Kozlowski: You think you know the Civil War?

In the 150 years since the American Civil War broke out, there has been ongoing debate as to why… In the 150 years since the American Civil War broke out, there has been ongoing debate as to why it happened. The immediate cause was obvious: A series of states decided they wanted to form a nation of their own. What caused this event to happen is a more difficult point that causes many an argument even today. Northerners hold that Southerners were rebelling to continue to maintain a slavocracy. Southerners argue that they were fighting to preserve their rights from Northern tyranny. Unfortunately, the truth is a little more complex.

Why should the war still be relevant to us today, these 150 years later? Largely because the impacts of the war were widespread enough that they still affect us in the 21st century. And in analyzing the causes of the war we are reminded of the timeless idea that reality is messy.

The causes of the war are varied and complicated by the shifting politics of the time. But slavery simply cannot be overlooked. Dr. Van Beck Hall of the Pitt history department gives a very good idea of just how important slavery was to the American economy as a whole, and to that of the South in particular. He notes that 20-25 percent of the total national wealth was composed of slaves at the start of the war, that 50 percent of American exports were cotton and that so much money could be made off the institution that one of the best investments a Mississippi planter could make was an investment in more land and more slaves. This was not an institution Southerners would give up easily.

Of course, this doesn’t explain why the South chose to secede around 1860. At the time of his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln was hardly an abolitionist firebrand, and the official policy of the Republican Party was to leave slavery in place where it already existed. Indeed, Dr. Hall mentions that the 13th Amendment actually failed to pass through Congress as late as 1864, showing how even late in the war politicians were uncomfortable with the idea of emancipation. In 1860, slavery was under no imminent threat. In fact, Dr. Hall believes that had the South not seceded, slavery would have continued — perhaps even up to the start of the 20th century.

So, why did the South secede? Dr. Hall holds that Southern slaveholders feared their nonslaveholding brethren would eventually fall under the sway of Lincoln and the Republicans, leading to the gradual formation of an abolitionist party in the South. The slaveholders saw secession as a kind of insulation against exactly this. The second broad cause was the problems created by the Mexican-American War and general westward expansion as “it forced the politicians to do something [about the expansion of slavery] when for a long time they tried to leave the question alone,” Dr. Hall said. When politicians had to do something, he explains, they ended up fatally dividing the Democratic Party between supporters of Stephen A. Douglas and popular sovereignty and John C. Breckinridge and the absolute right of slaveholding. Dr. Hall cites this as the point of no return leading down the slope to the Civil War. So civil war in the Democratic Party translated into a larger conflict.

It would also be a mistake to believe that Secession was a decision all Southerners were comfortable with. Two major factions emerged: conditional unionists and secessionists. Conditional unionists, such as eventual Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, wanted to adopt a wait-and-see approach, and see if the Republicans actually did prove as unreasonable as some in the South believed them to be. Secessionists wanted to move immediately, seeing nothing to gain from patience. Eventually, the secessionists won the argument in Charleston, and so we went toward war.

Another misconception is that all Northerners were fighting to end slavery and believed ending slavery was a good idea. The New York draft riots of 1863 took on an ugly racial tinge as many Irish in the city began to see blacks as the source of all their woes. The Colored Orphan Asylum was burned, a dozen black people were killed by the mob and Federal troops had to be called in to restore order. Much as it would be wrong to say that every Confederate private was fighting to support slavery, it would be wrong to say that every Northerner was enthusiastic about freeing the slaves.

Though the war primarily began because of slavery, it was not explicitly about slavery until reasonably later on. In fact, Dr. Hall believes that what ended slavery was, indirectly, Robert E. Lee’s victory in the Peninsular Campaign of 1862. Had Lee lost, Richmond would have fallen and the war might have ended with slavery still intact in the South. Reality is often messier than we would like it to be, and it is particularly messy when we consider the causes of the Civil War.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.