How to make arguments in essay, should everyone become a vegetarian essay how to write a theme essay. And under it in our country, he is in a better condition than he has ever attained in any other age and country, either in bondage or freedom.”, As the Civil War drew to a close, the myth continued and seems to have been embellished. Revise attitudes to slavery, causes of the civil war and the rise of the republican party in the 1850s with BBC Bitesize National 5. That figure was 25 in the next four seceding states, and it was 16 in the four non-seceding slave states. All of a plantation’s slaves, “for their moral improvement,” were gathered to watch their peers whipped while hung by the thumbs, have an ear nailed to a post before severing, or be “tomcatted” (having a tomcat dragged across their bare backs and thighs). A sampling of antebellum slave prices reveals the economic health of slavery. was a society beset by the specters of defeat, of shame, of guilt . . Is slavery the primary cause of secession and the Civil War? A historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, he is a publisher of popular history, a podcaster, and online course creator. Scott Michael Rank, Ph.D., is the editor of History on the Net and host of the History Unplugged podcast. © HistoryOnTheNet 2000-2019. . Workers on rice plantations spent days standing in the water of the rice field, prey to insects and disease, with a minimal diet to sustain them. I repeatedly rode through the lines at a canter, without producing the smallest change or interruption in the dogged action of the laborers, or causing one of them, so far as I could see, to lift an eye from the ground. The Union represented the North of America that stood for anti-slavery. Allan Nevins examined the late antebellum period and concluded, “The South, as a whole, in 1846–61 was not moving toward emancipation but away from it. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was a reflection that the Southern states have lost their influence and power, and it … Charles Sydnor’s study of slavery in Mississippi reveals that the value in 1860 of the state’s 436,691 slaves, at eight hundred dollars each, was over $349 million, while the total cash value of its farmland, farming implements, and livestock was only about $241 million.60 Well-to-do Mississippians’ financial stake in slavery as of 1860 is obvious. Indeed, it’s an apparition that still haunts modern American politics. Pregnant women worked, and after childbirth women returned to the fields quickly, with little time lost. I will ignore the apparent inconsistency of those two contentions and focus on each separately. . One of them numbered nearly two hundred hands . Slavery didn't cause the civil war and emancipation didn't enter into the war until quite some time after it began. The newspaperman-turned-historian Edward A. Pollard in his immediate postwar histories described slavery as “an inferior object of the contest.” His flimsy evidence included the rebels’ supposed program of “Negro enlistments and consequent emancipation,” which is discussed in detail below. Myths and Facts, California – Do not sell my personal information. They were upset that the Underground Railroad had helped between one thousand and five thousand slaves to escape each year between 1830 and 1860. A North Carolina slave who boasted that he preferred white women was castrated. They … maintained obedience, docility, and respect.” All of this supposed loyalty was “evidence of the mild, paternal and patriarchal nature of the institution of slavery as it existed at the South.” DeBow overlooked the nine hundred “contrabands” who fled in three months in mid-1861 to General Benjamin Butler’s Union lines at Fort Monroe, Virginia, 7 the two hundred thousand blacks (about three quarters being defecting ex-slaves) 8 who served in the Union military, and the hundreds of thousands of slaves who fled to Union lines as Union armies moved deeper and deeper into the Confederacy. Ayers identifies slavery as “the key catalytic agent in a volatile new mix of democratic politics and accelerated communication, a process chemical in its complexity and subtlety.” Specifically, “People on both sides were playing out future scenarios even as they responded to immediate threats. It means a loss to the planters of the South of, at least, FOUR BILLION dollars, by having this labor taken from them; and a loss, in addition, of FIVE BILLION dollars more, in lands, mills, machinery, and other great interests, which will be rendered valueless by the want of slave labor to cultivate the lands, and the loss of the crops which give to those interests life and prosperity.”