Do We Care Why the Civil War Began?
There seems to be a “new” hot historical debate about why the US Civil War began. I t’s been 154 years since the end of the War, you’d think that historians would have it pretty well figured out. And, factually, they do; but current American politics, with its focus on “fake news,” has found a way to try to revise this story of America.
Fake news: the Civil War was fought between two sovereign countries, a “War Between the States” not a technical “civil” war. To reach that conclusion, it requires that the US Constitution be seen as a transitory document; one that could be dissolved at the “will” of a given state government. But the founders, and the states that ratified the Constitution, did not see their “bond” that way.
The founding fathers, children of the Enlightenment era, were incredibly aware of the power of the words they wrote. They parsed every phrase, in full knowledge that, as the musical Hamilton notes; “…history had it eyes on them.” So when the Constitution starts with the words “We the People of the United States…” those words were intentional. The Constitution was an agreement among the people, a contract of the people, and as Lincoln later added, “…by the people (and) for the people.” It used the structure of state governments to reach those people, but it specifically does NOT say that it was a contract among the states, unlike the Articles of Confederation, the previous organizing document. The Articles of Confederation was an agreement of “…perpetual union between the states…” and proceeded to name each state. The Constitution did not.
The Founding Fathers understood the “perpetualness” of their agreements, first with the Articles, then with the Constitution. They recognized that the new “American people” were the union.
A contract of the people cannot be broken by the states. This was the key argument that Lincoln made to preserve the Union, and was confirmed in the blood of 600,000 Americans on the battlefield.
When the “states” of the South seceded from the Union, they were exercising a “right” they did not have. When the Union acted to preserve itself by going into the South to put down that War of Rebellion (as the United States government characterized the Civil War at the time) they were not “invading,” they were putting down insurrection and restoring civil government in their own nation.
The battle of interpretation started soon after the war, when Southern apologists pushed the phrase “War Between the States” to try to reassert a state basis for secession. It was “fake news” then, and still is today.
And why did those Southern states find it necessary to try to secede? The answer is easy: slavery. Take slavery out of the equation, and there is no reason for Rebellion, and no Civil War.
The United States had spent “four score and seven years” squirming under the inherent conflict in a nation, founded in the words “…all men are created equal,” enslaving millions of humans. While just before the War, the law allowed slavery to continue in those places where it existed, the “compromises” reached in 1850 and 1854 restricted slavery’s expansion into new territories.
The cotton growers of the South were trapped by the economics of their product. Cotton growing and picking required massive amounts of human labor, most easily provided by slaves. And cotton, by the nature of the plant, wore out the ground. Long-term cotton growth required new fields; if the cotton-growers were restricted to the old South, they would ultimately fail. To those Southerners, slavery had to expand to the new territories, or their whole economic model would collapse.
They could not tolerate restriction. Therefore, they had to either expand slavery, or rebel. The rest of the Union, recognizing that slavery was incompatible with America’s founding principles, was not willing to allow that expansion.
It is certainly true that the Civil War did not begin as a war to “free slaves.” It was fought to preserve the Union, and as Lincoln said at the time:
“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.”
He wrote this just a few weeks before the battle at Antietam, where in one day over 22,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or went missing. But it was right after Antietam that Lincoln authored the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in those parts of the United States in rebellion. He did it to hurt the Rebels, and he did it to encourage the abolitionists. But he also did it with full knowledge that once on the course of freeing slaves, there was no turning back for the United States. He knew that Union victory and the end of the War would be the end of slavery.
In today’s politics many try to rewrite history. Some see an advantage in restricting the Federal government, particularly when it comes to expanding civil and religious rights. To those who claim that the Southern states were simply claiming their Constitutional sovereignty by seceding, and therefore states have similar rights to ignore the Federal government today, it is simply not true. And to those who claim that the Civil War wasn’t “about slavery,” and therefore the Secessionists weren’t fighting to maintain ownership of humans, that’s not true either.
Political convenience today does not allow us to revise the sacrifices of our ancestors. They knew what they were fighting for, and against, and so should we.
