More than 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War, as well as countless civilians. This means that the number of Americans who died during that one war was as great as the numbers of Americans who died in all other wars through Vietnam combined. Of course, this statistic is helped immensely by all of the casualties in the Civil War being American–no other nations were involved–but that does not lessen how many men died during those four years as the North and South fought over the abolition of slavery. So many lives were lost for a cause that might have been pushed out of existence through a bill or another amendment. However, it may not have been able to happen any other way.
For example, in Great Britain, slavery had been eradicated with an act passed by Parliament. Abolitionist MPs took more than twenty years to push it through, but there were no battles or major bloodshed, and half of the country did not secede. Other European nations followed suit. The slave trade was done away with internationally, and while the US made bringing slaves over from other countries illegal, it allowed slavery to flourish within its borders. James McPherson wrote in his book Battle Cry of Freedom that at that time, a good many southerners considered slavery to be an evil,
albeit a “necessary” one…. But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South. Abolitionist attacks on slavery placed southerners on the defensive and goaded them into angry counterattacks. By 1840 slavery… was “a great moral, social, and political blessing–a blessing to the slave, a blessing to the master” (56).
The South made most of its money on cotton and other crops mass-produced on plantations. Slavery was relativley cheap, and “whether or not [it] was backward and inefficient . . . it was extraordinarily productive” (39). Slaves were forced to do most of the dirty work, freeing the higher class citizens of the South to
cultivate the arts, literature, hospitality, and public service… “Instead of an evil,” said John C. Calhoun in summing up the southern position, slavery was “a positive good… the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world” (56).
In other words, the South was building itself on slavery. Partly because of this, and partly because of Northern attacks on the institution, southerners gained a defensive-agressive temper in relation to slavery. During the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861 they began seceding, leaving the United States to create their own, more perfect confederacy. Jefferson Davis declared,
[From] the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights… which our fathers bequeathed to us… [let us] renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty (qtd. in McPherson 241).
Southerners justified their secession to themselves by stating they were fighting for their rights just like the founding fathers did. Of course the rights they claimed were not the same–they wanted the “right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of centralized government”–but their motives were similar, they said. McPherson puts it well:
Because the Union after March 4, 1861, would no longer be controlled by southerners, the South could protect its liberty from the assaults of hostile power only by going out of the Union (241).
Abolitionist Republican rule in the capitol threatened the South’s freedom–that is, by the South’s definition of the term. When they could no longer control the House and the Senate, and no longer had a anti-abolition president in the White House, many of the southern states feared that the North would use its power to rid the nation of slavery and make the black person politically equal to the white.
Their fears were not unfounded, yet as the Civil War began, slavery was not presented by either side as the main reason they were fighting. The Confederacy wanted to be acknowledged by European governments, so in defining their war aims the Confederate delegates “rarely mentioned slavery except obliquely in reference to northern voilations of southern rights. Rather, they portrayed the South as fighting for liberty and self-government,” not heeding Samuel Johnson’s question about an earlier generation of Americans: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (311). Northern newspapers, on the other hand, raged that “the Nation has been defiled. The National Government has been assailed. If either can be done with impunity… we are not a Nation, and our Government is a sham” (308). The flag, union, constitution, and democracy were all symbols, but powerful enough ones for men to bleed and die for. At this point in the war, emancipation of black men and women was a means to victory (by taking slaves the North was getting rid of one of the South’s assets), not yet an end in itself.
While the southern planter class did not use slavery as their face motive, it remained a large one behind the scenes. But the average, non-slaveowning rebel did not care as much about the defense of slavery. A captured soldier described their position well to Union soldiers: “I’m fighting because you’re down here.” He had taken up arms to keep blue-clad northerners out of his homeland. Yet if slavery was nonexistant, “there would have been no Black Republicans to threaten the South’s way of life, no special southern civilization to defend against Yankee invasion” (311). And while both parties in the North refused to admit that they were fighting to preserve or demolish slavery, most of their attacks on one another concentrated on this topic.
A paradox presents itself. Neither the North nor the South openly stated that they were fighting over slavery, yet if there had been no slavery the South would not have seceded and the North would not have fought to subdue it. And Lincoln made abolition a fundamental aspect of the South’s surrender.
Could the United States have abolished slavery without the Civil War? Likely not. Slavery was so ingrained into southern economy that they refused to give it up. In the end, the Union had to destroy the Confederacy, forcing them into surrender because they did not have enough men left to fight and food left to sustain themselves.
Perhaps the most telling example of the southerners’ views on slavery occurred when the war was nearing its completion. Jefferson Davis (along with Robert E. Lee) proposed that the South draft black men into the army. The measure was defeated by the Senate, but not before southerners had expressed their shock. “The day you make soldiers of slaves is the beginning of the end of the revolution,” Howell Cobb said. “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” It appeared, McPherson points out, that “many southerners apparently preferred to lose the war than to win it with the help of black men” (835). If these people were so set on keeping black men and women their subordinates, it makes perfect sense that a war had to be fought to overrule them. The sad reality might best be captured by Ulysses Grant, who wrote after Lee’s surrender, “I felt… sad and depressed… at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe one of the worst for which a people ever fought” (850).
Featured image by me.
Ellen Sheehy 