Not really. Cotton and tobacco are bad crops. They really wear out the soil. And plantation owners were notoriously bad farmers so their land was in terrible shape. What kept the plantations afloat was the breeding and selling of slaves. And that meant that the slave owners needed new markets. This was the reason the south initially supported westward expansion. (It also incidentally explains why the slave owners joined with the abolitionists on a single issue - ending the African slave trade. They had no desire to allow foreign competition for their “product”.)
But expansion ended up biting them in the ass. It worked out fine at first in places like Alabama and Mississippi and East Texas. But it turned out that most of the western territory wasn’t suited for a slave-based agricultural system. The southern states pushed for slavery as hard as they could but it never took root in the west. And that meant that places like California, Oregon, and Kansas entered the Union as free states. Politically, the balance of slave and free states was tipping away from the south and economically the lack of a western market made slavery a dead-end.
If the southerners had been able to face reality, they’d have seen the writing on the wall. Rather than trying to artificially preserve a dying system, they should have cut a deal with the abolitionists and agreed to a program of gradual emancipation with a government buy-out of their slaves.
No, that was called a joke but I’ll close caption it for the humor-impaired.
Davis might have paid lip service to state sovereignty, but he did nothing to support it in actual practice. In fact, he opposed state sovereignty when he was in office. He was the president of a national union and he wanted a strong central government with no resistance from the governors in the country he was running.
You can’t judge people solely by the claims they made - especially when those claims were made decades after the fact. You judge them best by what they did at the time that decisions were being made.
I’m kinda late to this party. I’ll break these up into different posts, and try to get my quote attributes correct. First:
It was my understanding that back then the US was more like the European Union is today. That is, people were loyal to their state first, and the country second. Robert E. Lee wasn’t fighting for slavery or the confederacy, he fought for Virginia.
So why are people arguing that Northerners were fighting to preserve the Union? Am I wrong about the states-first attitude of the time? Or was this attitude less prevalent in the North?
So the south tightens up its borders. I’m not saying that having an Iron Curtain between the CSA and the USA would be preferable, but it’s possible to have this situation and not have a war start every time someone manages to make it across.
It wasn’t every time. It was once, over a pretty big issue.
Well then, we can’t allow anybody to get divorced, because that would destroy the institution of marriage. At the very least, no divorced person could ever get married again. Who would marry someone who just ups and leaves after every disagreement?
Could a divorced man pop back in, grab some quick sex, the pop out on the next contrived pretext? Would have have to pay alimony? It’s just too messy. Nope, we can’t ever allow divorce.
Perhaps I am taking this out of context, or misinterpreting this, but this seems to support WillFarnaby’s assertion that the North was more concerned about the financial loss.
I think you’re way overstating the case here. Yes, localist attitudes were probably a lot more prevalent in the first half of the 19th century than they are now. But look at Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” This is an appeal to patriotism, on behalf of the entire United States. Look at the famous letter from Sullivan Ballou to his wife before First Bull Run; he clearly has a deep emotional connection to his “country”; that is, the entire Union.
Even on the Southern side, L.Q.C. Lamar didn’t say “Thank God, we have seven countries at last, united in a loose league for their common defense”–he said “Thank God, we have a country at last: to live for, to pray for, and if need be, to die for.”
Like MEBuckner said, the while it wasn’t universal, in general the nation was seen as one and not a group of separate nations. In fact the southern states didn’t object when the Federal government placed itself above the northern states with decisions like the Fugitive Slave Laws and the Dred Scott case. If it was strictly about state rights those should have been unpopular in the south as well as the north. They weren’t.
In addition I meant that comment in a more contemporary context. Willfarnaby does not seem capable of seeing the USA as a single country now, let alone in a context of Union views during the Civil War.
Not possible. You’re talking about a potential border stretching over 4,000 miles. Hard to do now let alone in 1861. And every escaped slave is just one more match to light the flame. War would have been the likely outcome no matter what.
Incidentally if the South could have done this they would. They were fighting a defensive war and they knew it. The goal was to hold out long enough that the Union gave up and let them go. What happened during the Civil War was their best attempt at digging in and tightening their borders.
It was only one time because there’s a pretty big precedent for what happens when you try.
If the marriage was a group marriage involving 50 partners (or 36 in 1861) who jointly controlled and managed resources worth trillions, you’d almost have a decent analogy going here. Trying to compare a contract between two people to the Constitution is just not going to work.
The loss was in Federal power and status as a nation on the world state, not financial. Of the two the Union could easily have survived the loss of the South financially. The South was doomed trying to maintain an agrarian plantation lifestyle in the face of the Industrial Revolution.
What would have happened is that the next time Illinois didn’t like a Federal decision, it left. Then maybe Maine. Followed by a few more. The USA no longer exists. The Federal government either had to step up and show that the Union between states was permanent or the USA ceases to exist. Now they could have let the South go and then used the military on Illinois for example, but then we’d be arguing about how the Federal government trampled Illinois’s rights. The biggest problem with WillFarnaby’s view that it was all financial is that you’d have to show that the Union made more off those tariffs than it spent on four years of war with over a million of it’s citizens dead. It’s not like they were collecting money from the South those four years. Plus they spent additional money during the Reconstruction. It makes very little sense to say they did it for the money, since the costs in both human lives and money were staggering. It makes plenty of sense if the Union was fighting to preserve itself as a nation.
