Over a hundred years after the Civil War, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. Was it over States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?

Or was it really about Slavery?

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”

It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage.

Making it prety clear that Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.

South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.”

In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their slaves along with no worries of them being able to seek refuge in the North.

South Carolina’s delegates were outraged when that changed.

In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies.

According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government.

During the Post-civil-war Southerners litterally opposed any sort of freedom allowed to former slaves by new laws. They continued to keep people of color in oprressive conditions, in some areas under a state of peonage up to the Civil Rights Era.

During the terrible years after the War, place after place across the South became all-white “sundown towns” some like one not to far from where I live now kept signs up warning blacks that if they were inside city limits after sun down they would be incarcerated, or even killed.

Though that didnt stop armed groups of white males from going out and terrorizing the local blacks while hiding their faces under white sheets whenever they felt like it.

Not to kmention all the things they did to prevent African Americans from voting some of which carry right on to as recent as the latest elections.

“Anything but slavery” explanations of the Civil War started to gain real traction in the South in the 1970's".

To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float false claims in Southern Schools, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States or: The War Aginst Northern Agression.

At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure,” .

Yet these explanations are flatly wrong.

High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Controversy in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson (also a Southerner himself) threatened force.

No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.

They did however warn in several newspapers accross the South that if "that Abolisionist from Illionis" got elected, there would be war. Most Southern States even went so far as refuse to place Lincoln on the ballot.

Another myth they propogated over their southern shame conserning slavery was that slave were not even owned by the majority of whites in the south.

Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. Many, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday had aspirations promised to them by the upper class as incentive to support them. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners becuase of this wool being pulled over their eyes by the pruveleged slave owning class. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery to Southerners...it was one of their main argument in debates against Abolisinist cadidates to public office.

As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.”

Given this belief, most white Southerners — and many Northerners of the era too, — could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Political cartoons even showed gangs of blacks attacking and looting farms carrying off white females under one arm with a torch iheld high in the other and the house buring in the background.

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.”

Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.

The soliders themselves wrote about it in their letters home.


Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union’s only goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. It was in a purely reactionary position. Actual Abolition came later. Though many people had abolisionist leanings in the North long before that.

President Lincoln himself even said “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

However, Lincoln’s own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In all of his debates on the way up the political ladder he spent a lot of time discussing it and his political supporters were in large part known abolisionists.

In the same letter where he trys to avoid the pretence of being abolisionist in his goals, he says: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

He stated several times his wish for the intitution of slavery to fade into disuse as it had allready done in Europe.

However Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860.

That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them — or forced them to abandon slavery?

There was even a fist fight right on the floor of congress between two elected officals who were arguing (one for and one against) the inclussion of new slave states in the years precceding the war itself.

In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked to be from the rich white southern elites point of view an absolute nescesity and they would do anything, including going to war to secure it.