What WAS the civil war about?

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Did all the Southern States Have a Right to Seceed?

This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Political Science Professor. He argued that a right of secession did exist, but it only applied to the original 13 States and Texas. His argument was that the original 13 States created the Federal Union and joined by their own free will and that Texas was a soveriegn nation which had joined the Union under a similar circumstance. All other states are creations of the Federal government and as such have no right to leave the Union.

In other words, Virginia could legally leave the Union, but not Missouri.

I found it to be an interesting argument, in any case.
 
Rather than re-type my old comments on the subject...

I would say the Civil War is largely the fault of the Southern politicians, who initiated secession to protect their personal material interest in the continuation and expansion of slave power, and plowed under hundreds of thousands of boys to try to preserve it. As their own public statements attest (reading those pesky primary sources again, sorry... ), they considered slavery a positive moral good, not something that was a necessary evil that would eventually go away. So the claim that slavery would have gone away on its own seems specious to me if the slave owners were making alot of money off it and thought God said it was good to go. Because you know how eager people are to abandon ways of getting rich that have God's seal of approval on 'em.

The State's Right's claim is true as far as it goes, but again by actually reading the primary source material it is clear that the "right" to own slaves was the paramount concern of the Southern politicians. The fact that they could dupe otherwise disinterested farmboys into fighting with some ersatz visions of herrenvolk democracy or wild stories about Republican-sanctioned forced negro sex with their sisters just goes to prove that the public at large is stupid.

Even if you somehow accept that this circumstance can co-exist with being on the "right" side, you have to recognize that secession was a suicidal strategy that made certain all the bugaboos that the war was supposed to prevent in the first place. It directly lead to a vast expansion in federal power and set the South as a whole back 100 years. Even if we accept for a moment that the South was fighting for all the right reasons, and that secession was perfectly legal, we are still forced to conclude that the war itself was folly on an immense scale... a gamble for high stakes where the other guy has the stacked deck.
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http://www.thehighroad.org/showthre...792&perpage=25&highlight=slavery&pagenumber=5
 
A dark period in American Military History

As with all other instances where politics and policy fail to reach a non-violent outcome - the American Military was called on to continue "politics" by forceful and leathal means. Our American Military has a proud history and heritage of winning our nations battles. Even during our lower points in this history, the military continued to win the battles in spite of not necessarily winning the war (per se).

In spite of the fact that many, if not most, military scholars laud the heroes and the magnificent "Generalship" of the Civil War, I have choked on this since I first raised my right hand to support and defend..... I see this as the darkest period in American Military History when our military got turned on itself. Regardless of the politics, the rationale, or the subtle and not-so-subtle causes, our own citizens and soldiers (and sometimes a fine line between the two) had turned on themselves. I find it hard to laud one General as a hero when his victory came at the price of other Americans - regardless of side. Grant, Lee, McLellan, Jackson, etc are figures larger than life to one side or the other... but in the end, they were responsible for murdering Americans.

Did we, as a country, benefit from our internal conflict? Did we truly learn from our mistakes? Were we merely acting like brothers who fight against each other tooth-and-nail, while maintaining the tightest familial bond, and attack any "outside" aggressor with even more ferocity? Or were we just two large entities occupying the same turf and the eventual fight that broke out was one power trying to overpower the other? I don't have any answers to these questions. Being on the "tip of the spear" when it comes to continuing our nations politics and policies "by other means" limits me to seeing things from the point of view of those who fight for our country.

I also am just jaded since I grew up in Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg, and grudgingly went along with the annual battlefield tours that our public school system insisted on. It got worse at the Marine Corps Basic School (6 month finishing school for new 2ndLts) where one supposed "scholar" after another would rant and rave on how wonderful the Civil War was as we studied Pickett's Charge and humped (hiked) the route to Chancellorsville. The s**t only got deeper at Command and Control School (finishing school for Captains) when actual PhD scholars ranted and raved on the same BS.

Thanks for letting me vent. I know that I've made some bold conjectures and there are some holes than can be exploited. However, I firmly stand behind my opinions and experiences.
 
"As for slavery being on its way out...I don't think so."

