I think it would be accurate to say that the leadership on both sides did not want to be seen as the aggressor. Prior to Sumter, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina all voted to stay in the Union. Their sympathies were with the south, but they felt that the Union was still a sacred enough institution to warrant staying part of. The leadership of both groups recognized that the sentiment in those states was divided enough that sympathy toward the non-aggressor would push them into the other camp.
We see that almost immediately after Sumter, those states felt that the North was being belligerent and unreasonable. You can read the newspaper clippings from just after Sumter in Richmond where they acknowledged that there was Northern sympathy, but the North was acting like a despot toward South Carolina.
If we get away from the leadership, then things are much, much more complicated. Generally speaking, the Appalachian mountains always held pro-union sympathies regardless of the state, so Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia, Western North Carolina were not eager for hostilities from any side. They mostly seemed to want to be left alone. We see this with Kentucky which was ostensibly neutral, but as soon as the Confederate States moved troops into their borders quickly fell in line with the Union for the sake of what they felt was their own sovereignty being violated. West Virginia was of course its own thing and the more mountainous counties generally sided against whichever group was there at the time - both sides had significant recruiting difficulties in West Virginia and many ‘soldiers’ decided to simply be guerrillas who stayed within state borders and spent their time raiding supplies from whichever side they decided they didn’t like. The more slaves you had, the more likely you were to be southern, so plantation areas were pro-Southern and definitely wary of northern attempts to end the practice and much more likely to support violence to preserve their slavery. The west was just strange and people had much more heated views about violence and I think it’s reasonable to say were much more willing to pursue violent solutions after years of their own mini-wars.
I don’t think as a whole the population was clamoring for war. I think that there were very vocal subsets that were, but most people probably just wanted the other side to magically stop what they were doing without a need for bloodshed. I think that once the fighting started, people very, very quickly got on board, but I also think that if a diplomatic solution were found, most people would have been breathing a sigh of relief, not wishing that the shooting had started.
It’s always easy enough to manufacture a reason to blame the other side. It will be believed by anyone who wants there to be a reason. That explains nothing and justifies nothing.
When I lived in West Virginia, I wondered why there were Confederate apologists waving flags there. Apparently they never learned that their state was formed by people seceding from Virginia to avoid becoming an appendage of a slave-holding region seeking to bust up their country.
I can remember, young’uns, when there were quite a few of them around here, arguing about the noble motivations of the South (at least, until they were smacked enough times with the reality of Southern state secession declarations about devotion to slavery).
During one such endless debate I endeared myself to the apologists with a simple summary:
The Civil War is over.
The Union was preserved.
Slavery was ended.
The good guys won.
Get over it.
Yes, but as senoy has so ably explained, “firing the first shot” is not the only way to “commence hostilities”. Nor is it the only way to initiate aggression.
This is a historical fact, but does not state if or why that is a good thing.
Thank goodness. But why was nearly every other nation on earth able to end slavery peacefully, while we required a massively destructive war?
This is laughable. There were no good guys.
I’m “over it” in the sense that I’m sure not going to attempt to resurrect the Confederacy. It’s certainly not worth resurrecting in any case. The problem is that we are living with negative repercussions from the precedents set by the Union victory. Might has made right.
Because the South refused to give up slavery, and when the North tried to take measures to prevent its further spread (Note: NOT to eliminate it, but to prevent it from spreading further) the South decided to take their toys and go home. Unfortunately for them, that’s not how the United States works. You can’t just take your toys and leave.
Maybe not, but there were definitely bad guys. Namely, the guys fighting to preserve the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
The negative repercussions stem from the Union’s refusal to adequately reshape the South, both because of the cost involved and the lack of political will. The Southern States should not have had their rights restored until every freed slave received a parcel of land (40 acres and a mule) in compensation for their suffering – land that should have been seized from the rich whites who started the war. The old institutions of the South should have been totally dismantled.
Instead, after a short period of reconstruction, the former slave owners were allowed to retake control of their states, and admitted back into the Union.
Because our white supremacists were particular powerful, influential, and vicious.
