I don’t disagree with this narrative. However, the North did not want to “smash” the South because they were appalled at slavery. It wanted to keep the Union intact and have power over the South, much like the South wanted power over the North. Keeping slavery from spreading to the territories was but a way to preserve that power (as without slaves, the territory would not be an agrarian state and aligned with the South). Conversely spreading slavery to the territories was a way for the South to have political power. And as you correctly observed, nobody was going to mess with slavery in the southern states. So why would a plantation owner in Georgia care if slavery spreads to Kansas? Because that meant more political power for him.
The point is that nobody, neither side, saw an absolute evil in slavery and tried anything at all prior to the war to outlaw it. It was simply a power struggle that slavery played a very large part in, but only insofar as it was necessary for the southern agrarian society to function. To repeat the modern narrative: North=good guys wanting to get rid of slavery, South=bad guys fighting to keep slaves from being freed, is simply false or at least an extreme exaggeration.
Again, these one liners that fail to explain the entire story. The South fought to preserve an expansion of slavery for their own political survival. The North fought against the expansion of slavery, not because of its abhorrence that people were enslaved, but for its own political survival.
No, if the question is: “Is privacy in your home a moral thing?” then that has to be answered based on the concept of privacy, with the understanding that it can be used for good and bad. If we were voting on the Fourth Amendment today, you cannot say that a yes vote is moral sometimes but not in other times. You’re simply mixing up two different things here.
When did I say the Corwin Amendment was ratified? I said that it could have been had the South wanted to pursue that path and return to the Union. And as far as starting the war, again, we can go back and forth on that all day, but when the North refuses to leave Ft. Sumter and does an “I’m not touching you” thing, then our definition of who started the war simply comes full circle to whether we believe the South had the right/power to secede.
Your oversimplication is equally as wrong as the oversimplification that you’d like to debunk.
There were many people in the north who cared greatly about the abolition of slavery and had been working toward that end since the earliest days of the Republic. You cannot ignore that a great deal of anti-slavery sentiment existed in the north. Likewise you cannot pretend that prominent southerners, one after another, made searing speeches in favor of not only slavery, but literal white supremacy as a god-ordained state of nature.
The northern abolitionists didn’t have a desire nor the numbers to go to war over slavery, but the south forced the issue by starting a war. The south fired the first shots, they attacked federal military installations first, and invaded northern territory first, all in the name of slavery.
You cannot ask why the south threw such a tantrum over Kansas without naming slavery as a cause. You cannot recast this as a struggle over “power” or “states’ rights” without asking… what power did they insist on? What right did they insist on? It was the preservation and expansion of slavery and white supremacy.
The northern causes were a mixed bag of noble, ambiguous, and self-serving. The southern cause was unambiguously racist, evil, and without redeeming characteristics.
Not for political survival, but for their economic interests. Or at least the economic interests of the ruling class.
Their wealth was based on slave labor. Without slaves they would have pay workers, and they couldn’t work them so hard, so they would get less profit from their plantations.
Like all summaries, especially about the Civil War, there will be oversimplifications unless we are going to write a thesis.
Almost everyone (a very few abolitionists aside) were white supremacists at that time. And not simply by today’s standards, but by their own words. Lincoln himself, in the Lincoln Douglas debates, stated that he was against blacks voting, against blacks serving on juries, and that the white race would always be dominant. He stated that he didn’t really see a need for an anti-miscegenation law as nobody he knew wanted to marry a black person, but if Douglas feared that he might marry a black person without the law, he would be glad to support it. And that was Lincoln! Not Davis or Lee. Lincoln.
And likewise (almost) everyone supported slavery, at least where it was legal then. The only difference, the only one, was that (as GreenWyvern) posted as I am typing is that the South needed slavery for its entire economic system, and without its expansion, the 11 states of the Confederacy would forever be outvoted in federal matters as the North had favored its own economic system of mercantilism over the South’s agrarian model. Secession almost came thirty years earlier over a tariff issue for example.
So slavery was a placeholder for the South’s economic freedoms, which is why you see them argue so forcefully for it. While that is a horrific stain on our country, the North can’t just claim to be the good guy in a white cape because it still allowed slavery, they largely had no problem with it, but did not want its expansion because of their own economic power.
