The Confederacy was About Slavery

Who cares about the motivations of the soldiers when the question is what caused the war in the first place? The soldiers didn't cause the war, and they fought for the same diverse personal reasons that soldiers throughout the millennia have fought.


Yes they can. There are few things in history as absolutely certain as the fact that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

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I think Finn may be on that board.

The only States Right the South was worried about was the right to own people, or to buy and sell people, or the potential new States refusal to make slavery legal.

As regards who fought for the southern confederacy and why, it is significant that the Confederate States legislated conscription before the United States did so. Conscription went into affect in the Confederate States in April, 1862, more than a year before the United States enacted conscription. Additionally, it is significant that Thomas Jackson (a.k.a., "Stonewall") wrote to Jefferson Davis to ask that he cancel all leaves, because so many soldiers left to go home and did not return. (Jackson had three stragglers publicly shot in August, 1862, just before the battle of Second Manassas--Lee publicly commented that such discipline was necessary, especially with habitual deserters).The Encyclopedia Virginia, maintained by the University of Virginia, states that Confederate desertion rates were 10% to 15%, while Federal desertion rates were 9% to 12%--these being determined by the regiments in question. Encyclopedia Virginia states that the desertion rate in the 44th Virginia Regiment was 30%. In southwest Virginia, deserters organized themselves in armed bands and in 1864, regiments were detached from the Army of Northern Virginia to hunt down those armed bands.

Whatever political resentments people may have had, dying for those resentments was not necessarily something everyone would want to do.

Nor killing, I'd bet. Most would surely have prefered a game of darts and a pleasant libation if they'd had their druthers.

Regular folks don't set the stakes.

First you should be aware that in the early 1960's NYC high schools taught that slavery was NOT the cause of the Civil War. Could that have been because the dirty little secret is that those in educational management knew that in a few years Northerners and Southerners were going to be fighting in Vietnam, and there was no reason to exacerbate regional differences?

Second, I do not think that before the Civil War the North was threatening Southern states to end their slavery; however, that makes me think the real point of contention is whether the western territories were going to be free or not. And, as I've read, that was why Northern men joined the Union Army - to make for a "white west," where white males could find employment outside of the insular slave plantation system.

But, this argument seems to be focussed on just historical facts, not what motivated them. I am just concerned that to accept slavery one was part of a majority in the South that had a very different concept of morality. Or, as I've read, at that point in history, Blacks were not considered equal to whites, similar to the dichotomy that the Third Reich promulgated about Jews in Europe. So while many talk of the Holocaust, few want to delve into what allowed Germans to consider Jews lower creatures that could be exterminated.

So, we really do not have an argument. In my opinion, few want to question what drove the morality of the slave owning South. Without understanding that, history may be quite sterile, and doesn't offend.

My point was shown in a PBS documentary explaining that the Northern abolitionists, who mostly were Evangelical ministers, believed that like instantaneous epiphanies of the unbeliever, the Southern slaveholder could have an epiphany of the immorality of slavery, if he was only educated. So the abolitionists wrote, and mailed, to Southern plantation owners, "tracts" that explained the immorality of slavery. It was met with the hostility one meets when one hits a bee hive, so to speak. So, there was a difference between the North and South. While white Northerners were not like the Northern liberal of today, he did not believe in slavery.

If you do not like my opinion, that is why I am lucky to be born in the U.S.A. . I am entitled to my opinion. And, you to yours.

I thought the reason that the Lone Star State didn't merge with Mexico was because Mexico, not having slavery, would only allow Texas (Tejas) to become part of Mejico, if they abandoned slavery. Since that was not happening, Texas became the Lone Star State, before it joined the Union? If this is correct history, how will it be taught in context of the new story of Texas in the Confederacy without slavery being the main cause? And, Juneteenth is a sticky wicket.

Cute, but no.

I don't think slavery was merely one issue that led to the Civil War, and I do believe it was, far and away, the primary reason.

However, unlike some of the participants here I believe that the issues which in some quarters get far too much attention, and in others are entirely dismissed, had some influence.

But then you and Chicago Joe must have a Way-Back Machine and were able to be there and interview the millions of people involved. Nice trick.

No, but very, very few things are necessarily so.

You're conflating individual reasons for fighting the war with the reasons that the Southern leadership started the war.

It's the latter category that is relevant to the subject of what led to the Civil War.

I'll nod, in that I can imagine that happened for some. There is also the possibility of buddies staying together, to fight the approaching enemy. On the other hand, I still take it that slavery was the key matter by far, re the war happening.

My ex, still friend, was interested in the south, to understand; he's a writer, so I learned somewhat through him and what he was learning. (He wrote a play about Fanny Butler, for example.) It's not my own preoccupation, so I'm no expert.