There were definitely bad guys (very bad – among the worst in history), and they lost. Though they still exercised power (and their desired brutality and oppression) for another century (and more, to some degree) in the South.
“We” didn’t. The South was gung-ho for war, got “negative repercussions” in return for launching hostilities, and only after many decades accepted that the old ways were standing in the way of a vigorous, prosperous society. A relative few, diminishing every year, insist on trying to rewrite history, or that “the South is gonna do it again” (do what, exactly?), or even pretending that a unified nation was not a positive outcome.
Put that on your protest sign the next time you visit the Lincoln Memorial or Grant’s Tomb.
I can see the positives in even those whose actions barely tipped the scales toward good, like Gen. Benjamin Butler. By most accounts a poorly trained and inferior military leader, Butler gained notoriety for issuing Order 28 while governing New Orleans during the war. This was in response to hostile acts by alleged ladies of the city taken against Union soldiers (including the dainty habit of emptying their chamber pots out upstairs windows on troops below). By Butler’s order, those committing such acts were to be essentially treated as prostitutes, so enraging the putative Southern Nobility that they labeled him “Beast” Butler.
And because the economy was much more heavily dependent on slave labor than other countries, causing a much more extensive and entrenched amount of interest in retaining it. That includes the North, btw - the textile mills of New England and their customers benefited from cotton being produced with free labor, and the merchant fleet benefited from the Triangle Trade, etc. Britain, for instance, just didn’t need slavery, and abolition there faced much less opposition.
West Virginia history is complicated. The secession movement was not because of slavery or the Confederacy or the Union (with the exception of the Northern Panhandle which was completely pro-Union for obvious economic and geographic reasons.) West Virginia was largely anti-state government of Virginia moreso than anti-Confederacy or pro-Union. Some West Virginians sided with the Confederacy (perhaps more than sided with the Union, although it’s debateable. If you exclude the Panhandle, there were far more Confederate than Union volunteers.) What West Virginia was doing with secession was seeking to break away from what it saw as an indifferent at best and hostile at worst state government in Richmond. The Trans-Allegheny Counties were largely completely ignored by Richmond (You can see a similar dynamic today with regards to the western counties in Maryland.) Due to population and wealth distribution, the mountain counties essentially had zero say in government policy and all of the policy was created to further eastern interests. Beginning as early as 1776, ‘Transylvania’ requested to be admitted to the US as its own country separate from Virginia and throughout the early 19th century, West Virginia brought the government in Virginia to various Constitutional Crises. The big straw though was slavery, but not the institution itself. Rather that the state awarded representation to the counties via the 3/5 clause which the Western counties felt robbed them of representation since they had very little slavery. The Constitution of 1829 also made property ownership a qualification to vote. The Western Counties had much looser property documentation and found it more difficult to prove their claims. There were also quite a few we’ll say ‘homesteaders’ who put their cabins wherever they felt like it without legal claim to the land. They felt that their right to vote was being denied. The West overwhelmingly rejected the State Constitution, but it passed anyway due to the population imbalance.
Anyway, this is only to say that the secession from Virginia didn’t really impact people’s opinion of the Confederacy and it certainly wasn’t out of some patriotic idea to preserve the Union. West Virginians hated Washington as much as they hated Richmond. They just saw it as an opportunity to get away from Richmond quasi-legally. The true disposition of West Virginians during the war was county by county and family by family. Usually the closer you got to Ohio, the more pro-Union you were and the closer you got to Virginia the more pro-Confederate. I would say the largest attitude though was “Both of you can go to hell, now get off my land.”
That is a horrible analogy. Saudi Arabia is not a part of the country that is looking to succeed. Your analogy covers no points in common between the situations.
A better analogy would be if say, Alabama decided to leave the Union, and shot at federal troops and raided Fort Rucker.
Slavery isn’t “free”, in either sense of the word. It’s actually cheaper to pay employees than it is to keep slaves. Economics was never a reason for slavery, except among those who didn’t understand economics, and those who were just looking for an excuse to treat people as subhuman (two groups with a large overlap).
