But there wasn’t an actual war until we decided that it was necessary to protect our oil interests. My point about invading Madagascar is that simply invading another country wasn’t enough to start a war. Our motivation mattered and so did Saddam’s. If Saddam was an ally who could be trusted to look after our interests and was simply invading Kuwait because he wanted their swimming pools, we wouldn’t have gone to war with him.
As it happened, Saddam invaded Kuwait to get at their oil and was not a trusted ally, so we went to war with him.
We already talked about this. Yes, the Union initially fought to preserve the Union, but eventually popular interest made the abolishment of slavery an important mission, too. But regardless of the Union’s motivation, Confederate secession would not have happened without slavery (just as invasion of Kuwait wouldn’t have happened if oil hadn’t been up for grabs). So portraying slavery as something other than the ultimate cause of the war is disingenuous.
The fact that they seceded was reason enough, slavery or not. The South could have seceded for any reason imaginable, and the Civil War still would have happened. Why is this disingenuous?!
Jefferson Davis: “Hey Abe, listen, we all got together and decided we don’t like your beard, so we’re going to go ahead and secede. Is that cool?”
Abraham Lincoln: “That’s fine, just as long as you’re not doing it because of slavery.”
Because it overlooks the reason why the South decided to take the course of action that led to the whole war.
It also overlooks the fact that the Confederates actually instigated armed conflict by firing on a federal military base. Now we could just as easily say the cause of the war was because Jefferson Davis and friends took hostile action against Fort Sumter, but that would be such a retardly oversimplistic description of events that it would be misleading. So is ignoring slavery.
The “why” is important for history. But again (and again, and again…), the secession by itself sparked the war. By your logic, had the South cited a more “legitimate” rationale for seceding, the war wouldn’t have happened.
If that was why the South seceded, then that might be the cause. But it wasn’t. They seceded because they feared they would no longer be able to torture, kill, rape, work to death, buy/sell human beings, because of those meddling Yankees and their liberal notions. Do you consider that a reason distinct from slavery? See I never used the word slavery there.
We already established Lincoln’s early motivations, dude. That isn’t being debated.
And you haven’t shown that Lincoln would’ve pursue war with the Confederates in the absence of a Southern military offensive. What’s to say he wouldn’t have tried diplomacy?
Well, seeing as how Lincoln’s ''early motivations" necessarily came before his “later motivations,” those early motivations would seem to provide some insight into the Union’s reason for waging war, would they not?
It really wasn’t a huge issue, more or a minor sideshow. The Southern elite didn’t like much of the tariff program, but what is often missed is that they had successfully reduced it considerably. Northern states agreed it could and should be reduced, and it was.
That did not stop the southerners fom objecting to other things, like transportation improvements and education. This is a bit of an odd duck and shows some rather different, motives than we might look at today. Southern elites wanted to avoid any of the stuff which disturb their political control, which was predicated on essentially being the only people with education and wealth to go deeply into politics. They hated things like waterway improvements and canals (crucial for northern and midwestern development), which would cost them money and possibly hurt them financially, as well as public education. Meanwhile, they also argued against land-grant universities and the like. All of this has two common threads: it would cost the planter clas money now and endanger their social position.
It is noteworthy that the pre-Revolutionary War generation had successfully created black slavery not by enslaving blacks so much as freeing whites. They did so deliberately. The post-Revolutionary War generation oitted poor whites and blacks against each other economically, essentially forcing the average man to adopt racism as a survivaly strategy. The Revolutionary War figures of the south may have been a lot of things, but they generally really believed in liberty and the like. Their forefathers and descendants subverted it, though not always consciously.
Likewise, the big figures pushing for a southern industrial base, though southern partisans who eventually favored Seccession, might have averted the Civil War if successful. Industrial success was increasingly associated with (and depended on) some level of education. Cheap labor could carry you only so far in the Americas, because rationalizing expensive labor had taken off so effectively. The planter class never took to it, but it could easily have created a rising merchant and professional class which would have likely seen few benefits in staunch adherence to an agrarian, class-based social order. Of course, that’s why the planters opposed it.
It’s surprising to hear, in an American context, the depth of class-based feeling, almost all on the planter side. Common farmers had some suspicions of “arrogant planters” and the like, but for the most part aspired to economic success and joining the class. Furthermore, their allegances were often not sectional (as among the planters) or even state-based, but intensely local. The early Confederate governemnt relied on upper-class military service, and when that supply of feeling ran dry turned to conscription to force lower-class farmers into service. Though this in turn eventually dragged the Federal government into it as well, the conscription law was hated with a holy ferver across much of the South, and seriously damaged its support.
Planters, though they very often had relatives among the poorer classes, were extremely class-conscious and class-obsessed, as if trying to out-noble the British aristocracy. it could go very deep, wherein Virginia planters sneered at frontier wannabes and received disdain in return.
The first major land battle of the war was the First Battle of Bull Run, which was fought in Virginia. The first major Confederate foray into the north was Antietam, in September of 1862.
Because there are two sides to every conflict and just because Lincoln’s primary goal wasn’t slavery doesn’t mean it makes sense to divorce slavery as the cause of the CW.
That’s why.
But I’m kind of tired of the back and forth. So bye.
It appears that your claim is that the North really started the War, and that secession and firing on Ft. Sumter had nothing to do with it. Them poor old Southerners had no idea that the North would react with violence to this. Sheesh.
No one is saying that the North went to war because of slavery - there was no movement to send in troops to the South to free the slaves. What we are saying is that secession caused the war, inevitably, and that slavery caused secession. The South did not attempt to negotiate anything before seceding, not that there was anything to negotiate since no bills outlawing slavery were being considered. I agree with a previous post that Lincoln’s election showed which way the wind was blowing, and that was what set them off.
Saying that the Southern states seceded to prove they had the right to secede is absurd. They did not try to get this supposed right recognized by the Supreme Court.
I trust that you are not saying that the leaders of the CSA were surprised by the North’s attack. If you were, you’d be calling them total morons. Given that, it is also absurd to bring up hypotheticals about seceding because they didn’t like Lincoln’s looks. They were only going to take this risky and expensive step for something important, and that important thing was only slavery.
If I am allowed a quibble, I’d say that the cause of the War was not slavery but the economics of slavery. The sudden end of slavery would ruin those in power in the South, at least. If this were not the case, I doubt they would have gone to war to preserve slavery as a moral good, in their fairly sick view. I suspect that they felt that secession resulted in only a probability of ruination, but staying the course in a Union where the demographics were turning against them would make their ruination a certainty in the long run. I don’t know if a somewhat more enlightened plantation class could have slowly freed the slaves into tenant farmer status. It is quite possible that they felt, very likely rightly, that without the level of oppression they used there would be many acts of revenge for past cruelty, and very likely that they had convinced themselves of the subhuman status of black people in order to justify enslaving them.
But the first actual fight was Fort Sumter, where the Confederate forces attacked federal soldiers, on a federal base, build by federal hands, on an island which served only federal purposes, by and order sent from Jeff Davis solely and deliberately to incite war by bringing on a conflict to force Southerners to choose North or South.
The Confederate Government attacked first. It was no shock that the Federal government chose to respond, and you are making a sore mistake if you reflexively assume their worldview in looking at the invasions of “Southern land,” as if they automatically had the moral right.