Yes, very overly simplistic. But it could at least be acknowledged before the country gets ripped apart that confederate monuments are not only for one single purpose and that is subjugating blacks. Blacks were already subjugated during that war and the stated purpose was not to do anything to change that. The North pleaded with the South not to leave by claiming that they wouldn’t touch slavery. How does that get spun into a “War Against Slavery”?
OK, UltraFilter, I now own your house: I have exercised my inherent moral right to take it. Are you going to just say goodbye and good luck and recognize my right? Because if not, then I get to fight you.
That’s what the South did, and what you are defending here, after all.
The guy who lit the fuse on the cannon that fired on Fort Sumter, was he wearing a blue uniform or a grey uniform?
Many rebels were still wearing their blue militia uniforms at this point, and it caused some identification problems in the early battles, especially as some Northern volunteer units had procured gray clothing for want of anything else.
Edmund Ruffin was credited with firing the first cannon shot at Sumter; at the end of the war he killed himself in despair at the outcome.
If I understand the analogy, I am the Union, my house is Ft. Sumter, you take Ft. Sumter and I (the Union) should just say take it and have a nice day?
Again, I think it goes back to the debate over whether secession is legal or not. If it was, then the North should have left and asked for compensation prior to any hostilities. By staying it was occupying a part of South Carolina territory that it had no right to occupy. If it was not, then the North had a right to stay there.
The answer to the secession question also answers “Who started the war?”
Here we get to the root of the strawman flogged by many Confederate apologists, which is briefly summarized as “the North were no angels and they didn’t care about slavery”.
Let me state this as baldly as I can… I do not care what Lincoln or the rest of the north felt about slavery. It has absolutely no bearing upon the fact that the Confederacy was conceived as a white supremacist entity of pure unvarnished evil. The word “white supremacy” literally is written into contemporary speeches and documents as being the motivating animus for formation of the Confederacy. The south was offered concessions to keep slavery and they rejected it because they wanted to expand slavery into territories and nations that never head it.
You can press the argument all you want that the north was morally ambiguous. It does not change the fact that the south was morally unambiguous in its aims, and those aims were overwhelmingly to preserve the evil of slavery and white supremacy. Or, if you want to phrase it in economic terms, to preserve a way of life where upper-class whites lived in ease and comfort thanks to maintaining multi-generational prison camps.
The Confederacy was evil. There is no ambiguity on this point. No amount of “what about Lincoln” changes the south’s stated purpose and actions.
This word “agrarian” gets used a lot in these discussions. Just to be clear, a state can be an “agrarian” state without slave labor–the economies of lots of free states were and are agrarian; that is, they were primarily based on agriculture.
The Deep South had an “agrarian” economy; this does not mean it had an economy based on farmers and their families working the soil of their own land in order to grow food. The Deep South had an economy based on slave labor to produce raw materials (cotton) for export, both within the United States and internationally, as an input for industrial manufacturing enterprises outside the Deep South (e.g., mechanized textile production in the North and Midlands of England).
When I say that the economy of the Deep South was “based on” these things, I don’t mean every single person there owned a cotton plantation, or worked (voluntarily or involuntarily) on a cotton plantation; but that this large-scale production of raw materials for trade in a global capitalist economy was the most important part of the region’s economy, and the economic fortunes of even people not directly involved in the global cotton trade nonetheless depended on that international commodity market–those other people often provided goods and services to the cotton producers, and if the world-wide commodity market for cotton was interfered with, those other people would also suffer severe economic distress.
Outside the Deep South, other agricultural crops (such as tobacco) were produced instead of cotton (but also using slave labor). Like cotton, tobacco of course was also part of a capitalistic international market.