Nightcrawler,

Slavery was on the way out, but people in the south just didn't realize it. Had the Civil War not happened, several events that were already in motion by the time the first shots were fired would have crushed virtually the entire Southern slave economy.

The first of these is the developement of off-shore cotton supplies, mainly in India and Egypt. Britain desperately wanted to reduce their dependence on American cotton, and looked to those two colonies as likely places for cotton cultivation. In addition, the type of cotton cultivated there, short staple, proved to be easier to process and gave finer weaves. That's where the aura of Egyptian Cotton as a clothing fiber was born. Cotton fairly quickly sank from being a very valuable commodity to one whose value was more along the lines of corn or wheat.

When British colonies started producing cotton in large quantities in the middle 1870s, the cotton economy became severely depressed in the South, even with the reduced production caused by the war.

At the same time, field exhaustion was rearing its ugly head. You simply can't plant cotton year after year and expect the soil to take it. Huge swatches of Southern agricultural land were burning out by the 1880s.

Finally, starting around 1900, had slavery lasted that long, you had the rise of the boll weevil. What the war, the crash of the cotton economy, and soil exhaustion didn't do, the boll weevil would have done. It was the boll weevil that finally forced much of the South to move away from the one-crop agricultural system and move into multi-purpose farming.
 
"The overwhelming majority of southerners were poor land owners (40 acres and a mule)..."

JPM,

You do know where that phrase came from, don't you?

40 acres and a mule was a proposal floated in Congress during Reconstruction. It would have given every former slave (heads of households) 40 acres and a mule as reparations for slavery.

It never transpired, which directly led to the development of the black sharecropper class.
 
Beaver,

No problem, and I apologize for misunderstanding you.

When you get right down to it, racism was deeply engrained in virtually the ENTIRE nation, not just the south.

One of the fallacies of the time is that the South was largely as depicted in Uncle Tom's Cabin (false), and that the North was a bastion of enlightened benevolent cooperation and coexistence between races (also false).

During the Civil War a number of the draft riots in the North became less about the draft and more about killing blacks. In New York, interestingly enough, most of the rioting was done by Irish immigrants, who targeted affluent whites and blacks of any status.
 
crittergitter,

I know a lot of people consider the South to have been a soverign nation that was invaded blah blah blah.

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

The only way the South could have completed the nexus to independent nation would have been by beating the North and forcing recognition.

I can jump up and claim that I'm the King of France, but if I don't have the ability to give that claim force, then it's moot.

It can be said that the Southern states had the right to try to suceed. It can also be argued persuasively that the Northern states had the counter right to fight to preserve the Union.

The Southern states were never able to effect the separation, and were never recognized as a soverign and independent nation by anyone other than themselves.

The South provoked the war by firing on Federal property, i.e., Fort Sumpter.
 
Mike:

I swore to myself that I wouldn't get deeper involved in this exercise in futility, but I must add that I agree with you that racism has no geographical boundaries.

At a local high school basketball game in our small (1850) community last week, one of the locals insisted on harassing a young black player on the opposing team. The HS principal swiftly and unceremoniously removed the insolent young dog, but not before his incivility had besmearched our entire community in the eyes of the visitors.

By the way, to the person who mentioned the Klan's presence in Vermillion, my atlas puts that town in South Dakota, not in Nebraska

That is not to say that the Klan didn't enjoy some popularity in the Cornhusker state. Heck, we even have a Democrat or two out this way.
 
The issue of states rights was very real and still is today. However, as a southerner, I must admit that the particular "right" that the south chose to focus on was in fact not a right, but a clear violation of a right. Individual rights trump the state's rights, just as much as state's right should trump the union's rights. In the case of the Civil War, the south was doing the right thing for the wrong reason, while the north was doing the wrong thing for the right reason. The issue will never be put to rest until both sides learn to accept that.
 
I found this thread late and my question concerning if it was about "freeing slaves" is as follows:

The importing of new slaves had been stopped in the early 1800s. Therefore the only new slaves in America were the ones being born here.