It was more of a question than a statement. And perhaps it deserves its own thread.
However, I don’t find your cites to be very compelling. Lincoln was trying to hold the Union together, so of course he was going to emphasize that. Since his job was POTUS, you would expect him to emphasize the union even if they weren’t on the brink of war.
I get that the Union soldiers were fighting to preserve the Union.
As for L.Q.C.L., he was clearly not a fan of the Union.
Also, in war there is going to be a tendency to band together with your allies. The battlefield is not the place to be an individual.
What were the general attitudes before things got (really) tense?
I think you’re confusing the notion that the Civil War was really about “State’s Rights” with my question about how the average American, prior to the immediate build up of the Civil War viewed his/her identity. Let me ask it this way: If I had a time-machine-type device where I could pluck a random American from 1860 and bring them to the floor of Congress, mondern time, and Congress asked him “What is your name and where are you from?”, would he say “I’m … from the United States”, or would he say “I’m … from Georgia/Virginia/Ohio/etc…” ?
If you like you can rephrase the question in a way that doesn’t beg the answer so much.
The reason that I ask is because I’ve often wondered why southerners fought. I doubt that there were many slave-owners, or sons of slave-owners, actually going into battle. I’m guessing that most of the rebel soldiers never owned a slave, nor did their parents. So why did they fight? The best explanation that I’ve heard is that one captured rebel soldier, when asked, said “Because you’re here.” I interpreted that to mean “You’re here invading my state.”, not “You’re here invading my newly-formed country.”
It seems to me that the biggest reason for the civil war was that nobody realized the costs. All of the costs that you just mentioned were not known at the beginning of the war, and therefore were not calculated in any cost/benefit analysis just prior to the war. It’s my understanding that, in addition to the South thinking that they just had to hold out, the North thought that they only had to march down to Richmond and the whole thing would be settled. (The first battle of Bull Run, IIRC, which did not work out as well as they had hoped.)
Well, Lee did so I can’t say I’d be surprised to find others. And you can claim that Lincoln had to say the country came first, he was President. But enough people agreed with him to vote him to that office. Nobody really argued that the Federal government wasn’t superior unless the issue was slavery. Even then nobody argued who was superior unless they were concerned about limits on slavery.
So it’s certainly possible there was a non-insignificant minority who place themselves as a citizen of a state first and the USA second. But they were a minority based on national elections and lack of outcry every time the Federal government passed any law that affected their state.
They fought to keep slaves. Or at least because other white people told them slaves were good. A few were probably like Lee and put state before country, but I strongly doubt they were a majority. I’ll need more than a explanation you heard once.
The people who formed the KKK and went lynching weren’t all slave owners or their sons.
The people who enacted the “Black Codes” weren’t all slave owners or their sons.
The people who promoted segregation weren’t all slave owners or their sons.
I agree completely. But this is evidence that it had nothing to do with tariffs or taxes or money of any kind. If it was about money, why didn’t the Union quit once the costs outweighed the gains?
It was about slavery for the South and the continuation of their country for the Union. To bring this back on track to the OP, the slavery issue was going to be have a lot of fallout from the beginning. It was always going to be unpleasant abolishing slavery in the US, and after the Missouri Compromise I don’t see any way there wasn’t going to be a war.
Until the Civil War became a war to end slavery I think the South had the better argument. The Southern states no longer wanted to be part of the United States. Nothing in the Constitution said they had to stay.
This is relevant to our present condition, because the polarization of the United States may lead to a similar drive by some states to secede.
I think this is reductive. The privileges of white supremacy were certainly a motivation for those who were not drafted, but other motivations like loyalty to State over country and an unwillingness to be thought a coward played just as much of a role. Young men are young men and were then, too. What moves them to mass violence has always been something of a mystery, but the social elites’ endorsement of the war was certainly the most important factor.
This is just begging the question. The Confederate position was “Nothing in the Constitution says we have to stay. So we can leave.”
And the Union position was “Nothing in the Constitution says you can leave. So you have to stay.” Which is just as true as the Confederate position. For people to claim one side was “right” just reveals their own opinion on the issue.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
No state is going to try and secede in any of our lifetimes. The polarization in the U.S. is not as bad the media makes it seem and does not fall on clear state lines. It falls more on urban/rural lines, although even that is not a clear division. The only states I can think of that have vast super majorities on one side or another have extremely small populations and could not survive on their own.
The borders of the United States of America can not be changed by any state government, or collection of state governments, having been established by properly ratified treaties.
The Southerners kept pushing and pushing. They would have broken the back at some point. Remember that they lost the election because they split the party because the fire-eaters weren’t happy when the Democrat party refused to force slavery on states & territories that did not want them.
These weren’t rational people. These were spoiled children who weren’t realizing that they didn’t own all the toys anymore.