st Gulf War, us paratroopers in the 82nd were just amazed by how much the press distorted the facts and in some cases re-wrote history and out-right lied on the reasons for our actions simply because they hate there own country and are always apologizing for being American. Sounds like you are keeping up with tradition.
Moderator NOTE
Architeuthis You can’t insult posters in General Questions. If you want to stay in the discussion, please offer something more substantial than I disagree. samclem GQ moderator
I don’t think anybody is saying that, exactly. The immediate cause of the war was that a bunch of states attempted to secede and sieze federal property, and the Lincoln government saw these actions as illegal rebellion and tried to put it down.
However, the debates about slavery, different attitudes about it, and Southern fears that the institution of slavery was under attack, and would continue to be attacked, went a long way into convincing them that secession was neccesary. So the Civil War was about slavery, even if, as you pointed out, most soldiers on both sides, didn’t go into battle shouting “Slavery must be destroyed!” or “Up with slavery!”
Um…the “press” isn’t distorting anything here. The words you were responding to were the South Carolina government’s own words about why they felt compelled to secede.
I’d like to hear what alternate explanation you have for the Civil War, if not slavery.
The North didn’t go to war to end slavery, but the South certainly went to war to preserve slavery. I mean, state’s rights. And by state’s rights, I mean the right of a state to preserve slavery.
Architeuthis, read some of the declarations of independence published by the various states as they secceeded. Read the constitution of the CSA. They make it quite plain that slavery was reason for the civil war, and every other issue in contention can be traced back to slavery. States rights, tarriffs, all those disputes were really about slavery.
Fischer’s Albion’s Seed make sit clear that the South was settled primarily by two groups: southern English aristocrats and Scots-English border people, both groups with violent tendencies and sensitivity to insults.
Another book, Violence and the Old South (I forget the author), makes it clear that Southern culture was a violent one, with great emphasis placed on the individual’s “honor” and his responsibility to avenge slights.
I believe that it’s the same book that discusses “slave rebellions” as a mechanism for whites to deal with their fears. Take a fairly normal slave unrest situation, add frantic and irrational rhetoric, work yourself up into a panic, go out and murder a few slaves, and the unease dies away for a while. Repeat every five-ten years as necessary.
“Catharsis”, that’s the word I was looking for.
Heinlein once wrote that “an armed society is a polite society,” which has to rank among the stupidest things ever said. I’m fairly sure he had southern ancestry as well.
In an armed society, those with the fastest triggers, both emotional and physical, will thrive and survive. The Southern elite were a classic example of a decadent society on the verge of collapse. They had the most exaggerated notions of “honor,” "duty,’ “womanhood,” and “purity.” They were ready to fight to maintain those “ideals” at every moment. Psychologically, a war had to arise because there was no longer any way of maintaining these notions without dishonoring them in their own eyes.
The OPs question about why the North fought is the more interesting one, but the answers are not much more difficult. Patriotism is a very powerful force. War has always been idealized and glamorized in the stories told by the survivors. Emotions in the north had been stirred by every public political event since the Fugitive Slave Act. The war was mostly fought on southern soil - the couple of minor incursions at Antietam and Gettysburg horrified and panicked the north and sent enlistments soaring - so it was a distant notion, not something that devastated local farms and villages.
And the North was so much more powerful than the South that the war was fought almost as an afterthought. It was the only war in all history in which population increased because of immigration to the nation at war. The North gained more healthy male immigrants during the war than it lost in battle deaths. It kept growing stronger as the war lasted. No matter how many romantic notions people glurge about how the South almost won, the South never stood a chance unless the North abjectly surrendered, which had zero per cent chance of happening. The North had all the raw materials, the factories, the military supplies, and a huge edge on manpower. It was a slaughter, made less obvious solely because of the incredible bungling on the part of the first generals and the oddity of having to protect a capital that was for all intents and purposes surrounded by enemy territory.
The U.S. has won all wars since when these conditions held, and has lost all wars since when these conditions didn’t. We took the wrong lessons from the Civil War into the textbooks and patriotic propaganda. We’re just begin to understand how disgustingly awful antebellum Southern society was. The Glorious Cause was slavery and derangement. True American values won out over that. I don’t apologize for that: I revel in it.
This makes me think of Woodrow Wilson (a Southerner) saying, “Because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.”
The only thing I’ll disagree with Exapno is the idea that the South had zero chance of winning the war.
I think they had a non-zero chance, because the war aims of North and South were not symetrical. The South wanted to prevent invasion and inflict enough pain on the North that they would eventually come to a negotiated settlement. The North wanted to invade and occupy the South. It is clear that given the political will, the North could do that. But it isn’t clear that the political will would always exist. Look at Buchanan. If Lincoln wasn’t Lincoln but rather someone else, he might have concluded that the war was too costly, given the string of Union military failures early in the war.
