The storm had been brewing for quite some time—perhaps more than a century. It was about many things, but at the heart of it all lay slavery.
A poll taken on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War showed that most Americans believe that a disagreement over states’ rights was the primary cause of the war—this despite the overwhelming opinion of most historians and teachers, who have examined the records and documents that demonstrate clearly that the cause was slavery. The issue of states’ rights was a rhetorical smoke screen. As we will see from Secessionist documents, the states’ rights they wanted to preserve had to do with owning slaves.
This is all still hotly debated among nonhistorians, who often ignore facts, with just about everyone confusing the cause of the war with the reasons for fighting it. Slavery caused the war, but that’s not what the fighting ended up being about. Some background material will help clarify the confusion. In order to understand the battles and the men who fought them, we need to know what led them there to kill their friends and relatives.
The first thirty of what later became known as slaves came to the Virginia Colony in 1619. But initially even slaves from Africa were considered indentured servants, released after a specified period of time or on conversion to Christianity. But wealthy whites didn’t like losing their best-trained servants, so they turned slavery into an automatic life sentence for both the slaves and their descendants. A 1654 Virginia court decision designated John Casor, an African, as the first official slave in the colonies. Even though he had served well past his period of indentured servitude, the court defined him as his master’s property and confirmed the designation as a life sentence.
The trade in Africans, which had gone on since the mid-1500s, escalated in the 1700s. As agriculture grew in the South, plantation owners relied on slaves to plant, tend, and harvest crops. Businesses increasingly used them to generate profits. As larger numbers of slaves were kept together in forced labor camps, the quality of their lives decreased to maximize profits, and increasingly brutal methods kept them in line. As slavery expanded, though, many questioned it—even some slaveholders, such as Thomas Jefferson.
The Revolutionary War complicated matters. It was a war for autonomy, the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal.” Yet the newly formed United States was one of the largest slaveholding countries in the world. While framing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery in order to gain the support of Southern states, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, which probably wouldn’t have joined the Union otherwise. But the discussion of human rights resulting from the Revolution also led to talk of abolition.
The abolitionist movement grew rapidly in the early 1800s, particularly in the North, lobbying governments and eventually establishing the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves to freedom. Their extremely vocal and sometimes violent activities sparked equally violent reactions from their opponents, pushing the two factions farther apart. Slavery became a major political issue, and the evolving political parties were forced to take sides, so that by the 1850s there were two main parties—the Republican Party, favoring abolition, and the Democratic Party, favoring slavery.
These two political parties now have essentially inverted what they were then. In general, Republicans were reformers, favoring change, while Democrats favored maintaining the status quo. Then, most Republicans were liberal and lived in cities, while most Democrats were conservative and lived in the country.1 Up until the war each party had its own liberal and conservative divisions, but when considering the parties of the 1800s, in a general way Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were more liberal, favored change, and opposed slavery, while Jefferson Davis and the Democrats were more conservative, favored the status quo, and championed slavery. Ultimately slavery defined their parties.
Linking the issue of slavery to individual states ended up dividing the country. Perhaps if the Founding Fathers had established a federal law one way or the other, taking the issue away from the states, the nation could have avoided civil war. But even then the issue was so contentious that the Founding Fathers—who had other matters to handle—for the most part avoided it.
As slavery expanded in the South after the Revolution, Northern states began abolishing it, sometimes converting slaves automatically to indentured servants. By 1810 the Northern states had freed 75 percent of their slaves—which wasn’t all that difficult since there weren’t many slaves in the North. Only 1 percent of enslaved and free African Americans lived in the North, primarily in cities, while 95 percent lived in the South, with the rest in the territories.
By 1860 the South had nearly four million slaves. A third of all Southern families owned at least one, with half of those owning between one and four. Estimates put 20 to 30 percent of the slaves in the hands of less than 1 percent of the slaveholders, and only nineteen slaveholders owned more than 500 slaves each.
