Causes of the American Civil War
Mike Kubic
"The weather is always doing something," Mark Twain once complained in a speech to the New England Society. In America, it helped to bring on the Civil War.
Climate was at the roots of the profound disagreements that led to one of our nation's greatest tragedies, the 1861-1865 war between the North and the South.
In the lower half of our continent, early settlers learned that there was a way to make a good living despite the region's oppressively hot, humid and unhealthy climate. The region had good soil and an almost year-round growing seasons, and it could produce abundant harvests of such crops as rice, cotton, and tobacco.
In his book, The American Civil War, Christopher J. Olson quotes a letter from a Mississippian describing the good fortune of many newcomers to the South: "I have met with... men who (many of them are entirely destitute of a common education) five years since could not get credit for a pair of shoes, now worth 100,000 to a million of dollars... [This] is in truth the only country... where a poor man could in 2 or 3 years without any aid, become wealthy..."
But to grow these staples required large fields and plenty of workers who were cheap and, in the description of one South Carolina planter, of "inferior" race "but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, (and) in capacity to stand the climate."
In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, White southerners enslaved Black Africans for free labor. The American South quickly became a major market for their imports.
In 1665, there were fewer than 500 Africans in Virginia. In the lower South, by 1840, there were 2.3 million of them, or 47 percent of the population, and there were 1.6 million more in the rest of the slave-owning states.
This was not the case north of the 36th parallel, where the temperate weather encouraged small-scale farming and, from the 1700s on, the growth of an industry that employed tens of thousands of white European immigrants. Thus from the very birth of our nation, behind its unifying desire for independence and democracy, there was a significant, and in time growing, divide between the North and the South.
Compromise
As long as each colony was independent, slavery had a few critics in the North. But at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which was called to create a single federal government, the status of the slaves became a major issue.
The Southern states wanted to count them as white people in order to increase the number of their representatives in the United States Congress and the Electoral College that elects U.S. presidents. They did not, however, want the same blacks included in the number of citizens for which the states had to pay taxes to the central government.
The Northerners, who had far fewer slaves, wanted just the opposite fewer Southern representatives who would water down the North's influence in the federal government, and more Southern money in the U.S. treasury.
The anti-slavery states lost by one vote, and the status issue was papered over by a formula that counted each slave as three-fifths of a white person. It was a shameful compromise that ended during Reconstruction with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
But even more fateful in the long run was the failure of our Founding Fathers to resolve the other weighty issue involving slavery, and that was its reach into the new U.S. territories and states in the rest of the continent.
Again, a compromise of sorts was cobbled together by admitting into the Union one new slave state for every new free one, but it did not satisfy either side. The two regions deeply disagreed on other issues, such as the states' rights and the roles of the states' and the federal governments. But over time, as the morality of slavery came under scrutiny, the Southern emotions became so inflamed and hardened that the spread of the system became the crux of the controversy over which 630,000 young Americans died in the bloodiest war of our history.
The Heart of the Conflict
Most experts on the issue agree that the virulent Southern feelings that eventually triggered the war resulted from the region's two-centuries-long dependence on slavery. In his book, Drawn With The Sword, preeminent American Civil War historian James M. McPherson quotes the opinion that in effect, slavery had stamped the South with its own culture by creating "...a ruling class with economic interests, political ideals,... moral sentiments [and an] aristocratic, anti-bourgeois spirit with values... emphasizing ... a strong code of honor ... that set [the South] apart" from the North.
As the South's high-minded self-esteem increasingly clashed with the slavery's moral rejection by the rest of the world (by the 1850s, only the South and Brazil owned large numbers of slaves), the region's leaders defended their economic system and their grossly exaggerated sense of honor with arguments that most Northerners found beyond baffling.
Mississippi Senator (and later the Confederacy's president) Jefferson Davis praised slavery for giving even the poorest white Southerner someone to look down upon - a sense of dignity and "equality with the rich man." South Carolina's Senator John C. Calhoun proclaimed slavery "a positive good" on much the same grounds as Davis. Religious leaders in the South denied that slavery was a sin by proclaiming it to be "ordained by God."
Eventually, this self-righteousness precluded any possibility of another North-South compromise. "Slavery was the basis of Southern life," Olson concluded in his book, and it "had to expand for Southerners to feel that they were being treated equally as Americans and Christians."
That, however, was a demand that the North was increasingly unwilling to accept. Between 1830 and 1860, the New England and the North Atlantic states absorbed nearly 1.5 million German and almost 2 million Irish immigrants, and by the latter date, about 20 percent of the people in these regions were foreign-born.
These new Americans had no need for slaves and no sympathy for Southern lifestyle or traditions. Their religion prohibited slavery, and they readily flocked to the cause of abolitionists who by 1860 controlled much of the new, anti-slavery Republican Party. The sentiments of the North were usually couched in civil language and moderate terms. For example, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican leader, at first favored slavery's limitation - not an abrupt extinction - and did not call for the emancipation of the slaves until after the South launched the war.
