Because it was their dream to own slaves. And because blacks being slaves gave them someone to look down on.
Georgia wouldn’t have. There was a vote to select delegates to a session to decide the issue. The total votes for pro-union candidates was higher than pro-secession candidates. But as we’ve seen twice in recent Presidential elections, majority votes in indirect elections doesn’t matter. So more pro-secession candidates were elected and Georgia barely voted to secede. Note that Georgia hadn’t been a big time slavery state for as long as some of the others, only allowing slavery at all 1751. (It was the only one of the original 13 to have banned slavery.)
(And that vote of course excluded a lot of people.)
This is one thing to always keep in mind in arguing about secession. A large fraction of the population in the South were loyal Americans before, during and after. To these people the Confederacy was and will always be a treasonous state. You don’t “honor” traitors.
This is what people making the “states’ rights” argument never acknowledge. The slave-holding states, even in that very right which the apologists defend with the “state’s rights” motto, are denying other states their rights.
And many times, slavery wasn’t inherited; children of slaves weren’t born slaves. In many places, the slaves looked pretty much the same as the masters; looking different from the members of the dominant class/culture made you more or less exotic, but not a slave. At the time of the American Civil War, the assumption was that anybody who looked like (s)he might have any black ancestry was that they were slaves, and if they happened to have papers to prove they were not, those papers could easily be destroyed or declared false by the people who’d benefit from such behavior.
None of the choices offered really fits my view.
The Civil War was a lot more complex than just “it was all about slavery”. If that was all it was about, then the South should have seceded twenty years earlier.
The North side is particularly complex, because for the North, it wasn’t all about slavery. There were a lot of abolitionists in the North, and their numbers had been rising steadily through the 1800s, but they had nowhere near a majority in the North. A big part of the Civil War from the northern side was all about money and greed, specifically with the northern industrialists.
The South wasn’t all about slavery either, since most southerners didn’t own slaves. Most slaves were owned by the larger plantations, and plantation owners were a small minority of the population. From a purely economic point of view, it would have been in the best interest of the smaller southern farmers to abolish slavery, since smaller farms couldn’t afford slave labor, and without slave labor, these smaller farms had a hard time competing against the large plantations.
So why did the majority of non-slave owners in the South side with the plantation owners? Two reasons. First, in the North, you had the abolitionists and the industrialists, and neither group was large enough to take on the entire South. But, these two groups then joined together, and now they could take on the South. When they managed to get a majority in Washington, they enacted tariffs and such that favored industrialism and hurt agriculture. The small farmers in the South saw this as an attack on their entire way of life (which it was). If the southern farmers wanted to survive and not get wiped out economically, they needed to band together with the plantation owners, which they did.
The second reason was racism. The small southern farmers didn’t own slaves, but they thought of blacks as sub-human, and there was no way that they were going to give these sub-humans an equal place in society. The only way that the small farm owners would agree to freeing the slaves would be if they could somehow gather up all of the slaves and ship them back to Africa. That wasn’t practical, and so the small farmers in the South, who had no slaves, very openly supported slavery, just to keep those sub-humans under control, where the southern men all thought they should be.
In many ways, the racism aspect of this is worse than slavery.
The South didn’t secede because of slavery. The South seceded because the northerners were all banding together to destroy the Southern way of life. The entire southern economy and social structure was built around slavery and racism. Even when Lincoln promised that the South could keep its slaves, that wasn’t enough, because part of Lincoln’s campaign platform had been that the new western territories would become free states, and the South knew that once those states had voting rights in Washington, the South would be out-voted, and the northern abolitionists (wanting to free the slaves) and the northern industrialists (wanting to promote industry over agriculture for their own greedy self-interests) would legislate the South into economic and social turmoil. If the South wanted to preserve its way of life, it had to secede in order to survive.
As far as State’s rights are concerned, there is actually an issue there, though it gets horribly twisted around and misrepresented these days by many revisionists. But the issue is how much control should the Federal government have over the States. The issue was raised because of the dispute over the economics of the northern industrialists and the southern agriculturalists, but it does raise an issue that is separate from the issue of slavery. Even if the issue had been something other than slavery, the question still remains. How much control should the Federal government have over the States? Should Northerners be able to tell Southerners how to live their lives, or vice-versa?
