The Civil War – Part One

The American Civil War began 150 years ago today, April 12, 1861. On that day, Confederate forces fired upon the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, in the state of South Carolina. Many books have been written on how circumstances reached such a point that Americans would fire upon other Americans. Many more books have been written about the four years of warfare that followed.

This three-part post doesn’t attempt to make sense of the entire Civil War episode of American history. It won’t analyze military events. With the except of one brief segment, it won’t speculate on “what if?” questions. This post will attempt to answer a few related questions. The first will require some discussion, and is the subject of Part One:

(1) What was the main issue over which the war was fought?

Responses to other questions will appear in Parts Two and Three:

(2) Which side was correct on the issues?
(3) Based on moral considerations, which side should have won?
(4) Why has public opinion developed as it has?

This post includes fact and reasoned opinion, intertwined. If you disagree with the assertions or conclusions that follow, explain why and submit your comments back to this blog. If they have merit, I will concede your points.

What was the main issue over which the war was fought?

You will hear many over the past century-and-a-half claim that the motivating cause of the Civil War was slavery. They are not correct. Admittedly, it does look like slavery was the cause of the war, if you don’t look too closely. Slavery was indeed the issue around which the two sides coalesced, and the end of slavery was an important result of the war. The root issue of the conflict, though, was not whether or not slavery was permissible. The real issue was who had the power to decide whether slavery was permissible.

States’ Rights - Two Different Perspectives

This may seem like splitting hairs, but the distinction is important. Leave the issue of slavery for a moment and think about these observations. The states of the north (the Union) and the south (the Confederacy) had a different concept of the very nature of the Union.

In the north (the Union) the opinion was that when the various states had joined together in common cause in the American Revolution, and later in the Constitutional Convention, they had created a new entity, a nation that was bigger and greater than any of the component parts (the States) that created it. This view is related to that of the Federalist Party of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Marshall in the early 1800s. The states were considered subordinate to the federal government.

In the south (the Confederacy) the individual states were considered the creators of the federal government. The opinion was that the states had voluntarily created the federal government, and the federal government existed at the pleasure of the states that had created it. Accordingly, if a state disagreed with a federal law, then that state could nullify, or cancel, that law. If a state no longer felt that remaining in the Union was in its own best interests, then that state had the right to secede, or leave, the Union and set itself up as an independent nation. In fact, the word “state” was then and remains today a synonym for the word “nation.” This view is similar to that of the Democratic party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The United States was seen as a sort of voluntary alliance.

It may be surprising today, a century and a half later, when our federal government has become so much more powerful than the individual states, but before the Civil War, the second view was more common. Notice this clue from public dialogue. Today, and for more than a century, those who speak about this nation might say, “The United States is….” But before the war, those who spoke about this nation would say, “The United States are…”

Likewise, the Union name for the war, the “Civil War,” has become the accepted term. “Civil War” implies a conflict between factions within a single nation. But consider the term used in the Confederacy to name the war, a term which endured in common use for a century after the war’s end. Southerners called the conflict the “War Between the States.” This term implies a war between different nations, not among a single nation, as southerners believed the “States” of the “United States” were actually separate nations.

The most concrete evidence that the war was primarily about states’ rights rather than slavery is this simple fact. Four slave states (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland) chose not to secede. They remained slaveholding states, but stayed within the Union.

Why do So Many Think the Main Issue was Slavery?

If the war was about states’ rights, why do so many think it was about slavery? Because that is the issue over which the two competing ideas came to conflict.

The document which created the new nation, the Declaration of Independence, declared that “all men are created equal.” This was not a new idea. Staging a revolution on that premise, and creating a new nation dedicated to it… That was something new. But the new nation failed to live up to its own high ideals. Even as patriots fought for American freedom, some Americans continued to own slaves. This extreme double standard was recognized from the start as a problem, but the new nation was unable to solve it right away. The new nation was too busy gaining its independence in a war with the most powerful country on Earth. Many patriots, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, realized that the issue of slavery would have to be solved eventually. But their efforts were spent in creating the new nation, and the people of their generation did not have the means to solve the problem of slavery. If they had tried, the entire American nation would have failed. The existence of slavery was accepted as the status quo in the Constitution, although those opposed to slavery did manage to insert into the Constitution a prohibition against the slave trade. In any event, the problem of slavery was left for another generation to solve.

Over the next few generations many attempts were made to solve the slavery problem. As time passed, it became more and more a regional issue. Slavery, once legal in all thirteen colonies, was outlawed by the northern states. This was partly a moral decision, but it was also an economic one. In the north, factories were common and farms were small. Slavery was economically unnecessary. In the south, where plantations formed the core of the economy, slavery was an economic necessity.

The United States was a nation that was half slave-owning, and half free. Even though racist attitudes were common in all parts of the nation, a person of African descent in the north had most of the same essential liberties as persons of European descent.  Well, they did until 1857 at least, when the Supreme Court rendered the worst verdict in its history in the "Dred Scott" case.  In the south, though, most persons of African descent were enslaved, deprived of the rights delineated in the Declaration of Independence ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”), owned.

Animosity between the regions grew more and more heated. Compromises kept the nation about equally divided. Those opposed to slavery, called “abolitionists,” called for slavery to be eliminated completely. The abolitionists, as you might expect, tended to live mostly in the northern “free” states. Southerners rejected their calls to abolish slavery as meddling in matters that were none of their business. They maintained that the institution of slavery was their particular cultural and economic right. (“Our peculiar institution,” one called it.) Southerners held that the federal government had no business attempting to influence the issue. They contended that whether the institution of slavery was permitted or not was a question for each individual state to decide.

Northerners disagreed. Whether motivated by old Federalist sympathies, or international pressure to end slavery (it had been outlawed in British Canada and Mexico for decades), or the abolitionists, or a sense of moral indignation, they overwhelmingly wanted slavery to end.

In the end, it came to war. The thing that caused the war was whether states or the federal government had the final say in matters of governance. The issue on which they divided was slavery.

[To be continued…]