Mounting Tension
But the anti-slavery camp had its extremists, and it grew stronger and more assertive. The description of the slavery's cruelty in Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin inflamed the Northern abolitionists so much that they refused to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the North to return escaped slaves to their owners.
In many towns in the North, volunteers patrolled streets to rescue fugitive blacks from the slave catchers, and in 1854, President Franklin Pierce had to send the U.S. soldiers to bring a slave back to the South after the officials and people of Boston refused to turn him in.
To this growing antagonism in the North, the Southerners' responded with an increasingly virulent, hateful attacks on their critics. The 1854 founding of the Republican Party was denounced as "an outrage and insult that's unacceptable to the South," and Southern politicians and newspapers routinely denigrated The Northerners as subhuman creatures far below the whites of the noble South.
An episode that best depicts this sentiment was the aftermath of a scathing speech in June 1856 by an abolitionist U. S. Senator against the pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Two days later, a Southern congressman walked into the Senate and severely beat the abolitionist with a gold walking cane.
Typically, this crime is punishable with a stiff fine and a time in jail. In the South, it made the congressman a hero and inspired the following editorial in the Richmond Enquirer, a major Southern newspaper: "These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves," the editors wrote. "They have grown saucy and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! Now, they are a low, mean, scurvy set, with some little book learning, but as utterly devoid of spirit or honor as a peck of curs... The truth is that they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission... Let them once understand that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves, like decent dogs - they can never be gentlemen..."
Instructed by arguments at this level, it was no wonder that President Lincoln's moderation throughout the growing crisis, and his final appeal to the South in March 1861 that "[w]e are not enemies, but friends" fell on deaf ears.
Deriding The Northerners as animals, the Southerners denounced the 1860 election of the "Black Infidel" Abraham Lincoln for president as "a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage" and turned it into a casus belli.
The subsequent secession of eleven Southern states, their formation of the ill-fated Confederate States of America, and the April 1862 bombardment of the Union's Fort Sumter that started the Civil War, were the products of the South's unhinged and irrational mindset caused by the slavery.
As McPherson points out, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many Southerners called the conflict "the War of Northern Aggression" and regarded their region not as the attacker, but the victim. The brave Confederacy soldiers went to battles under the slogan "Freedom is not possible without slavery!" "Dixie," their war-time song, called the Union troops "beagles" that had to be "hunted back to their kennels."
It was our country's surpassing good fortune that after "the beagles" - whose song proclaimed that "The Truth is Marching On!" - had won on the battle field; President Lincoln, in his high-minded, immortal Gettysburg Address, closed the war's final chapter by restoring the dignity and generosity of the relations between the North and the South.
Climate was at the roots of the profound disagreements that led to one of our nation's greatest tragedies, the 1861-1865 war between the North and the South.
In the lower half of our continent, early settlers learned that there was a way to make a good living despite the region's oppressively hot, humid and unhealthy climate. The region had good soil and an almost year-round growing seasons, and it could produce abundant harvests of such crops as rice, cotton, and tobacco.
In his book, The American Civil War, Christopher J. Olson quotes a letter from a Mississippian describing the good fortune of many newcomers to the South: "I have met with... men who (many of them are entirely destitute of a common education) five years since could not get credit for a pair of shoes, now worth 100,000 to a million of dollars... [This] is in truth the only country... where a poor man could in 2 or 3 years without any aid, become wealthy..."
But to grow these staples required large fields and plenty of workers who were cheap and, in the description of one South Carolina planter, of "inferior" race "but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, (and) in capacity to stand the climate."
In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, White southerners enslaved Black Africans for free labor. The American South quickly became a major market for their imports.
In 1665, there were fewer than 500 Africans in Virginia. In the lower South, by 1840, there were 2.3 million of them, or 47 percent of the population, and there were 1.6 million more in the rest of the slave-owning states.
This was not the case north of the 36th parallel, where the temperate weather encouraged small-scale farming and, from the 1700s on, the growth of an industry that employed tens of thousands of white European immigrants. Thus from the very birth of our nation, behind its unifying desire for independence and democracy, there was a significant, and in time growing, divide between the North and the South.
Compromise
As long as each colony was independent, slavery had a few critics in the North. But at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which was called to create a single federal government, the status of the slaves became a major issue.
The Southern states wanted to count them as white people in order to increase the number of their representatives in the United States Congress and the Electoral College that elects U.S. presidents. They did not, however, want the same blacks included in the number of citizens for which the states had to pay taxes to the central government.
The Northerners, who had far fewer slaves, wanted just the opposite fewer Southern representatives who would water down the North's influence in the federal government, and more Southern money in the U.S. treasury.
The anti-slavery states lost by one vote, and the status issue was papered over by a formula that counted each slave as three-fifths of a white person. It was a shameful compromise that ended during Reconstruction with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
But even more fateful in the long run was the failure of our Founding Fathers to resolve the other weighty issue involving slavery, and that was its reach into the new U.S. territories and states in the rest of the continent.
