I think only a minority of soldiers thought they were fighting for or against slavery. But I think few soldiers would have denied that without slavery there would have been no War. Slavery was the poison in the American experiment, which is why almost all the Founding Fathers thought, and hoped, that it would peacefully die out.
Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.“
Would thousands of black men fight and die to make white men free?
Hopefully. The reverse, we know.
The idea that the Civil War was fought to “free the slaves” is so entirely incorrect as to begger the imagination. The War was fought because the Southern states left the union, as was their constitutional right, and Lincoln would have none of it, so he invaded the South. See the Battle of Bull Run Number One. Sumter was a minor skirmish in which no soldier was killed. Slavery was part of the equation, of course, but the idea of young Southern boys fighting so that the Big Plantation Owner on the hill could keep his slaves is rediculous. As is the idea of young Northern boys, most of whom had never seen a slave or knew what one was, hopped on their white horses and rode down South to free them. The more I read about the Civil War, the more I leave it at Lincoln’s feet.
Most of the statements of secession by the states of the Confederacy indicate that slavery was the cause of secession. Jefferson Davis was quite forthright about it in his first message to the Confederate Congress:
The climate and soil of the Northern States soon proved unpropitious to the continuance of slave labor, whilst the converse was the case at the South. Under the unrestricted free intercourse between the two sections, the Northern States consulted their own interests by selling their slaves to the South and prohibiting slavery within their limits. The South were willing purchasers of a property suitable to their wants, and paid the price of the acquisition without harboring a suspicion that their quiet possession was to be disturbed by those who were inhibited not only by want of constitutional authority, but by good faith as vendors, from disquieting a title emanating from themselves. As soon, how ever, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provision for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was not “to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,” but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the wellbeing and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slaveholding States had augmented from about 1,250,000 at the date of the adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. With this view the legislatures of the several States invited the people to select delegates to conventions to be held for the purpose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted to meet so alarming a crisis in their history. Here it may be proper to observe that from a period as early as 1798 there had existed in all of the States of the Union a party almost uninterruptedly in the majority based upon the creed that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact. The Democratic party of the United States repeated, in its successful canvass in 1856, the declaration made in numerous previous political contests, that it would “faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the Virginia Legislature in 1799; and that it adopts those principles as constituting one of the main foundations of its political creed.” The principles thus emphatically announced embrace that to which I have already adverted – the right of each State to judge of and redress the wrongs of which it complains. These principles were maintained by overwhelming majorities of the people of all the States of the Union at different elections, especially in the elections of Mr. Jefferson in 1805, Mr. Madison in 1809, and Mr. Pierce in 1852. In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well established, and so necessary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States, in their conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they were menaced required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the Federal Government which they had ratified in their several conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resuming all their rights as sovereign and Independent States and dissolved their connection with the other States of the Union.
Having done this, they proceeded to form a new compact amongst themselves by new articles of confederation, which have been also ratified by the conventions of the several States with an approach to unanimity far exceeding that of the conventions which adopted the Constitution of 1787. They have organized their new Government in all its departments; the functions of the executive legislative, and judicial magistrates are performed in accordance with the will of the people, as displayed not merely in a cheerful acquiescence, but in the enthusiastic support of the Government thus established by themselves; and but for the interference of the Government of the United States in this legitimate exercise of the right of a people to self-government, peace, happiness, and prosperity would now smile on our land. That peace is ardently desired by this Government and people has been manifested in every possible form. Scarce had you assembled in February last when, prior even to the inauguration of the Chief Magistrate you had elected, you passed a resolution expressive of your desire for the appointment of commissioners to be sent to the Government of the United States “for the purpose of negotiating friendly relations between that Government and the Confederate States of America, and for the settlement of all questions of disagreement between the two Governments upon principles of right, justice, equity, and good faith.” It was my pleasure as well as my duty to cooperate with you in this work of peace. Indeed, in my address to you on taking the oath of office, and before receiving from you the communication of this resolution, I had said “as a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies must be directed to the conduct of our own affairs and the perpetuity of the Confederacy which we have formed. If a just perception of mutual interests shall permit us peaceably to pursue our separate political career, my most earnest desire will have been fulfilled.” It was in furtherance of these accordant views of the Congress and the Executive that I made choice of three discreet, able, and distinguished citizens, who repaired to Washington. Aided by their cordial cooperation and that of the Secretary of State, every effort compatible with self-respect and the dignity of the Confederacy was exhausted before I allowed myself to yield to the conviction that the Government of the United States was determined to attempt the conquest of this people and that our cherished hopes of peace were unattainable.
No slavery, no War.
OK Sandy. Go ahead and read the Confederate Constitution. It’s all about State’s Rights, except for slavery. That’s enshrined as applying to all States. And why did they secede from the Union? Slavery. Pure and simple. No slaves, no secession, no war.
Did the average Confederate soldier think he was fighting to keep slaves? I think that’s debatable, but that those same soldiers elected people to office who held that view would indicate that it was certainly popular enough to carry the day. The average US soldier wasn’t and ardent anti-fascist in the 1940s or anti-communist in the 1950s, or broadly capable or interested in debating the finer points, but probably enough so to be representative of the broader populace.
One often hears “Only a small percentage of southerners owned slaves”. That may be true (25% of white southern households–i.e.this included some soldiers who fought in the Civil War who didn’t own slaves outright, but whose older family members did). But culturally, it became the mark of prosperity in the South, even among free black people. In the South, owning slave became something “successful people” aspired to.