There were long-standing resentments against the bluebloods running much of the state, sure, but division wasn’t in the cards until the pro-slavery faction got completely out of hand. Virginia’s joining the breakup of the Union was an intolerable act.
“People of North Western Virginia, why should we thus permit ourselves to be tyrannized over, and made slaves of, by the haughty arrogance and wicked machinations of would-be Eastern Despots,” asked a committee of Western Virginia politicians in an open letter in the Kingwood Chronicle in May of 1861. “Are we submissionists, craven cowards, who will yield to daring ambition…The Union under the flag of our common country…causes our bosoms to glow with patriotic heat, and our hearts to swell with honest love of country.”
My understanding is the opposite (at least from the plantation-owners’ perspective) – slavery impoverished much of the South outside of the planation economy, but was incredibly beneficial, financially, from the perspective of the plantation owners. It was considerably cheaper to have the labor onsite, and be able to house and feed them en-masse (and with extremely substandard conditions and supplies) thus utilizing economies of scale, and use brutalization and fear of brutalization to motivate harder and longer work, and discard responsibility for those older slaves and those otherwise incapable of working, and never have to worry about unionizing or strikes or wage-competition or other sorts of labor-rights disruption, and much more, then it would be to pay a wage for work when the worker can go look for a better job elsewhere. It was utterly monstrous, and sometimes utterly monstrous things make lots of money for the monsters responsible.
Management is cheaper, and profits (for the owner) greater, in systems in which the labor has no rights and can be abused at will.
Nope, way more complicated. Following the Convention of 1830, TransAllegheny had already begun cries for secession. You can look through the old archives of the Kanawha Republican to see a near constant cry to leave Virginia. Sure, saying slavery had nothing to do with it is ridiculous, but so is saying that loyalty to Washington was the reason is also not true. A Clash of Loyalties by John Shaffer is probably one of the better treatments of the subject where individuals really draw up sides based on kinship loyalty more than anything else. If you look at anti-Richmond forces in say the Mon Valley, you see that it’s largely Whigs and surprisingly enough Democrats who are banding together against elites. In the Kanawha Valley, it’s laborers who are seeing wages devalued by slave labor in the salt flats who are clamoring for Union. West Virginia’s secession from Virginia was the culmination of many forces and inherent divisions that found a legitimate path forward due to Virginia’s secession from the US, not a simple ‘We hate the Confederacy. Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!’
I agree with your point in part and disagree in part. The language in the Constitution did not answer the specific questions about enforcement and the burden of proof upon slave owner or the rights of free blacks to defend against a charge that he was not a slave.
The 1793 law was weak insofar as the Supreme Court allowed free states to completely refuse to comply with the Constitutional guarantee given to southern slave holders. The 1850 law went the other way and placed onerous restrictions on people in free states to attempt to say, “Hell, I know this guy, and he’s not an escaped slave!” This person could only do so on pain of, as you said, the equivalent of a $29k fine in today’s money if he lost.
That was a political give and take at the time, and if the south had every right to be outraged by Prigg, yet likely went too far in insisting on the 1850 Act. The issue was destined to be a boiling point.
But just because the issue was slavery is not controlling. It could have been issue X. The national government owed the southern states good faith and fair dealing when they had previously given ground on issue X.
There were two forts in the vicinity of Charleston: Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter. Both were property of the United States. (And by that I don’t mean they were on land that was within the United States. The legal owner of the property was the United States government.) When South Carolina seceded, Fort Moultrie was evacuated in order to minimize confrontations and the troops were moved to Fort Sumter.
I think it’s disingenuous to say troops were moved to Fort Sumter and occupied it, because that implies the United States was seeking to build up the confrontation. The troops had been in Charleston all along and they were being moved away from the city and giving up one of the forts so the United States was clearly seeking to reduce confrontation.
Lincoln made it very clear and public that he would not send any reinforcements to the fort and was only sending supplies. The authorities in South Carolina knew this. And what Lincoln said was true.
So if South Carolina decided to believe that reinforcements were being sent, it’s because they wanted to start a war and were looking for an excuse, regardless of whether or not their excuse was based on reality.
