It was about slavery in the sense of, no slavery, no war. There were other points of difference between North and South, but they all came back to slavery one way or another. E.g., protective tariffs protected Northern industry at the expense of Southern agriculture – but, Southern industry was underdeveloped because of the Southern elite’s commitment to a slave-agrarian economy.
It is worth pointing out here that many whites in the North (and some in the South, I’m sure), regardless of how they felt about race, or about the morality of slavery as an institution, were very suspicious of the “slave power,” feared that sooner or later they might end up no better than slaves to that class – and this was not entirely unwarranted paranoia. A prominent antebellum Southern writer argued baldly that the best order for American society at large would be an aristocratic order, like that of a plantation or a medieval manor, with an elite owner class and everybody else dependent laborers with no property or education – I forget his name, but you can read the story in To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, by Heather Cox Richardson.
First off, the South didn’t secede peacefully, instead they started seizing Federal property and firing on US soldiers. If someone starts a war with your country, it’s generally in your country’s best interest to win that war instead of just letting them get away with attacking you, since that encourages them to attack in the future. The myth of the “War of Northern Aggression” is complete nonsense. Also, the South never made any proposal to take their share of the US debt with them, which would be a key part of peacefully splitting.
Beyond that, you don’t have a functional country if any dissatisfied group, region, or state can take their ball and go home any time they don’t like the result of an election. You end up with a country that either fragments into parts or avoids making any real decisions because it will fragment over a controversy. It also means that citizens cannot rely on the government of the country for any protections or contracts, as you might just suddenly not be in the country any more. Note that the Confederate constitution specifically forbade secession - if secession is really such a good thing, why did a country that started with it forbid it right off the bat?
And finally, any argument based on any kind of moral principle of self-determination has to address the fact that the Confederacy was a country founded on the principle that torturing, raping, and murding dark-skinned humans is a fundamental, inalienable right. If you’re going to say ‘well wouldn’t it be better if…’ you have to include the black people being raped, tortured, and killed as part of the argument, you can’t just ignore it.
Was that US property in one of the Confederate States?
Were the US soldiers inside the Confederate States?
If so, then from their perspective, they were reacting, not attacking.
If the Brits came here claiming dominion of some piece of land here and we attacked them, who was the aggressor?
Sure they didn’t offer to take debt with them. Is THAT why we fought to keep them in the union? To force them to take their part of the debt? of course not.
I thought this was what I said in my post. Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough.
Is THAT why we fought that war? The moral outrage of slavery? If so then why did they wait so FUCKING LONG!!!
This is not anything close to a reasonable excuse, in my opinion. If the Southern states had written letters, conducted protests, lobbied Congress, and the like, for US forces to withdraw from this specific piece of property that the Southern states no longer considered US property, for some period of months, then perhaps there would be some slight justification that the US soldiers were an attacking or offensive or occupying force.
But that doesn’t come close to the Fort Sumter attack. It’s not at all reasonable to say, for the real world Fort Sumter attack at the beginning of the war, that it was anything but an attack on US forces, on US property.
If the Brits had been working there, peacefully, for more than 30 years, and we attack them out of the blue? Then definitely us.
The two sides had a fundamentally different way of looking at the Civil War; to the Southern Confederacy, it was a war between two soveregn nation-states; to the North, it was ‘suppressing rebellion’ in a number of states that had illegally seceeded from the Union. The North never ever recognized the South as a nation and took some pains to prevent any European state from providing them formal recognition; which led to an incident or three over the course of the war (see the Trent Incident for the best-known example).
Which is why the North (Federals) never recognized the South’s right to usurp Federal installations in ‘rebellious’ territory (even when they couldn’t do a damn thing about it), while the Confederacy figured that as a independent nation-state, they could not tolerate ‘foreign’ (US Federal) forces on their new nation’s territory.
Which led inevitably to Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to “suppress rebellion” and the whole bloddy business.
And while the war was not (at the start) about the legality of slavery (something neither Lincoln or most Republicans ever argued against). it is undeniable that whenever Union (Northern) forces entered the Confederate states, slavery began dying in those areas.