The country divided itself into Northern free states and Southern slave states. The political parties dividing along the same lines, with Republicans in the North and Democrats in the South, made the situation worse. As new states and territories joined the rapidly growing country, Republicans wanted to contain slavery to the South for moral reasons but also to decrease the Democrats’ political power. Democrats naturally objected.
The issue became so incendiary that people were being murdered because of their opinions. In the Bleeding Kansas years of 1854–58, Kansas Territory, seeking statehood, tried to establish whether it would be a free or slave state as abolitionists and proslavery forces poured in to battle it out. Both factions fully believed they had God on their side.
Southern Democrats controlled Congress and the White House from 1852 to 1858. The Supreme Court also sided with the South in its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which said that blacks couldn’t become American citizens, the Constitution didn’t protect them, slaves were strictly property, and Congress and the various territorial governments had no authority to prohibit slavery. The court foolishly thought it was removing the issue of slavery from politics by making it a matter of law. Instead, the decision exploded a bomb among abolitionists and Republicans.
The Dred Scott decision caused a panic in the North, particularly among the political parties. If territories became slave states, slavery would expand and the Democrats could cement total control of the government. It forced many who otherwise were willing to accept slavery, as long it remained in the South, to take sides. Northerners flocked to the newly created Republican Party, formed several years earlier from the antislavery Free-Soil Party. Since the Republican Party had formed around containing slavery, the South became deeply worried. They—particularly Virginians—had to a large extent controlled the federal government since George Washington, but without any new slave states they would lose control of the government forever and the North’s power would continue to increase.
When Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives in 1858 and two years later won the presidency and both houses of Congress, Southern politicians suddenly found themselves playing a minor role in government, with the prospect of losing power completely. Nor was their fear baseless. With one party dominating the North and another the South, when one lost, half the country lost. When the majority of voters elected Lincoln, the South could say legitimately that they were subject to a government for which they didn’t vote. Lincoln didn’t appear on ballots of ten of the eleven states that seceded. In Virginia, where his name did appear, he received only 1.1 percent of the vote.
Fearing a permanent loss of power, Southern politicians saw an exaggerated future in which the North imposed its will on them and they had no recourse. They believed their rights would be violated—which was already the case to some extent because abolitionists were violating the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution—and that the government would dictate whatever the North wanted, including the abolition of slavery altogether.
By the time Lincoln took the oath of office, Southerners had convinced themselves that much of their fantasy had already happened, seeing Lincoln as a modern-day Julius Caesar, dictatorially leading a tyrannical federal government. They viewed secession as a second war for freedom—except, of course, for the slaves.
Even though most didn’t own slaves, Southerners firmly believed abolition would end the “Southern way of life.” William Tecumseh Sherman, living in Louisiana before the war, wrote that “all men in Louisiana were dreadfully excited on questions affecting their slaves, who constituted the bulk of their wealth, and without whom they honestly believed that sugar, cotton, and rice, could not possibly be cultivated.”
When Southern politicians lost control of the government, they felt they had to form their own government to save themselves. The seven cotton states of the Deep South, which had the greatest number of plantations and slaves, seceded first. Together they formed the Confederate States of America on February 4, 1861, with a government modeled on the one they were leaving.
Many reasons other than slavery are given today as the cause of the war—states’ versus federal rights and economic differences between the North and South, among others—and to some extent these played a part. But at the base of it all lay one primary cause: slavery. The South feared losing it, which various declarations of secession clearly spell out. Several discuss slavery at considerable length, with Georgia’s the most detailed and reasoned.
Four states—Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee—gave no reasons for secession. The remaining seven cited the following reasons:
Slavery (four states): This is the only reason Mississippi gave, saying, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. … A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. … It [abolition] has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits, and to destroy our social system. … For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.”
Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas also mentioned slavery as a reason, and Georgia further specified the exclusion of slavery from new territories, making it illegal for Southerners to take their legal property with them if they traveled or moved to the new territories.
Violations of the Constitution (four states): Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas cited violations of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause.
Fear of Lincoln (four states): South Carolina cited the election of Lincoln, “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery,” and the fear that under Lincoln’s government the “guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of selfgovernment, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy”—all before Lincoln even became president.