But while the southerners might have had a point when they told the northerners that they didn’t have the right to tell the southerners how to live their lives, the issue remains that the Confederate cause was one of preserving their way of life, and their way of life was built around slavery and racism. Period.
I’m having trouble with your explanations.
It was about saving the Union, first and foremost.
Since an agrarian economy was vitally important in northern states and new territories as well, how is it that the Evil Industrialists were picking mostly on the South?
In other words, secession was over slavery.
I’d have to see compelling evidence that abolitionists entered into an unholy alliance with industrialists to destroy the South in order to believe what sounds more like paranoid fantasy than fact. Of course, you may be merely describing the delusional thinking that led to secession rather than agreeing that it had a solid factual basis, but it’s hard to tell.
:dubious:
You cannot take part of my country unless I let you. They took part of my country without asking.
That’s a good point. Many in the North were fighting just to preserve the Union. I forgot to mention that.
I don’t think the intent was to destroy the South, but for all practical matters, that’s what it amounted to.
The abolitionists just wanted to free the slaves. They didn’t necessarily want to destroy the South, but there was no practical way to free the slaves without destroying the southern economic structure or its social structure.
The industrialists were mostly about greed. They wanted their industries to make money. They didn’t give two hoots about what happened in the South. You can structure tariffs and economic policies so that they favor industry or agriculture, but not both. The conflict between the industrialists and the agriculturalists got so bad that when the industrialists managed to get enough votes to enact tariffs protecting industry (and harming agriculture), South Carolina went so far as to say those tariffs did not apply to their state.
As for the two groups joining forces, I don’t know if I would call it an unholy alliance. Most folks just call it the Republican Party. 
Then again, some folks do have some very unkind words for the Republicans these days. 
If you look at Lincoln’s speeches, you can see that there are clearly two main groups within the party. When he spoke to industrialists, he talked about protecting industry and things like building a trans-continental railroad, and he downplayed the anti-slavery aspect of the party. When he spoke to abolitionist groups, he did the opposite. Even though the abolitionists really didn’t care much about industry and the industrialists didn’t care much about slavery, the two groups supported each other so that they could join forces against the economically powerful South.
Not just slavery. Slavery and racism. And it wasn’t just the right to own slaves. It was that their entire way of life was built around slavery and racism. It’s more than just “slavery”.
This is true, but not by as much as most people think. If you go by households that owned slaves in the Confederate states, you’ll see that it was not a tiny percentage that owned slaves. In many over 25% of households owned at least one slave, and in South Carolina (first to secede), it was 46%. Slave ownership was a very attainable-seeming goal for many. Though, of course, many owned only a few, as you said. But that slave or few slaves could represent a great deal of their wealth.
Also, slaves were often rented or loaned out. But more than that, the entire social/societal structure of the south was built around slavery. Even with wealth - wealth from plantations was superior to wealth from industry. And by time the Civil War happened, slavery was seen as a moral good, a noble and honorable system.
I can easily imagine that in the South, most whites who couldn’t afford slaves still fashioned themselves as “temporarily embarrassed slaveowners”. It was a dream out of reach for many, but it was attained by enough people to make it a very powerful status symbol. Like luxury automobiles today.
If luxury automobiles were banned, you better believe it just wouldn’t be the rich who’d get upset. A lot of working-class and middle-class people would be angry too.
I voted #4.
I believe in secession in principle. There is nothing sacred or immutable about the American Union.
But, I don’t believe that the southern states had good reason to secede in 1861, nor do I agree with most of their justifications for seceding, as race-based slavery is clearly immoral (though its immorality clearly wasn’t as obvious back then).
That said, the American invasion was in no way justifiable, and the atrocities and destruction that they committed in the name of “Union” are utterly shameful and deplorable.
Both sides had evil ideologies. The war was a wholly unnecessary tragedy for humanity.
Though I am generally a pacifist, I can’t begrudge my ancestors too much for taking up arms to repel the invaders. If you had an invading army in your backyard, what would you do? Ideology, politics, and ideals matter very little at that point.