. On the one hand, the convention must be set up that the thing simply did not exist, and enforced under penalty of being shot; and on the other, the [white] woman must be compensated, the revolting suspicion in the male that he might be slipping into bestiality got rid of, by glorifying her; the Yankee must be answered by proclaiming from the housetops that Southern Virtue, so far from being inferior, was superior, not alone to the North’s but to any on earth, and adducing Southern Womanhood in proof. The issue was so divisive that it split America’s major religious denominations into Northern and Southern wings. This elevation became a component of the myth. An institution that was so profitable and accounted for such a huge portion of Southern wealth was unlikely to disappear without some outside compulsion. Joseph Glatthaar’s statistical study of the soldiers in Lee’s army finds that soldier slave-owners had a 56.5 percent casualty rate, while that for non-slave-owner soldiers was 48.5 percent. Obviously, it’s difficult to separate slavery from any discussion on the Civil War. After examining the 1830–1860 data, they conclude that “[d]uring the decade of the fifties sanguinity was increasing quite rapidly, accounting for 40 percent of the rise in slave prices in the Old South and 75 percent of the rise in the New South. The practice of slavery was a major cause in starting the Civil War for both economic and social reasons. In his extensive economic study of slavery, Harold Woodman concludes: [S]lavery was apparently about as remunerative as alternative employments to which slave capital might have been put….This general sharing in the prosperity was more or less guaranteed, moreover, if proper market mechanisms existed so that slaves could be bred and reared on the poorest of land and then be sold to those owning the best. . South Carolina’s 1860–61 commissioners to Florida, Leonidas W. Spratt, was an advocate of reopening that trade. Sociology family essay questions. Michael C. C. Adams observes, “even before the abolitionist attack from the North, Southerners began the defense of slavery as a social system that provided unique benefits, both for the slaves whom it placed under the fatherly care of a superior race and for the master who was given the freedom from toil necessary to the creation of a superior culture.”, When abolitionists, especially after 1830, began seriously attacking slavery, Southerners tried even harder to justify the institution. One auction house alone had more than $1,773,000 in sales in 1858. A recent study of land usage, slavery, and other agricultural phenomena in the United States and Britain concludes that in fourteen slave states (all but small Delaware) in 1860 there were a total of 73.769 million developed acres and 170.644 million undeveloped acres on 755,209 farms. Abraham Lincoln himself pointed out that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War because of increase in tension within the country. Cash stated that Southerners questioning the institution were hanged, tarred, horsewhipped, or assaulted in other ways. If you are white in the antebellum South, there is a floor below which you cannot go. The essence of the slave-states’ complaints was not that their rights were being violated but rather that the federal government and the non-slave states were insufficiently helpful in defending slavery. This was because the south was seceding from the Union to protect the Southern way of life and economic practices, in which slavery was the core of both. This picture was first painted by antebellum Southerners: “Seeing the tide of history turning against them, Southerners went on the offensive. I am doing an essay on this, and i have to come up with 3 arguments with evidence, and i don't know where to start. Evidence That Slavery Was the Cause of the Civil War: One way to determine the cause of the Civil War, is to examine the primary sources from that period to see if any explicit causes were cited. . . They incurred higher casualties, deserted less frequently, and suffered more for their slaveholding Confederacy than the troops who did not own slaves and were otherwise unconnected to the peculiar institution. The following are the 1859–1860 price ranges for male and female slaves between the ages of eight and twenty-one in the states indicated: Both sets of numbers become more meaningful when placed in the context of even longer-term slave values. Each state that seceded issued an Article of Secession announcing that they were leaving the Union. Woodman cites the antislavery Kentucky politician Cassius Clay’s analysis that because slaves could not participate as buyers of products in the marketplace, “A home market cannot exist in a slave state.” Woodman himself then concludes, “Plantation slavery, then, so limited the purchasing power of the South that it could not sustain much industry. “[E]ven more brave and constant” than Southern soldiers, wrote Thomas Nelson Page, “were the women who stayed at home. The best evidence of the frequency of masters’ raping their female slaves was the widespread appearance of “mulattoes” or light-skinned blacks throughout the South—many of them with facial and physical characteristics similar to those of their masters. After noting that slave hiring rates and sales prices in the 1850s had a solid economic foundation, he concluded that “the slave was earning for his owner a substantial, though varying, surplus above the cost of maintenance. Their position became a “cardinal element of the Southern apologia,” and postwar Southerners manifested “a nearly universal denial to escape the ignominy attached to slavery.”, In the North, where white racism and a desire for national reconciliation made slavery an issue no one wanted to discuss, the idea that slavery was not the cause of secession and the war found acceptance. The issue of slavery was a very important, if not the most crucial, reason for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The abolition of slavery or meaningful reform was therefore unlikely. The Frenchman’s hosts explained that “the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary.”