Another thing–the Federal Union wasn’t a “club”, but something a state applied for and was voted into. It seems to me, if a state wanted to leave, it’s US congressmen submitted a bill for vote by the whole congress to be “voted out”.
When one people insist on telling another what they must do, especially when such demands are against their inclinations or interests, friction is inevitable.
Did slavery cause the war, or did the abolitionist movement? Asked a different way, did the political and moral pressure applied by abolitionists make peace untenable?
Abolitionism was still very much the minority opinion in the North in 1861. The majority view was the strange sounding “anti-slavery but anti-abolition.”
The typical northener did not want slavery to spread, but didn’t have any intention to interfere with it where it was rooted. Plus, they were only slightly less hostile to the idea of a flood of freedmen than Southerners were.
However, the implacable demands and victories of “the Slave Power” driving the 1850s, which included a strong fugitive slave law, the abolition of the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the 19th Century’s Roe v. Wade, Dred Scott v. Sandford, aggravated the hell out of the typical Northerner. After all those victories, the South decided it would break up the Union because it had finally lost a presidential election. With the firing on Fort Sumter, the typical Northerner’s patience broke. And as the war went on, made him more amenable to abolition. Meanwhile, the South hung on to the peculiar institution despite the loud hints from their foreign friends that they would receive the recognition they craved. The leadership of the Confederacy would rather the CSA die than give up slavery. And so die it did.
Did slavery cause the war, or did the abolitionist movement?
Slave holders were firmly in control of the governments of all states of the future Confederacy. They attempted to leave the Union in order to protect slavery. In the North, the abolition movement had little sway. What did have growing power was an anti-slavery movement that opposed expansion of slavery into the territories, and the human man hunts for escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act that repulsed most Northerners. This growing sentiment made the Republican party a power in the North. The election of Lincoln convinced the slaveholders holding political power in the South that their Peculiar Institution was no longer safe in the Union. This was a miscalculation. Filibusters in the Senate would have blocked any antislavery moves in Congress, and Lincoln likely would have been a one term President, no president having had two terms since Andrew Jackson, and likely been succeeded by a Northern Democrat friendly to the South. Instead of letting the normal political process play out, the slave holders, some reluctantly, embraced the Fire Eaters of the South who had long called for secession, and embarked on a course which led to the destruction of slavery, the law of unintended consequences always being in full force in human affairs.
it’s US congressmen submitted a bill for vote by the whole congress to be “voted out”.
Correct BPS! If the South as a body had approached Congress for a peaceful exit, I have little doubt that over time they may have been successful. But secession was under taken in an atmosphere of panic and hysteria, and such a reasonable course had almost no support.
Quite right Dale. This was typified at the Charleston Convention of the Democrats in 1860 which ended in a split of the party, when one exasperated Northern Democrat stood up and said, “Men of the South, you want us to eat dirt. We will not do it! We will not do it!” The average Northerner wished the slavery issue would simply go away, but the advocates of slavery would only grant them this luxury if a third of the states could leave the nation.
Mr. McClarey, you may be right, as H.L. Mencken used to respond. We’re not arguing the moral evil of slavery, about which we can all agree. My argument is that the war was not about “freeing the slaves,” but “saving the union.” Lincoln himself said that many times. But, suppose Lincoln had not invaded the South and had, instead, let the Confederacy go its way. There would have been no horror of war and no 600,000 dead soldiers. Most historians agree (see Dr. James Robertson) that slavery would have ended as a matter of course. I would argue that fomer slaves would have been integrated into society much better and that there would have been no Jim Crow South, at least not as we have known it. There had to have been a better way than Civil War.
After the Civil War the Old South enacted the Jim Crow laws which reversed as much as the Old South could the gains made by the freed slaves. This along with the points made by Don and Dale undercuts the states rights arguments. Slavery was an open abridgement of the all men are created equal assertion in the Declaration of Independence. That is what made the issue so contentious and poisonous.
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Even in modern times the H1-B visas historically gives the employer control over the immigrants’ work permit. Indentured servitude, a kinder, gentler form of slavery as it were. The spirit of slavery lives on in the way illegal immigrants are used as cheap, exploitable labor.
“Slavery was the poison in the American experiment” it was unfortunately.
And the shame is still being used by sections to excuse political violence and fuel racial divide.
The late Charlie Kirk challenged black college kids repeatedly about the inferiority complex they still carried (and has been drummed into them), and he said nothing prevents a person from advancing their situation to a better one. The colour of one’s skin is irrelevant. This is true. Only victimhood prevents this.
To be fair, Slavery is a tale as old as time. I listened to a British Catholic human rights solicitor talk on Radio Maria the other day. He said current figures on Modern Slavery in UK is around 20,000. And that’s only the ones they were able to count! There has always been a group of people in the world who used another group of people as subjects, against their will, to perform tasks in order to advance themselves. It goes as far back as the Old Testament.
It was about slavery. It was always about slavery. Slavery was an institution in the South and they were never going to give it up peacefully. Free labor is what the plantation owners wanted, what they had and what they were going to keep come hell or high water.
Advanced in technology 30-40 years later (farm tractors and other farming implements) made slavery obsolete, but human beings are stubborn. Southerners – the English based aristocracy and the mountain folk who descended from Scot immigrants were never going to listen to anyone.
When one looks at the English treatment of the Irish and Catholics for centuries and the combativeness of the Scots….a fight was inevitable, and so was the outcome. I highlighted these examples because the aristocrats were mostly English in ancestry and the hillbillies were mostly ethnically Scot.