Georgia declared that the avowed purpose of Lincoln and the government dominated by the antislavery Republican Party was “to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.”
Arkansas believed the Republican Party intended to wage war on the seceded states, while Alabama merely cited Lincoln’s election.
Abolitionists (three states): Georgia and South Carolina claimed the abolitionists were encouraging their slaves to rise against them, threatening their security and “domestic peace and tranquility.” South Carolina also pointed out that the abolitionists were helping slaves run away. Texas was more general, citing the relentless activities of abolitionists.
Federal government (two states): Virginia believed the federal government was perverting its powers in order to injure Virginians and oppress the slave states.
Texas’s Declaration of Secession, the most vitriolic, cited the problems in Kansas, claiming that “the disloyalty of the Northern States” and “the imbecility of the Federal Government” allowed “incendiaries and outlaws” to “trample upon the federal laws and to make war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory.” They also cited “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.”
States’ rights (one state): Initially the South used the banner of states’ rights as a euphemism for their perceived right to have slaves, but over time they separated and added to it the right to freedom, selfdetermination, and secession. At the time of secession, Southern documents and speeches clearly reveal a primary concern about the right to own slaves. Only South Carolina mentioned encroachments on states’ rights, and the only rights they specifically listed were the “right of property in slaves” and the rather nebulous “right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions.”
Before seceding, the South stood against states’ rights when it came to restrictions on slavery, such as New York’s law that if a slaveholder vacationing in the Empire State brought along a servant, that slave would automatically be free. They also seethed that it was legal in other states for citizens to openly form abolitionist societies and for blacks to vote.
The South wasn’t fighting for the right of a state to secede. Every state in the Union had that right—and still does. It was the method of secession that Lincoln felt was illegal, and he presented his case in his first inaugural address. The Constitution acted as a contract between the states, and for any state to leave, all parties to the contract had to be in agreement. Obviously the North was not. To join the Union, a territory had to petition Congress and draft a constitution. Both houses of Congress had to approve territorial statehood, and the president signed a bill formally establishing the new state. In theory, the reverse also held true: If a state wanted to secede, the state legislature had to vote as such, and both Congress and the president had to approve. But even Lincoln himself didn’t believe the president had authority to force states to remain in the Union. The Southern states, on the other hand, believed in total self-determination, that they could leave the Union only if a majority of their citizens favored it. There was talk in the North of rebellion and treason, but the issue didn’t come to a head until after the Battle of Fort Sumter.
Northern businesses (one state): Georgia felt the federal government actively favored Northern businesses.
Tariffs (none): Custom duties comprised 95 percent of the government’s revenue in 1860, although by 1863 it only made up 56 percent because the government reintroduced excise taxes and for the first time established income taxes in order to pay for the war debt. Before the Morrill Tariff, America had one of the lowest tariff rates in the world. In 1861 the Morrill Tariff raised the average custom duty from 21 to 36 percent.
Some pro-Confederate people today cite tariffs as a cause of the war, but at the time the cotton states seceded, the government was operating under the 1857 tariff law, which the seceding states helped write. It wasn’t until after secession, when those states pulled their members from Congress, that Republicans could pass the Morrill Tariff, which President Buchanan, a Democrat, signed just before Lincoln took office.
Only Georgia and South Carolina cited tariffs in their secession conventions, and even Alexander Stephens, later vice president of the Confederacy, argued that the Morrill Tariff wouldn’t affect the South as much as others claimed.
Three weeks before Fort Sumter, Vice President Stephens gave his Cornerstone Speech, in which he outlined the difference between the United States and the Confederate States. “The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
His speech demonstrates how deeply slavery had become embedded in the Southern identity.
The Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter of April 12–13, 1861, gave Lincoln the excuse he needed to call up an army, since the peacetime force was too small to fight a war and a large portion of it, including many of the best officers, had joined the Confederacy. Even though most people knew the war they’d been expecting had begun, only Congress could declare war, so Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers to regain federal property taken by the South. Four wavering states rightly saw the proclamation as Lincoln’s call to arms. Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and most of Virginia used it as their reason for joining the Confederacy. The four border states, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, remained with the Union, along with what later became West Virginia.