It was NOT a contest between an “industrial” and an “agrarian” economy, but between a mixed economy of agriculture and industry in the North and Midwest–using free labor–and a slave labor economy in the South. In the “North” (Northeast and Midwest) there were still plenty of farms as well as factories, but farms and factories and shops were worked by the people who owned those farms and factories and shops; or by people who were being paid wages by the owners of those farms and factories and shops, and had the right to quit their jobs and seek employment elsewhere (or go West and homestead new land) if they felt like it. The workers in the “agrarian” South who formed the backbone of the labor force were legally classified as property, and if they quit their jobs they could be hunted down, flogged or branded, and forced back into the fields (or sold to new and harsher “employers”, including forcible and permanent separation from their spouses and children).
Let me clear it up for you: the side that starts shooting cannons is the one that started the war.
Let’s put aside the issue of secession and say the Confederate States of America was a real and legal country. Fort Sumter was an American fort. The Confederates had no more rights to claim it as their own than the Canadians or the Mexicans would have. If a Canadian ship had shown up and started shooting at an American fort and demanding it be turned over to Canada, would anyone argue that Canada wasn’t attacking the United States? It would be a clear act of war. And it was equally an act of war when the Confederates did it, regardless of whether or not secession was legal.
You’re saying slavery was needed to have an agrarian state?
How does that argument explain the mid-west, which was all agrarian states at the time and none of which had slavery?
And if the war was a battle between agrarian interests and industrial interests, why did the agrarian states in the mid-west and the west side with the industrial states in the east?
So the South eventually cornered itself into a disastrous war because their elites could not imagine how they could remain on top in a future without their economic model that depended on slave labor. Refused to adapt, refused to change, and then of all the issues they may raise to justify it they hitched their rhetoric to the one whose moral wrongness is indisputable. That’s just, as the kids say, Full of Fail. If your economic model looks doomed, learn to do something else. Adapt or die… and they chose “die”.
Right… there was no real reason the south couldn’t have been a mixed agrarian/industrial economy, except that agrarian is phenomenally profitable when you use forced labor.
When you say “the south just wanted to keep its agrarian lifestyle”, you erase the fact that black people are also southerners, that black people were the “agrarians” whose stolen labor supported the “lifestyle”, and who desperately wanted the end of the “agrarian lifestyle”.
There is no argument that can be made for the Confederacy that is not totally demolished by the fact that black people were/are also southerners, and the entire lifestyle of the white south depended on the theft and suppression of their political power.
You know, it never occurred to me to think about it this way. The people who say these things today are entirely ignoring the enslaved humans living in the south – it’s an interesting kind of subconscious White Supremacy that I was completely guilty of myself.
Heck, look at the CSA constitution. It’s right there in Article I. The CSA congress explicitly did NOT have the right to limit the right of individuals to own slaves. And it’s also there explicitly that any new territory or state added to the CSA (not that they ever got that far) could not restrict the right to own slaves. That’s one right that states explicitly did NOT have. And there are several other bits listed enumerating the rights of slaveowners, including recovery of escaped slaves and guaranteeing their right to slave ownership even if they moved to a different place (almost certainly put in there due to Dred Scot).
It’s out there for anybody to see. They themselves understood preservation of slavery was a critical issue underpinning the Confederacy, no matter what modern revisionists want to say.
"A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow atcommerce and civilization. …"
Georgia:
"The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation.
For the last tenyears we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against ournon-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject ofAfrican slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply withtheir express constitutional obligations to us in reference to thatproperty…
… A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. … … With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers. … The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. … We refuse to submit to that judgment…"
"A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union.
… Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union … She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits - a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. …
… In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color - a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. …"
South Carolina:
"Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.
… But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding Statesto the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution…"
Going off on a bit of a tangent but this is why I never bought into the Goldwater myth.
Goldwater used to say that the United States needed to be more confrontational towards the Soviet Union and other communist countries. And he justified this by saying we had an obligation to help the oppressed people living under communist regimes.
But Goldwater also opposed the civil rights movement. He said that regardless of how you felt about racism, as a matter of principle we shouldn’t have a government that tells people what they should be doing.
The blindspot in Goldwater’s argument was that he was only thinking about white Americans when he said the government would be telling people what to do. He apparently never thought about what was happening to all the Americans who were black. Goldwater never saw the contradiction between wanting to take active steps to protect the rights of oppressed Russians while not being willing to take active steps to protect the rights of oppressed Americans.