Now, a slave was a large investment. In fact, most plantation owners couldn't afford slaves and only a tiny percentage actually owned them. A slave owner had to shelter them, clothe them and feed them or he wouldn't get any productivity. Oh, they may run away, so now he needs an overseer and guards to watch them, which means more people on his payroll. Slavery was expensive.

Compound those factors with increasing industrialization, including the mechanization of agriculture, and it's clear that slavery was a dying institution.

Since the supply of slaves in America was fixed (to a certain extent), (due to no more importation), and assuming the North REALLY DID want to free them, Lincoln could have gotten the total numbers of slaves owned in America and written the slave owners a Government check for their fair market value, thereby buying the slave's freedom. Boom: slavery is over and no War of Northern Aggression.

Expensive? Yes, but no more expensive than a war on American soil, with Americans killing other Americans and opening wounds and cultural rifts that are still being felt to this day, 144 years later.


I'd also say that Reconstruction caused more damage to the country than the War.
 
P&R,

The term Plantation means a large farm worked by resident labor -- in the case of the South, slaves.

Plantations and slaves went hand in hand. Slaves made plantations possible, as if you didn't have slaves you, as the individual farmer, couldn't cultivate much more than 40 or 50 acres, if that.

What we think of as a Southern plantation is today most analagous to corporate farming of the type that goes on in the mid west, where a single agricultural concern may hold hundreds or even thousands of acres.


As for actually buying slaves, that was floated at various times, and summarily rejected by many in the South.

Even though the slave trade had been abolished in the United States in 1808, slavery was by no means dying out of its own weight. In 1808 there were about 1.2 million slaves in the United States, by 1860, nearly 4 million.


As an aside, here's a site with some very interesting and informative numbers regarding slaves in the United States from the 1860 census.

http://www2.uta.edu/stillwell/notes-file/usslavery.htm#pop
 
By the way, to the person who mentioned the Klan's presence in Vermillion, my atlas puts that town in South Dakota, not in Nebraska
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Hmm? That was me. I was working off memory, so perhaps it wasn't Vermillion. I know it was Nebraska because we also had unrelated conversations about the unicameral legislature, which I found very interesting/enlightening. :)
And the Kansas Vermillion is very close to the Nebraska state line.
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So it the South Dakota Vermillion now that I look at a map.
 
These are all some great posts !

As a previous poster said it is incorrect to refer to the great conflict that happened , as the civil war ....rather it is the war of Northern Agression. The South was merely exercising its right of secession. The war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with tarrifs and money. At the time of the war the tarrifs leveed on the South were so disperportionate that the Southern states ended up paying 87% of all federal tax revenues, while the South had its very livelihood and way of making a living in peril. The first attack at Ft. Sumpter....it was a customs house ! Kind of symbolic.
Karl Marx wrote from London , England in observation of the war. "The war between the North and the South is a tarrif war.The war is further not for principle, does not touch the question of slavery,and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty."
I have studied this extensively, and have had to relearn and open my mind as I was propagandized from one viewpoint in school.
Consider this exerpt from the New York Evening Post, March 2,1861

"That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substatially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. "

Clearly there was a dependence on the South to grease the wheel. Sounds like a bit of old fashion corruption to me.
Remember Lincoln himself ran on a campaign that was pro slavery, to get elected president. He vowed not to touch slavery. He didnt declare the Emmancipation Proclimation till several years into the war. While it may sound noble...many feel it was a further ploy to weaken the South!
In studying this I find compelling evidence that the South was the noble side! We have all been fed a revisionist history pile of crap, while in fact the South was acting on freedom , the Constitution, and states rights! In fact the nation as our Founding Fathers intended died with that conflict !
I refer you all to the books below for reference. And next time some liberal talks some banter about the battle flag being racist....remember it was St. Andrews cross and stands for freedom; perhaps even more than our stars and bars!
A converted Yankee.......


"The Costs of War" John Denson (1998)
"Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (1996)
"Secession State and Liberty" David Gordon (1998)
"The Confederate Constitution" Marshall de Rosa (1991)
"Was Jefferson Davis Right?" James & Walter Kennedy (1998)
"When in The Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case For Southern Secession" Charles Adams (2000) Five stars on this one!
 
