What, if any, issues did Lincoln face from his own commanders at the start of the Civil War?

[fedman1]

and slavery is extant in Sudan today

[Jaguars]

Generally the prominent confederate sympathizers in the US army resigned sometime around the start of the succession to when the fighting started. For example Longstreet walked off his post in Albuquerque when news of Fort Sumpter arrived, while Hardee resigned his commission when Georgia seceded.

I suspect that there were a few factors that stopped them from becoming spies, turncoats or forming fifth columns.

• As known confederate sypathizers, they would have concluded that they would be frozen out of important posts.
• They likely saw themselves being more useful as military leaders of the new nation than as turncoats in the Union army.
• It wouldn’t accord with the honor system that still remained at the time. While both sides enthusiastically used spies and gathered intelligence, the higher class of officers in positions of power probably distinguished between abandoning their country for the new state and personal betrayal of their peers. No one would have wanted to be a Benedict Arnold.

[Little_Nemo]

@engineer_comp_geek

Keep in mind that the South was fighting for its very way of life. If the new territories became free states, the balance in Washington would shift and the free states would have more votes than the slave states. Slavery was on its way out world-wide, and it would just be a matter of time before slavery was abolished in the U.S. This would completely destroy the Southern economic structure as well as their social structure, both of which relied on unpaid slave labor and a working class that effectively had no rights and no voice in their own government. There was no way that the South was going to voluntarily dismantle their own social and economic way of life.

It wasn’t just an issue of congressional representation.

Plantation owners liked to think of themselves as engaging in agriculture. But southern agriculture was a dead end street. Most plantations were constantly on the verge of going bankrupt.

To deal with this, plantation owners increasingly relied on cotton, which was the most profitable crop. And to maximize sales, they would plant as much cotton as possible. Which meant using the same fields year after year, rather than letting some fields go fallow.

Which is a terrible way to grow cotton. Cotton sucks nutrients out of the ground at a high rate and growing it in the same ground year after year means you get diminishing yields.

So how did plantation owners stay afloat? They sold slaves. And in order to keep selling slaves, they needed a constant supply of new plantations. So they kept pushing for the expansion of plantations into western territory so there would be a market for slaves. Plantations in Virginia and the Carolinas sold slaves to new plantations in Georgia and Tennessee. Plantations in Georgia and Tennessee (and Virginia and the Carolinas) sold slaves to new plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. Plantations in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas sold slaves to new plantations in Louisiana and Texas.

You can see the problem here. Each new slave state that joined the union was a short term market for buying slaves but then became a long term competitor for selling slaves. And geography dictated this system couldn’t go on forever.

But this explains why southerners were so much in favor of expansion, even though they worried about the possibility of new non-slave states. It also explains why the only anti-slavery measure that was enacted before the Civil War was an end to the international slave trade; this was one issue on which abolitionists and plantation owners could find common ground.