Do We Care Why the Civil War Began?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There seems to be a \u201cnew\u201d hot historical debate about why the US Civil War began.\u00a0\u00a0I t\u2019s been 154 years since the end of the War, you\u2019d think that historians would have it pretty well figured out.\u00a0\u00a0And, factually, they do; but current American politics, with its focus on \u201cfake news,\u201d has found a way to try to revise this story of America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fake news: the Civil War was fought between two sovereign countries, a \u201cWar Between the States\u201d not a technical \u201ccivil\u201d war. To reach that conclusion, it requires that the US Constitution be seen as a transitory document; one that could be dissolved at the \u201cwill\u201d of a given state government. But the founders, and the states that ratified the Constitution, did not see their \u201cbond\u201d that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 <\/em>notes; \u201c\u2026history had it eyes on them.\u201d So when the Constitution starts with the words \u201cWe the People of the United States\u2026\u201d those words were intentional. The Constitution was an agreement among the people, a contract of the people, and as Lincoln later added, \u201c\u2026by the people (and) for the people.\u201d 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 \u201c\u2026perpetual union between the states\u2026\u201d and proceeded to name each state. The Constitution did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Founding Fathers understood the \u201cperpetualness\u201d of their agreements, first with the Articles, then with the Constitution. They recognized that the new \u201cAmerican people\u201d were the union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When the \u201cstates\u201d of the South seceded from the Union, they were exercising a \u201cright\u201d 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 \u201cinvading,\u201d they were putting down insurrection and restoring civil government in their own nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The battle of interpretation started soon after the war, when Southern apologists pushed the phrase \u201cWar Between the States\u201d to try to reassert a state basis for secession. It was \u201cfake news\u201d then, and still is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The United States had spent \u201cfour score and seven years\u201d squirming under the inherent conflict in a nation, founded in the words \u201c\u2026all men are created equal,\u201d enslaving millions of humans.\u00a0\u00a0While just before the War, the law allowed slavery to continue in those places where it existed, the \u201ccompromises\u201d reached in 1850 and 1854 restricted slavery\u2019s expansion into new territories.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s founding principles, was not willing to allow that expansion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is certainly true that the Civil War did not begin as a war to \u201cfree slaves.\u201d It was fought to preserve the Union, and as Lincoln said at the time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In today\u2019s 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\u2019t \u201cabout slavery,\u201d and therefore the Secessionists weren\u2019t fighting to maintain ownership of humans, that\u2019s not true either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"