Edit to say that I hadn't yet seen JoefromChicago's post before I wrote this.

There's no war if a lot of individuals have don't have a reason to fight it. The "leadership" rarely fights, and if they do at all, it's usually from the rear.

C'mon Finn, that doesn't even make sense. It doesn't matter what the rank and file think, once the leaders decide on war.

This is a long thread, which goes back for years. Even before Joe posted, i and others pointed out that the squabbles over the tariff did not lead to war, and the nullification brouhaha did not lead to war. More significantly, Farmerman quoted and linked secession ordinances, which specifically state that those states were going to war to preserve the institution of slavery. He also posted the text of the speech by Alexander Stephens to the Georgia legislature which specifically stated that they had formed the confederacy (which is a constitutionally illegal act) and had gone to war to preserve slavery. The early part of this thread is full of such evidence. This is like talking to a bunch of holy rollers who deny evolution with a complete disregard for the evidence.

I can only wonder at the sort of mental, political pathology which leads people to attempt to excuse the southern confederacy for launching a war which cost a million American lives with feeble excuses suggesting that if it were not entirely about slavery, such a tragic loss of life were justified. Sheer idiocy.

There wasn't a standing Southern army that could be ordered to war. It had to be created from volunteers, and therefore there had to be a reason for them to fight beyond the orders of the "leadership." Some of those volunteers very likely couldn't give a damn what the fight was about as long as they got paid, and a lot of them probably did want to see slavery preserved if only because it meant that was always someone more wretched than them, but that still would have left a lot of confederate soldiers who didn't own slaves who volunteered to fight.

It would also be inaccurate to assert that everyone who fought for the Union, did so because they opposed slavery. Clearly the draft riots in NYC suggested that were quite a few New Yorkers who had no desire to risk their lives to free black slaves.

I guess I can't say enough times that I agree with the assertion that slavery was, far and away, the number one reason for the war.

I don't think it was the only one.

Now if that, as Infrablue, suggests means I'm a Confederacy apologist, fine.

I'm tired of repeating myself.

A question for our historians or simply students of history:

Did the North ever propose a means by which the South could recover from the economic devastation of ending slavery?

Slavery is an abomination regardless of the race of the slave, but let's recall that the North merely preceded the South in terms of abolition (and, of course, without the requirement of force).

The North was able to establish a vigorous economy without the benefit of slave labor, in part, due to industrialization.

Whether the almost exclusively agrarian South could have done the same is something I can't say, but clearly it didn't.

So by the time the sh*t hit the fan, the South was so deep into slavery that it's ending would have mean't severe economic disruption at the very least.

(Before the righteous go wild, this is of course not a justification for slavery)

So, in simple terms, we have a North that can get by without slavery telling a South than cannot, that they must give it up.

If the North's conditions were essentially: "End it and go cold turkey!" then I would suggest it was complicit in the start of the war.

Cornering a rat and leaving it not even a tiny hole through which to escape, will guarantee that it will leap for your throat.

One could argue that the South's continued dependence upon slavery meant that it wasn't entitled to a rat hole, and I understand that. It's a bit of a neo-con approach and resonates with me.

If there was a credible offer to the South from the North that the Union would assist it economically if it voluntarily gave up slavery, than it was all on the South.

If on the other hand Northern politicians, supported by Northern industrialist millionaires saw the opportunity of crippling the South economically as a way to prosper, then I would say it wasn't such a Black and White affair (pun intended)

From a perspective of more than a century hence, it's very easy to damn the South and insist it was all their fault.

Perhaps it was, but if your view includes a notion that the North was the Lord's avenging angel against slavery, then maybe your last name is Brown.

And you were also probably taught that you could survive a nuclear blast by hiding under your desk. Some of us have moved beyond the falsehoods we were taught as small children.


OMG! That's the first (semi-)intelligent thing you've said! Yes, the extension of slavery into the territories was a very real issue leading up to the Civil War. That was the result of the Dred Scott decision. Northerners feared that the next supreme court case would then extend slavery into the free states. As Lincoln said in his "House Divided" Speech:




Motives are deduced from facts. If you ignore the facts, then you can't plausibly deduce the motives.

Given that you think your interpretation of history is better than mine, that must mean that you have a way-back machine of your own. I assure you, though, that mine is vastly superior to yours.

The North never presented the South with that choice prior to the Secession Crisis. That's because neither the Buchanan nor Lincoln administrations favored abolition at that juncture. The southern states feared that the Republicans in congress and the White House would abolish slavery - even though Lincoln repeatedly said that he had no such intention - and so they seceded. The North, therefore, bears no responsibility whatsoever for secession. That's all on the South.


That's because it was entirely their fault.

Spoken like a true Yankee