"As a previous poster said it is incorrect to refer to the great conflict that happened , as the civil war ....rather it is the war of Northern Agression."

Oh come off it, Stealth.

Up where I grew up we called it the War of Southern Stupidity.

The South rattled the sabres long before the North.

The South called up the militias long before the North.

The South went to force of arms long before the North.

If there was an agressor, it was the South, which undertook said agression by firing on Federal property with heavy guns.

The taking of Ft. Sumpter by Southern forces is not unlike the Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor.

A tactical victory, and an absolutely stupdendous strategic nightmare of a defeat.

"The war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with tarrifs and money."

Well, except when you consider, as I've explained above, that the Southern economy was so tightly wound around the slavery issue that there's no ability to really separate the two. Given the force that slavery played in the Southern economy, the war then actually had a lot to do with slavery.

Then there's whole political issue that slavery forced on both the North and South -- parity between the number of slave and free states, etc.

As for tariffs, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm by 1845 the tariff issue had been resolved with the last of the tariffs to which the South objected either expiring or being revoked. By 1860 tariffs were close to a generation removed from a being a direct cause of the war.

As for the right of a state to seceed (sp?), here's what one person had to say about the issue...

"Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent the execution of the laws deceived you. The object is disunion. Disunion by armed force is treason.†(Andrew Jackson, President and a Southerner, to South Carolina during the Tariff crisis of 1832).

"Remember Lincoln himself ran on a campaign that was pro slavery."

No, Lincoln ran under the Republican banner, which was to allow slavery to continue in the states where it existed, but was opposed to its expansion in all new territories, even those in the South below the lines of demarcation laid out by the Compromise of 1850.

Additionally, the Republican platform formally opposed the Dred Scott decision.


And, in opposition to what someone noted earlier, that Lincoln didn't receive a single vote in a Southern State, that's not true.

Lincoln got 1,364 votes in Kentucky, 1,887 votes in Virginia, 2,294 in Maryland, 3,822 in Delaware, and over 17,000 in Missouri, all slave states.


And finally, here's something that I never knew before...

In the Confederate Constitution, slavery was a guaranteed right, but the foreign slave trade was outlawed.
 
The war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery
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Spoken like someone who has never read the documents of secession. ;)

If the war had nothing to do with slavery, why did Jefferson Davis mention it 23 times in his inaugural address? If slavery was a non-issue, why did he spend most of his address obsessing over the federal government's "impairing the security of property in slaves"? Why did the secession conventions of the various states make proclamations such as, "We ask you to join us in forming a confederacy of Slaveholding States" if slavery was a non-issue in the war?

:rolleyes:

To say that slavery was not one of the principal issues of the war is to simply stick your head in the sand and sing "Dixie" to yourself. It is a denial of objective reality. You have to ignore what Jefferson Davis said, and what the state secession conventions said, and... and... and... :scrutiny:
 
Davis touched on state's rights and nullification/tariff issues in his address, but skirted slavery quite handily. There's some vague language that could be construed to be, in part, about slavery, such as the part about the agricultural south, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion.

The Confederate Constitution, however, addresses the subject of slavery in great depth.
 
MIke Irwin............

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"The South rattled the sabres long before the North. "
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Even liberal Ted Turners portrayal of the conflict in " Gods and Generals" clearly shows that the North was amassing troops before the South..IE they invite Lee to lead the armies, which he of course refuses.
It is only the propaganda that has been handed down after the war to present, that you parrot............and I mean no offence in this as it is only discussion. I too thought as you until two years ago when I began to dig deeper. The union had their slaves, so how can you draw a distinction ? It is not difficult to see that the issue was not about slavery........Slavery is used as a cover by both sides even to mask their real intent. Did you not read the quote from the New York Evening Post?
Reading that was eye opening to me.......I encourage you to read at least one of those books...All written recently and show compelling evidence that the war was not as we have been taught.
 
Hkmp5sd,

Wrong speech. I was referencing one he made in Montgomery on April 29, 1861... not the one on February 18th.

