The above-quoted line is taken from the very first sentence of a delightful little volume titled “A Young Folks’ History of the Civil War.” It was published sometime in the early 1880’s, when the majority of soldiers who partook in the titular conflict were still living. It is now two centuries later, and to make the claim that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War is typically met with resistance and argument from certain, peculiar corners. Let the argument be made again: slavery was the main cause of American Civil War. Slavery was the big question left unanswered at the founding of the nation. This left distinct halves of the country going in two different directions, creating the tension that would result in the American Civil War; the Northern states went in a radically more industrialized direction, relying more on immigrant labor than chattel slavery while the Southern states became even more deeply entrenched in their agrarian practices, furthering the need for a reliance on chattel slavery. As has been pointed out by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the leaders of the first slave states to secede from the Union were explicit in their defense of slavery. Coates cites the position of the State of Mississippi, in their declaration of secession from January of 1861,
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth” (Coates).
The admission that the decision to secede from the Union is “thoroughly identified witht he institution of slavery” is a telling one. The defense of slavery is what precipitated the secession and eventual Civil War. They knew it then when they seceded, and they knew it after.
Even in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the notion that the debate over “The Slavery Question” had the potentiality to result in violence and bloodshed was not unusual. In the Seventh Lincoln-Douglas Debate on October 15th, 1858, Lincoln made this statement:
“Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that
men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be
settled, and it will be done peaceably, too. There will be no war, no violence” (194)
Alas, there was a war that was teeming with abundant violence. At this point in American history, where the Civil War was just over the horizon, the issue of slavery was treated as if it had the potentiality to result in war. Lincoln uses a lot of the same imagery and rhetorical devices that many abolitionist writers of the day had also used; liking slavery to a diseas, appealing to a sense of right-versus-wrong, and the religious appeal all make for great examples of this. Additionally, he includes the threat of war hanging over the country’s head like a Sword of Damocles.
There is a story often propogated around the Civil War, and especially the Confederacies “Lost Cause,” about how the war was over states’ rights and not slavery. What exactly are the states’ rights that would be so important as to cause half of the country to divorce itself from the other half? The answer is evidently the right to engage in the practice of chattel slavery. Were these rights being attacked? Lincoln was a vocally anti-slavery figure in contemporaneous politics, so his election would have been something that would have sparked fear that the so-called “right” to practice chattel slavery would be threatened by his administration. It is an understandable fear; in the mind of the agrarian Southerners, their economy would tank with the removal of their labor-force.
The evidence is abundant, and the recognition is old, that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. The question that remains, and is certainly worth examination, is of how the notion became built into the minds of so many Americans, that this issue was not about slavery, but about states’ rights.