Yes, once Grant and Sherman showed they could not be stopped from marching into the south, the war was over. But there are plenty of cases where a smaller country “wins” a war against a much larger and more powerful country, if the smaller country’s war aim is to expell an invading army and the larger country’s war aim is to conquer and annex the smaller country. Look at how long it took for England to finally pacify Scotland, US vs Vietnam, and so on.
Well, I hate debating “what-if” scenarios because you can make literally any case and not lose.
In the only history we know of, the South waged war against Lincoln. States seceded because Lincoln won the election. I contend that another Buchanan-like president who supported the South would have postponed a war until a Lincoln-like president got elected, so any scenario that starts out with Lincoln not being Lincoln breaks down instantly in my eyes.
It is probably wrong to say the South had no chance of winning. I don’t have McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” anymore but there is a passge where he says many European military experts thought the South would win: too much territory to effectively hold, too much costline to blockade. It has been suggested by some people that the decision by Lee, Johnston, Forrest and others to surrender and go home without engaging in a guerrilla war in April, 1865 saved us from years of insurrection. Aides to Lee who advocated this course noted it took Rome two centuries to fully conquer Spain after they beat the Carthigians. The Moors and later Napoleon never did. If Jefferson Davis had assigned better generals to the underappreciated Western Theater (see Victor Davis Hanson’s “Ripples of Battle” for a discussion on the circumstances of the deal of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh), if Grant had been cashiered as a drunk, if the French and British had decided to intervene to weaken a potential Western Hemisphere rival, the South could have won despite fewer people and resources.
Not that Forrest stayed home…
However, I’ve heard this POV as well and agree with it.
This is not the place to debate a subject as huge as this, but a few points.
No military “expert” anywhere in the world at the time had the faintest notion of what a modern technologized war would be like. The rest of the world didn’t really catch up to the U.S. in military technology until the 20th century.
Yes, a guerrilla war could be been lengthy and painful for both sides. Fortunately, virtually everybody in the south in any position of leadership - except a few hotheads - understood this and kept it from happening.
Your ifs are part of the dreary “I can keep making up new rules until I win” game of what if. In reality, if Grant wasn’t promoted someone else, Sherman or Sheridan, likely, would have won. There was next to no chance that any European government could be seen as supporting slavery, which is what entering the war on the side of the South meant.
The North fought the war with the back of its hand while life went on in ordinary terms for the vast majority of its people, and emerged militarily and economically ten times stronger at the end than at the beginning. The South waged Total War a century before the term was known and still was laid a complete waste in four years, with starving soldiers and no ammunition supported by a starving populace and no war industry.
The Civil War casts an unholy romantic spell over otherwise rational people. They especially love refighting the battles. Take a look at the Civil War books at any library. They’re all about battles, or generals, or ordinary soldiers, or ironclads, or whatever piece of minutiae still remains that hasn’t been talked to death. Very few look at the war years in terms of economics, logistics, technology, and society. Study those instead of the battles and a whole different war appears. The South may have won all the battles, but it couldn’t win the war. All it could do was fight to the last soldier, which it very nearly did. This romantic notion of what war is seems to cloud men’s mind just like the Shadow. Cast aside the clouds and look at the North in 1865. The only way it could have lost was to unconditionally surrender. Since that never could have happened there are no plausible ifs to turn reality on its head.
That’s it, in a nutshell. If you think about it, the Civil War generation had been raised on the stories of their great-grandfathers’ glorious victory over the British in '76, Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, and the swift and sweeping victory of their fathers in the Mexican War.
They had no television to show them what war is really like. Photography was in its infancy. They knew all of the glories of war, and none of its horrors. (How many veterans talk freely about the horrors, then or even today?) Matthew Brady introduced most Americans to the reality of war for the first time, and not until Antietam.
So here was a generation hungry for its share of martial glory, and little suspecting the costs.
A note on the subject of France and Engand jumping in on the side of the Confederacy:
The thing that gets brought up the most by various people arguing in favor of this was the European dependence on American cotton. Just one problem: During the civil war, England and France had a surplus of southern cotton, that is, MORE than they needed. The South exported so much cotton early on to raise money for their war that they destroyed their own market. Once the war got going, England developed a type of cotton that could be grown in India, negating the dependence on American cotton altogether.
Another factor is that while Europe imported cotton from the south, it imported wheat and corn from the north. And a third of the world’s merchant shipping was American. A British declaration of war against the United States would have had a serious economic impact in England.