The obvious positive result of the war was the abolition of slavery. However, almost every other western nation on earth was able to end slavery peacefully. Surely we could have found a way to do it while avoiding the bloodshed that still festers resentment over a century later.
I think of it more in terms of robots. If you could save up a lot of money and be able to buy a robot that would do all of your cooking, cleaning, laundry, and yardwork and after that initial investment the only expense is the fuel to run it, wouldn’t you want to? Especially if you were convinced that the robot wasn’t fully setient? And if someone came along and said that you had to set your robot loose to roam uncontrolled, treat them like they were people, and now do all the hard work yourself or else pay someone by the hour to do it, wouldn’t you resist? The South at the time was racist in the real meaning of the term–they believed that blacks were a seperate species, more usefully trainable than a monkey but “obviously” not intelligent or consious enough to deserve the rights of the Master Race.
This is wrong pretty much from beginning to end.
First off, ignore what the United States did (and it’s the United States not “the north”). The war was not caused by industrialists. It was caused by secessionists.
The Confederates seceded from the United States and set up their own country. Then they declared war on the United States and began shooting at American soldiers. The United States responded to this the same way they would have responded if Canada or Mexico had started shooting at American soldiers. The Confederates started the war.
The talk about how “the North” was somehow attacking “the South” before the war is nonsense. Prohibiting slavery in the territories was not an attack. It had no effect on any state. The United States government said that they would not prohibit slavery in any state. The Republicans said they would not prohibit slavery in any state. Lincoln said he would not prohibit slavery in any state. How much clearer could they have been? The southern states were not defending themselves because nobody was attacking them.
If non-slave states banning slavery in the territories was an attack on slave states then the reverse is also true. Slave states must have been attacking the non-slave states when they tried to legalize slavery in the territories. To put it in your terms, the southerners were trying to tell the northerners how to live their lives. This idea is obviously nonsense but it’s the same nonsense that Confederate apologists keep claiming.
Others have already pointed out how the southern states did not want states rights. They opposed states rights when other states tried to prohibit slavery. They wanted the national government to overrule the states. The southern states wanted slavery not states rights.
The Confederates didn’t support secession either. They opposed any of the groups that tried to secede from the Confederacy back into the United States.
The Confederate cause was entirely about slavery, defending slavery, and supporting slavery.
Again, this is nonsense. The was didn’t start because the United States invaded the Confederacy. The war started when the Confederacy attacked the United States. The United States was clearly justified in defending itself after it was attacked.
And what are the “evil ideologies” that the United States holds?
What, the South just up and decided one day, “Hey, we’ve got nothing better to do, let’s secede”?
The North-South divide was caused by the northern U.S. moving to an industrial society, while the southern U.S. remained an agricultural, slave-based society. This divide started long before the Civil War. While slavery was the underlying cause of the Civil War, the slavery issue itself wasn’t the only thing that factored into it. You also have to factor in decades of folks on both sides throwing fuel onto the fire instead of trying to come to any sort of resolution (not that I think any resolution was possible, since the South wasn’t about to dismantle their entire economy and social structure).
Technically, the shooting war started shortly after the southern states seceded. But to say that is what caused the Civil War is completely ignoring everything from the 1800s to the 1860s that led up to the war.
Saying that the south caused the war by seceding is like saying WWI was caused only by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the only cause of the Korean War was North Korea invading the South. The actual event that sparked off the shooting is not the only cause of most wars, and is often not the root cause.
Yes. And what were they defending slavery from? Where was the “attack” on slavery coming from? It was coming from the northern industrialists and abolitionists. It wasn’t a shooting attack, but it was an attack.
Many of the founding fathers were well aware that they left a serious problem for the young nation with the slavery issue. But there was apparently no room for compromise and the south was not agreeable to slowly phasing out horrendous institution. They fought it tooth and nail.
In retrospect it was clearly rebellion; in the context of the time it was a little more confused. In other words, had I been alive in 1861 I don’t know what my attitude would have been on the same question even though I’m a “Yankee”.
Good points.
But they weren’t any worse that what the South committed.
What was the “evil ideology” of the north? Uniting the Union? Freeing Slaves?