No, that US property was inside the United States. And so were those soldiers. The Confederacy never had any more legitimacy than an SCA kingdom, regardless of its delusional inhabitants.
A lot of people saw value in the existence of the United States and felt that allowing states to leave at will would irreparably damage the United States.
And there was a legal obligation. The people in the southern states were American citizens, even if many of them didn’t wish to be anymore. But all of them were being denied their rights as American citizens by the secessionist governments that were preventing the American government from protecting its citizens. So the American government had to use force to reassert its authority. (And this wasn’t a completely disingenuous argument. There really were a lot of people in the seceding states that had opposed secession and wanted to remain American citizens.)
Finally, there was the biggest issue: the United States didn’t start the war. The Confederates did. They attacked the United States, which then defended itself by shooting back. The United States didn’t choose to wage war; war was waged on us.
They could have tolerated it. They chose not to. Cuba, for example, has tolerated the existence of a foreign military base in its territory for decades without attacking it.
Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs saw the sense of this. He advised President Davis that the CSA’s main goals were to establish its independence and protect slavery. It had done those things. Toombs said that while the CSA didn’t like the presence of two American forts in its territory (there was a second American-occupied fort in Florida) it shouldn’t go to war over it. They should work on building up the new country and seek a diplomatic solution to the fort problem.
This would have put the problem on Lincoln’s plate. He would have been faced with either starting a war, for which he would have paid significant political costs, or not starting a war, which would have granted the Confederacy its de facto indepedence.
One more thing. The South was very worried that when the territories out West became states they would be free states, since most had no need for slaves. If there were enough free states there would be enough for a Constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. It wouldn’t be soon but it would be inevitable considering that Lincoln could be elected.
Wow. I’m amazed at the number of reactions within 12 hours of posting. I have been enlightened a great deal. Thanks all.
A few quotes in an attempt to summarize
Apparently slavery had a lot to do with the war, if not everything. But (surprise …) it’s a lot more complicated than that. While the initial secession by the southern states was motivated by a desire to keep their slave economy going, the reaction by the north was mainly motivated by a desire to maintain the integrity of the United States. Which brings us to the next point
One of the things I did read at some point was that ever since the United States were founded, the question whether a state could leave the union if it so wished had been avoided. The Civil War was a firm ‘NO’ to that question. Which begs the question
This is the point of my original question: I can understand the ideological thinking (be it abolishment of slavery or preservering the Union) but I keep wondering why the north was willing to actually wage a costly war over it, instead of letting the southern states slide into one or several third countries of third world status.
The discussion about who fired the first shot and why may shed some light on that matter: I guess no one on either side foresaw the whole tragedy; this was simply a result of several ‘hotheaded’ actions and reactions that together escalated into all out war.
One more thing before I stop
Anything in particular you can recommend on this matter?
It was clearly Southerners who fired the “first shot”. It’s unknown if Lincoln would have ordered Union forces to use force if they hadn’t been attacked first. With this in mind, it’s entirely reasonable to ‘blame’ the South for starting the war.
From the perspective of international law, they weren’t.
Have you ever heard of Hong Kong or Guantanamo Bay? If China had attacked Hong Kong before 1997, or Cuba had attacked the US, they would be the aggressor. Same thing if the US had allowed Britain to buy or lease land and set up a military base in US soil.
If you’re actually planning to peacefully split the country and go your separate ways, you divide up the sovereign debt of the former mother country. It’s what would have happened if Scotland voted to leave the UK, and what did happen with the USSR split up into separate states. If the US did let the South secede without taking their share of the debt, then there would be a huge incentive for other parts of the US to secede (especially if they could get Federal money spent for them) and leave their debt with the ‘US’, eventually leading to some rump ‘US’ with no economy and a lot of debt. Or, more realistically no one would lend the US money at reasonable rates, which would be devastating too.
No, and I stated the opposite, so I’m not sure why you would think I said that. The issue of slavery does, however, rather break any arguments that secession was justified from a perspective of individual rights, voluntary association, or any other moral standpoint - and there are a lot of revisionists who make said arguments.
