So, this annoys me to no end, because the first dude is technically right, Lincoln came in to office with no intention to outlaw slavery, although he did want to keep it confined to the states it was already legal in. And what he’s actually wrong about is that Lincoln made it about slavery to get the support of the northerners - he actually made sure that it northerners believed it was about “keeping the union together.” Remember the union still had the slave states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. He wanted to keep these states in the union.
Lincoln (through Seward) stressed the anti-slavery stuff to Europeans, many of whom wanted to intervene on the side of the confederacy because that was where they got their cotton. The industrial north also was a threat to industrial Europe, but the agrarian south was a source of raw materials. But by stressing the anti-slavery stuff in Europe (and then of course the emancipation proclamation which didn’t actually outlaw slavery in the border states) he ensured Europe could not intervene on behalf of the confederacy since it would be so unpopular. So, in the states it was about the union, abroad it was about slavery.
But anyway, he’s right on a technicality that, for Lincoln, it was not really about slavery. But this does not mean the war itself was not about slavery. His conclusion rests on the assumption that in a war, two sides must be diametrically opposed to one another, so if Lincoln and the north were not fighting against slavery, therefore the south could not be fighting for slavery.
But as others have pointed out, the south explicitly says they are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. They are worried about waning political power also - if Lincoln stopped the spread of slavery across the continent as he desired, the growth of free states would mean congress would not be as evenly split between slave and free states, opening up the possibility of legislating an end to slavery.
So the war was about slavery, and would not have occurred without slavery. Often we point to the Battle of Sumter as the beginning of the civil war, but many historians also point out the popular civil war could instead be said to begin in 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, or with Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawotamie Massacre, or maybe the caning of Charles sumner or the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, or any of the political battles that arose when the US began to expand west and the question arose “what about slavery.” All of these events are directly about slavery and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
And also, just as a last thing “many southern generals didn’t care about slavery.” I have no idea how true that is and it doesn’t matter, because the war was not fought because of southern generals but because of politicians, southern landowners, and an economy resting on the subjugation of Black people, and that’s why they were fighting.
This is a really well thought out and written comment. Thanks for an excellent contribution 👍🏼
Thank you!
I try to always emphasize the existential threat to the South that abolishing slavery was. As another user pointed out in Mississippi’s declaration of secession, their “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”. If you abolish slavery, the South dies (in the economic sense, and in the cultural sense for white people) immediately. If you simply restrict slavery to this one corner of the country, the South dies slowly as its political power is curbed.
Remember the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Similarly, people who would otherwise be on the fence about slavery were firmly in the pro-slavery camp because of the political and economic power inextricably tied to it.
That’s not to say that the South was full of reluctant slave owners or anything. It was still one of the most racist times and places in human history. The South brutalized their slaves and they enjoyed doing it, or at best were indifferent to the brutality.
The South liked slavery. But it was the economic and political threat that meant fighting was their only course of action if they wanted to survive as a socio-economic bloc at all. If it weren’t for the economic impact, they probably would have done like the North: got rid of their slaves (though not their racism…the North was extremely racist at the time too, a fact which history glosses over).
And we can see proof of this in the history of the South after they lost: abject poverty for generations. That was what they feared.
It’s way more complicated than pro-slavery vs anti-slavery. On both sides. Yes, that was a central theme but there’s an important distinction between “fighting to keep slaves” and “fighting to keep the economy built on slaves”. The former is pure evil, the latter is the same kind of evil we all promote when we buy iphones or leggings assembled by child laborers in China.
I grew up in the South and went to college in the South, so I learned all of this. But I’ve since discovered that in the rest of the country, none of this context is taught. It’s literally “these guys were all unrepentantly evil and we, the good people, defeated them”. Like a fairy tale.
On the southern side it’s really not any more complicated than being pro-slavery. Not only secession, but throughout the 19th century southern states were pushing for the continuance and expansion of slavery, and actually resisted industrial development in the south because of the threat it posed, then as you point out fought to preserve slavery. And I’d love to know the difference between fighting to keep slaves and fighting to keep an economy built on slaves, and how a southern plantation owner who owns slaves and has great sway in government (or is in government) is in any way comparable to me with no political power buying an iPhone (or other smartphone) because of the difficulty surviving in the modern world without one.
And I’m sorry, I did not realize that southerners were all given in depth lessons about bleeding Kansas and the lead up to the civil war. You must be hiding them somewhere because all I ever get from southerners is the rote memorization of basic historical facts that seem to (but don’t) contradict popular narratives of the civil war with absolutely zero historical analysis, just like the picture. I’d much rather a layperson have the northern “fairy tale” understanding of the civil war that actually gets its reasons for occurring correct, than some both sides attitude towards it. I honestly cannot believe I typed out that whole thing above and what I get in response is some sort of “nuanced” confederate apologia.
And I’d love to know the difference between fighting to keep slaves and fighting to keep an economy built on slaves
I doubt that, but I’ll play along.
First though, we should make a distinction. Most people are ignorant. If we are to leave people ignorant of history, yes the Northern fairy tale is better than the Southern one. At least then they’re not ignorant and racist. But here I’m arguing against fairy tales AT ALL.
Nuance can be weaponized, yes. That’s a poor argument for always striving against nuance and contextualizing things. I haven’t seen any pro confederate racism in this thread at all. I think we are not in danger of that happening here, now, in this conversation specifically.
I think we can afford nuance in this space. We don’t need to silence it for fear of it being weaponized by bigots. There’s very few if any bigots here, and the pro-nuance camp here doesn’t deserve to be accused of bigotry. Maaaaybe pedantry, at worst.