Source:

"Message of Jefferson Davis to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America," from J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861-1865

Partial quote:

As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in 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 provisions 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.
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And Ted Turner is an historian... how?

And movies are always absolutely historically accurate, how?

You claim that I'm parroting propaganda, but your citation of a movie as a reflection of historical fact is most curious.

A little timelineing is in order...

South Carolina was by far the most rampantly secessionist (sp?). It had been drilling troops as part of the State militia for nearly 4 years with an eye toward secession.

The gun emplacements that fired on Ft. Sumpter were state emplacements, not Federal, and were manned by state militia under the command of Gen. Beauregard.

Seven southern states seceeded on February 8, 1861, nearly a month before Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President.

As part of the formation of the Confederacy, the South put it self on a war footing from virtually its first day of formation by putting into place a military structure and requesting the individual states to call up their militias, authorizing a tax on cotton to pay for the military, and calling for 100,000 volunteers to serve for 12 months. I'm still searching for the order, but it was issued in February, again before Lincoln was innaugurated.

Prior to Lincoln's innauguration, James Buchanan took no steps to put US troops on a higher military footing. He called for no volunteers, he issued no orders for garrisons in the south to take steps to fortify, nothing.

It wasn't until AFTER Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumpter that Lincoln issued a general call for volunteers to put down the rebellion.

Lincoln invited Lee to head the Union army on April 18, 1861, AFTER Confederate forces had fired on Ft. Sumpter. Lee declined, given that a day earlier the Virginia Secession Delegation had voted to put the issue before Virginia's citizens. The vote was ratified, and Virginia formally seceeded, on May 23, 1861.

No, you say that you thought as I did until you began to dig deeper... I've been digging deeper for the past 20 years, Stealth, and have yet to uncover anything that would cause some sort temporal transformation -- maybe I haven't watched the right popular movie?

Yes, the North had its slaves, but it wasn't an institutionalized system or foundation of the economic process in the North -- it was in the South.

I find it to be absolutely amazing that someone would say that slavery had nothing to do with the the break out of the Civil War when nearly 100 years of political and economic interaction between the two regions of the nation that fought the war were predicated largely by issues of slavery.

What you're saying, then, in spite of the overwhelming bulk of evidence to the contrary, that:

The South's economy didn't hinge on slavery. After all, cotton, by far the South's largest and most profitable cash crop, planted, cultivated, harvested, and shipped itself. A triump of early technical innovation.

The Missouri Compromise had nothing to do with slavery issues. I guess it's a fallacy, then, that what set off the crisis was a bill by James Talmadge that would have prohibited the importation of slaves into the Missouri territory, which was petitioning for statehood.

The Compromise of 1850 had nothing to do with slavery. After all, the Fugitive Slave Acts, which were adopted as part of that compromise, weren't about slaves at all.

As I've said before, Stealth...

Slavery was not a direct CAUSE of the Civil War, nor was the war about freeing slaves and ending slavery, but it was by far the strongest CATALYST for the war.

There's simply no way to deny that.

If slavery truly had been only a mask for the South to cover its true intents, then why spend to much time writing it into the Confederate Constitution?

As for the books you cite...

I've read 4 of the 6 and, again, have found nothing in them that would change the precept that slavery was the strongest catalyst of the war, nor has any of them caused me to change my thinking that the South was largely wrong in its actions of trying to seceed.

And yes, I read the quote from the New York paper.

Did you actually read my response to it? I said that by 1845 the tariffs that had caused the 1830-32 nullification crisis had been revoked or passed out of law.

Tariffs of other types still remained in place. The South still squealed about some of them. Interests in the North squealed about other tariffs that had been placed on goods made in, or brought to, Northern interests. It wasn't solely a unilateral issue. It's a case of "Your taxes are too high? Well guess what, so are mine."
 
The causes (plural) of the Civil War are many and complex. May I recommend reading the first few chapters of McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" which explains the causes far better than I ever could hope to do.

A thing to think about, though, were two names actually used during the War by the sides that fought.

In the South, some called it "The War for Southern Independence"; and in the North, some called it "The War for the Preservation of the Union".
 
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