Again, a compromise of sorts was cobbled together by admitting into the Union one new slave state for every new free one, but it did not satisfy either side. The two regions deeply disagreed on other issues, such as the states' rights and the roles of the states' and the federal governments. But over time, as the morality of slavery came under scrutiny, the Southern emotions became so inflamed and hardened that the spread of the system became the crux of the controversy over which 630,000 young Americans died in the bloodiest war of our history.
The Heart of the Conflict
Most experts on the issue agree that the virulent Southern feelings that eventually triggered the war resulted from the region's two-centuries-long dependence on slavery. In his book, Drawn With The Sword, preeminent American Civil War historian James M. McPherson quotes the opinion that in effect, slavery had stamped the South with its own culture by creating "...a ruling class with economic interests, political ideals,... moral sentiments [and an] aristocratic, anti-bourgeois spirit with values... emphasizing ... a strong code of honor ... that set [the South] apart" from the North.
As the South's high-minded self-esteem increasingly clashed with the slavery's moral rejection by the rest of the world (by the 1850s, only the South and Brazil owned large numbers of slaves), the region's leaders defended their economic system and their grossly exaggerated sense of honor with arguments that most Northerners found beyond baffling.
Mississippi Senator (and later the Confederacy's president) Jefferson Davis praised slavery for giving even the poorest white Southerner someone to look down upon - a sense of dignity and "equality with the rich man." South Carolina's Senator John C. Calhoun proclaimed slavery "a positive good" on much the same grounds as Davis. Religious leaders in the South denied that slavery was a sin by proclaiming it to be "ordained by God."
Eventually, this self-righteousness precluded any possibility of another North-South compromise. "Slavery was the basis of Southern life," Olson concluded in his book, and it "had to expand for Southerners to feel that they were being treated equally as Americans and Christians."
That, however, was a demand that the North was increasingly unwilling to accept. Between 1830 and 1860, the New England and the North Atlantic states absorbed nearly 1.5 million German and almost 2 million Irish immigrants, and by the latter date, about 20 percent of the people in these regions were foreign-born.
These new Americans had no need for slaves and no sympathy for Southern lifestyle or traditions. Their religion prohibited slavery, and they readily flocked to the cause of abolitionists who by 1860 controlled much of the new, anti-slavery Republican Party. The sentiments of the North were usually couched in civil language and moderate terms. For example, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican leader, at first favored slavery's limitation - not an abrupt extinction - and did not call for the emancipation of the slaves until after the South launched the war.
Mounting Tension
But the anti-slavery camp had its extremists, and it grew stronger and more assertive. The description of the slavery's cruelty in Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin inflamed the Northern abolitionists so much that they refused to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the North to return escaped slaves to their owners.
In many towns in the North, volunteers patrolled streets to rescue fugitive blacks from the slave catchers, and in 1854, President Franklin Pierce had to send the U.S. soldiers to bring a slave back to the South after the officials and people of Boston refused to turn him in.
To this growing antagonism in the North, the Southerners' responded with an increasingly virulent, hateful attacks on their critics. The 1854 founding of the Republican Party was denounced as "an outrage and insult that's unacceptable to the South," and Southern politicians and newspapers routinely denigrated The Northerners as subhuman creatures far below the whites of the noble South.
An episode that best depicts this sentiment was the aftermath of a scathing speech in June 1856 by an abolitionist U. S. Senator against the pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Two days later, a Southern congressman walked into the Senate and severely beat the abolitionist with a gold walking cane.
Typically, this crime is punishable with a stiff fine and a time in jail. In the South, it made the congressman a hero and inspired the following editorial in the Richmond Enquirer, a major Southern newspaper: "These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves," the editors wrote. "They have grown saucy and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! Now, they are a low, mean, scurvy set, with some little book learning, but as utterly devoid of spirit or honor as a peck of curs... The truth is that they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission... Let them once understand that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves, like decent dogs - they can never be gentlemen..."
Instructed by arguments at this level, it was no wonder that President Lincoln's moderation throughout the growing crisis, and his final appeal to the South in March 1861 that "[w]e are not enemies, but friends" fell on deaf ears.
Deriding The Northerners as animals, the Southerners denounced the 1860 election of the "Black Infidel" Abraham Lincoln for president as "a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage" and turned it into a casus belli.
The subsequent secession of eleven Southern states, their formation of the ill-fated Confederate States of America, and the April 1862 bombardment of the Union's Fort Sumter that started the Civil War, were the products of the South's unhinged and irrational mindset caused by the slavery.
As McPherson points out, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many Southerners called the conflict "the War of Northern Aggression" and regarded their region not as the attacker, but the victim. The brave Confederacy soldiers went to battles under the slogan "Freedom is not possible without slavery!" "Dixie," their war-time song, called the Union troops "beagles" that had to be "hunted back to their kennels."
It was our country's surpassing good fortune that after "the beagles" - whose song proclaimed that "The Truth is Marching On!" - had won on the battle field; President Lincoln, in his high-minded, immortal Gettysburg Address, closed the war's final chapter by restoring the dignity and generosity of the relations between the North and the South.