It always chaps my hide when southern apologists say that most of the Southerners didn’t own slaves, as if that’s significant. Most Americans didn’t care who ruled in Korea or Vietnam, either. Most didn’t care how much money Halliburton made in Iraq. Most English peasants probably didn’t care whether or not Henry V ruled France. And most Mongols didn’t care what happened in Poland.
Wars have always been fought over what the ruling oligarchy wanted, whether it was a kingdom, a dictatorship, or a democracy.
Because the US would cease to be an actual country and would instead become more of an association of small, hostile countries. For the Union, the war was about whether the United States would actually be a functional country, or whether it would cease to be a functional country at all. Again, note that the Confederate constitution specifically forbid secession - even the rebels thought that it was a bad thing for a country to allow.
Further, having a long border with an actively hostile, less economically developed country that has already launched military attacks and stolen vast resources from you already is a bad idea if you can help it. Better to wage one sharp war and keep your country together than sign on for generations of ‘border conflicts’ and the potential of your southern neighbor acting as a base for Europeans. Really, if the US had a commander as competent as Grant in place of McClellan, the war would likely have been over in a year or two, and the US had just finished an incredibly profitable war against Mexico so had no reason to expect things to go on so long.
What makes it a bit more complicated is the abstract principle of “states rights”.
It’s the nature of most people that they tend to support abstract principles which happen to coincide with their own interests at any given time. (For example, you’ll find support for expansive Executive versus Legislative power tends to be very highly correlated to whether the Executive branch or Legislative branch happens to be controlled by the party that a given person supports.) But despite those beliefs being adopted out of expedience, people believe them anyway.
At that time, the South as a whole had a different economy and different interests than the North on a a variety of issues. Most notably slavery, but slavery was not the only issue; for example tariffs were also a major point of contention. Since the South at that time was the minority of the country they stood to lose on every single issue if these were all to be decided on a federal level. As a result, the South tended to be big supporters of States Rights, and the North tended to be opponents of it, in the decades which preceded the CW. And this is what ultimately produced the war.
You could call this a war over slavery, and it’s very likely that had slavery not been an issue there would have been no war. But it was not the main direct cause of the war. IOW it wasn’t “let’s secede so that we can keep our slaves”. It was “these Northerners keep imposing their will on us (most notably WRT the slave issue) and we’re sick and tired of them pushing us around so we’re out of here”.
To split a hair, secession was not strictly due to slavery, it was over whether slavery could be expanded to newly formed states that did not have this institution. Had the slavers not been greedily determined to expand the institution, they probably could have kept it for quite a long time.
Instead they started a war, increased sympathy for the abolitionist cause, and sped up the political timeline for ending slavery altogether.
Some people like to point out that the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in slave states and should be considered a cynical political move, but actually it was an executive order and could only be exercised in areas under martial law (the southern states).
Whether poor whites held slaves or not, overwhelmingly they believed in white political supremacy. They feared what might happen when the slaves were freed, and this is a major reason so many of them supported the Confederacy. Even so, many southerners still believed that a war was not in their interests and dodged or deserted the army.
As Michael Lind explains in What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President, Lincoln judged it that important because 1) democratic-republican government was still a new and rare thing in the world, and the breakup of the United States would have been a signal failure and discouraged democratic-republicans and emboldened monarchist-aristocrats all over the world; and 2) a disunited America would become embroiled in European wars and power politics, every Euro power seeking to make an ally/proxy of the USA or the CSA or (assuming still further secessions) of some American state or other (this was a time when Napoleon III had done just that to Mexico), and British- and French-allied states would find themselves fighting each other in fights not their own.
That is why Lincoln regarded slavery as a secondary issue, worth tolerating if necessary to preserve the Union – because preserving the Union was just that important. He once said, “If I could preserve the Union by freeing the slaves, I would do that; and if I could preserve it by leaving them alone, I would do that; and if I could preserve it by freeing some of them and leaving the rest alone, I would also do that.”