Back to my first point:
The difference is one of degree. The North faced a similar dilemma of pro-slavery racism vs abolitionism a hundred years prior, but without the economic or political implications. That was a pure “racism good” vs “racism bad” debate, and “racism bad” won. Not a complete victory, but enough to undo slavery and some of the worst dehumanizing aspects of racism.
If you could, today, abolish slavery and child labor without giving up your iphones and milk chocolate and cheap clothes, that’s an easy battle to undertake, morally. But you can’t extricate the economic implications. Removing yourself from consumerism is HARD. We have fought wars to protect our oil even though we know it’s bad for the planet. No, we didn’t all agree with it, but enough people put their immediate quality of life above concerns for the climate and for the well being of locals. These people, you and I included, are not all unrepentantly evil.
It’s a tradeoff. It’s a spectrum. It’s not all yes or no, black or white, good or evil.
“I will fight a war to preserve my right to be evil” is not a thing that anyone has ever thought or done. “I will fight a war to maintain my standard of living” is a thing that happens all the time, even when that standard of living is based on evil.
In many cases, the evil that the standard of life is based on is SO EVIL, it must be stopped. That’s why the North was right. I’m not making some sort of both sides bullshit argument here. The Confederacy was wrong, and should not have existed. The tradeoff between harm done and standard of living for those on top was too much, by far. It was a morally good thing that slavery was destroyed, despite the harm that came to Southern whites because of it.
But the reason for understanding all this is so we don’t fall into the trap of dehumanizing the Confederacy. They’re not cartoon villains. They had rational reasons for why they were willing to fight to preserve slavery.
“People who disagree with me are evil, full stop” is a dangerous place for one’s mind to go, and I’ll always try to combat it. With the understanding, like I mentioned above, that nuance can be weaponized, and when that happens (not before), we can take the gloves off, ignore nuance, and berate the bigots into submission. Then once the bigots are gone, we can go back to discussing nuanced and contextualized hostory.
Slave owners and their drivers are unrepentantly evil in my book, there’s no amount of apologia you can offer to make me feel good about Preston Brooks or any of the big Charleston plantation owners.
Sometimes even the way slavery is taught, as if the point of slavery was to produce white supremacy rather than cotton and not the other way around, an economic system which these notions of race and white supremacy developed to explain and justify.
Then post-Civil War you have this Populist movement which condensed the interests of both black and white labor and really threatened the landowners, and out of that comes things like Booker T Washington’s “Atlantic Compromise” and notions of race relations. It isn’t really until the New Deal and the 50-60s with A. Philip Randolph and MLK Jr that you get any kind of serious civil rights connections to labor organizing again.
as if the point of slavery was to produce white supremacy rather than cotton and not the other way around
This is a perfect summary of how I feel the civil war is taught in the north.
That isn’t “technically correct”. His statement said the Civil War. Not Lincoln. If you want to go and support the racial ramblings of a moron on Twitter, it would help to technically correct yourself.
If someone means “both sides thought it was about slavery” then initially no. The south absolutely left over slavery and stuff like the fugitive slave act (“states rights” and “right to property” 💀) but originally the union was just trying to get everything back together.
That’s part of why it feels off.
Imagine this contrived metaphor. The union is a barber. The south paid for a haircut. The south says “This haircut sucks, I’m getting a refund with the bank.” Then the union says “Actually you owe me money and can’t do that.” Is it correct to say this spat is about a haircut? I’d think so, yes. Let’s say later the union decided “actually, I’m a good barber and it isn’t just about the money.” Is it correct to say the spat is now about a haircut? Definitely. So when someone says “The spat wasn’t initially about a haircut, the union didn’t care about their barber skills until later”… Is that correct? Technically. Does it make me suspicious they’re trying to spread Lost Cause of the South propaganda? It definitely makes me suspicious.
Even if both sides didn’t agree the war was about slaves originally the fucking Confederacy definitely believed it was about slavery the entire time and they were founded on slavery and mentioned it in their letters of secession and their founding documents. There’s no ambiguity about that. Everything else is just a linguistic trick of whether a war being about something means both sides have to agree what it is about.
His entire train of thought is based on the idea that “Lincoln didn’t oppose slavery” which is “technically correct.” Except it leaves out all historical analysis which allows him to come to the fallacious conclusion that “the civil war wasn’t about slavery.”
Most Americans naturally want the war to be about slavery—and they object to allegations it’s not—because that’s the morally righteous position, which is the position they want to believe their side held. So telling them the war was about slavery for the South, but the North really didn’t give a shit, is not what they want to hear.
yeah I agree, people have a hard time hearing any criticism of Lincoln. I wouldn’t say that he “didn’t give a shit” because he was committed to stopping it’s spread into the western territories (the position that caused secession). And he did express moral opposition to slavery. But he was a moderate and felt bound by the constitution that he couldn’t actually outlaw slavery in the south, hoping that to stop its spread west would cause a gradual end to slavery as slaveowner political power wanes.
So he’s a liberal who goes to war mostly to keep the union together, and his first thought is not really about the slaves. But he did do things, like when he issues the emancipation proclamation he ensures there is a legal argument that the slaves freed by it will remain free after the war. So it’s not like Lincoln didn’t care about the slaves. He was extremely moderate, but he did hold generally anti-slavery views.
Also it’s hard to say “the north didn’t give a shit” since abolitionism was strong in the north, John Brown was celebrated in the north. There were a lot of people who cared and were extremely opposed to slavery in the north. You have soldiers singing songs celebrating John Brown. Of course this was definitely not true of everyone lol.
So I don’t think it’s fair to just say the north was completely unconcerned with slavery, but there’s a lot of complexity there, especially with Lincoln, and ultimately at the end of the day Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery and didn’t declare war because of slavery.