Kentucky, deeply divided, initially decided on neutrality, but Brigadier-General Leonidas Polk, “the Fighting Bishop,” sent the Confederate army to occupy Columbus, prompting the state government to ask the Union army to come to their aid. The majority of Kentucky’s elected government was pro-Union, so Southern sympathizers formed a provisional government, creating two Kentucky governments—one with the Union, the other with Confederacy. A similar situation arose in Missouri, where a provisional government formed in opposition to the original elected government.
When people argue over what caused the war, they tend to confuse the matter with why they were fighting—two different things. Slavery ultimately caused the war. Without slavery, the war wouldn’t have taken place, but that’s not what the fight was about. Slavery led to secession, and that split sparked the fighting. For the North the fight was to preserve the Union and suppress an illegal rebellion. For the South it was to uphold the right of self-determination, regardless of what the rest of the country wanted. The South saw the Union army as an invading force against which they had to defend themselves, while the Union saw the Confederacy as a traitorous bunch of rebels trying illegally to seize U.S. soil and establish an illegitimate government.
I wrote you about my disgust at reading the Reunion speeches: According to [George] Christian the Virginia people were the abolitionists and the Northern people were pro-slavery. The South went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war—as she said in her Secession proclamation—because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding. Ask Sam Yost to give Christian a skinning.
I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in.
—CONFEDERATE COLONEL JOHN MOSBY, KNOWN AS “THE GRAY GHOST,” TO CAPTAIN SAMUEL CHAPMAN
The soldiers themselves gave a wide variety of reasons for fighting. Chief among them was patriotism either for their country or for their state. Some believed it was the right thing to do—and their duty. Others feared being labeled as cowards if they didn’t. (Neighbors sent some men dresses if they refused to join.) Some did it for adventure and excitement or a chance at honor or glory. Some wanted to prove themselves and show their courage. Some wanted to join friends or relatives. A few realized the importance of the events taking place and wanted to take part. Some wanted to defend their homes, while a few wanted the pay or signing bonuses. There were those who saw it as a battle between virtue and vice or good and evil. Some didn’t know why they were fighting. For most, it was a combination of these reasons, which changed over time. As the war dragged on, many Union soldiers, sick of it all, wanted to stop the bloodshed by ending slavery altogether. But the Confederates didn’t want their world turned upside down. Both sides professed to fight for freedom. Very few risked their lives solely to preserve or to end slavery.
Even Lincoln didn’t initially intend to end slavery. Although personally opposed to it, he didn’t believe the president had the power to abolish it. The president, through the executive branch, implements and enforces laws. It was up to Congress to create, modify, and abolish them. He also knew the country at large wasn’t ready to end slavery.
Lincoln had a higher priority. In a letter to the New York Tribune, he wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
The Emancipation Proclamation was a tool designed to weaken the Confederacy. A prior proclamation, issued in September 1862, freed all slaves in the Confederacy if those states didn’t rejoin the Union within three months. But that didn’t affect the slave states that remained in the Union. With the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, between 20,000 and 50,000 slaves were freed immediately, with many more to follow as the Union regained control over parts of the South. The Proclamation dramatically shifted the government’s perspective on the war from one of preserving the Union to one of establishing freedom for all. Lincoln wanted to sway international opinion in the Union’s favor. The Proclamation also allowed freed slaves to join the military and may have hurt the South’s economy by encouraging slaves to flee to the North. The Union didn’t officially abolish the institution of slavery until after the war, when Congress enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Before the war began, no one knew what they were getting into. They hadn’t a clue to the unimaginable death, destruction, and devastation they were facing. Each side thought it would end quickly. But both sides were determined and roughly evenly matched, so it turned into a difficult and bloody war that dragged on for four years. Circumstances and events established a situation where war was probably unavoidable—that is, without compromises that neither side was willing to make.
The storm had been brewing since before the birth of the country. When it finally hit, it literally ripped the country apart, and America went to war against itself.