. Is it possible that no slaveholder noticed the grief of the woman who [said] that she had had six children, three of whom had died and three of whom had been sold: ‘When they took from me the last little girl, oh, I believed I never should have got over it! The demographics of slavery reveal a strong correlation. How Did Slavery Cause the Civil War: Reality of the Institution Margaret Mitchell captured the “mint julep school” of antebellum Southern history—happy, indolent, and ignorant slaves protected by their kind and benevolent masters—in her novel Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, and the epic film version of 1939 engraved it on the popular imagination. Cash pointed out that slavery rested on force: the lash, chains and shackles, hounds and pistols to chase runaways, and mutilations and brandings (reflected in runaway slave advertisements). Would you like to learn the complete history of the Civil War? Southerners’ violent opposition to criticism of slavery may have betrayed their fear that the true nature of the institution would be revealed. . At two conventions (Charleston and Baltimore) in mid-1860 Southern Democrats bolted because of the majority’s unwillingness to approve a platform plank calling for a federal slave code for the territories. Despite their declaration in 1776 that “all men are created equal,” they affirmed the continuation of slavery in the U.S. Constitution of 1787. At that time, according to Charles Dew, the rental of slaves from their owners was “a very, very important part of the Virginia economy. Even if slavery was the catalyst, it does not follow that all rebel soldiers believed they were fighting for that cause. . The Old South . The Constitution also provided that fugitive slaves who escaped across state lines were to be returned to their masters, a provision that would be a source of controversy for the next seventy-four years. . He concludes, “There is no apparent reason why high market values of slaves should be a permanent cause for unprofitable plantation economy. © HistoryOnTheNet 2000-2019. Both the north and the south fought the Civil War for different reasons. The Civil War was about slavery, but it wasn’t “just about slavery”. In the history of the United States, African Americans have always been discriminated against. It had utilized only a small fraction of the available land area. [and] a large part—in a way, the very largest part—of its history from the day that [William Lloyd] Garrison began to thunder in Boston is the history of its efforts to [justify itself] and characteristically by means of romantic fictions.”, Ultimately, however, this myth was not confined to the South. The north fought to keep the Union together, which would not have been a problem if the south would not have seceded to keep slavery legal within … The average percentage of families that held slaves in the first seven seceding states was 37. Robert E. Lee disavowed slavery’s role in the war: “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”, More significantly, Confederate President Jefferson Davis explained in his postwar memoirs, “The truth remains intact and incontrovertible, that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” He argued that North-South hostility was “not the consequence of any difference on the abstract question of slavery. Whips and switches were used on the spot in the Upper South while more formal weekly “settlements” were used in the Lower South. It benefitted whites economically and socially and did the reverse for African Americans. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 required state and local governments to return runaway slaves to their owners and penalized those who assisted the runaways. Site created in November 2000. Perhaps the president himself was surprised when his personal servant and his wife’s maid, both slaves, escaped from the executive mansion in Richmond in January 1864 and when, later that month, another slave tried to burn the mansion. . Each slave was to count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of determining a state’s representation in the lower house of Congress, and the importation of slaves was to continue until at least 1808. Share via Email. Owners, aware that blacks were not natural-born slaves, tried to control them by a series of steps: “establish and maintain strict discipline,” “implant a consciousness of personal inferiority,” “awe them with a sense of the master’s power,” and persuade them to support the owner’s enterprise and standard of conduct.”. Even before the war was over, scholars in the North and South began to analyze and interpret the reasons behind the bloodshed. Slave marriages were not recognized under state laws. One might ask how slavery could have been on the verge of extinction if it was of such great benefit to whites and blacks alike. Kenneth Stampp concurred in this analysis. Dwight Pitcaithley sheds light on this ironic twist: “The use of the term ‘states rights’ in modern discussions of the causes of the Civil War almost exclusively connotes a cause separate from that of slavery[;] indeed it is used largely in opposition to the idea of slavery as a cause. From then until the Civil War, Southern whites did all they could to prevent similar uprisings by tightening legal restrictions on slaves and free blacks.30 The massacre of blacks following this revolt discouraged further insurrections. Click here for our podcast series Key Battles of the Civil War. David Blight observed, “The relationship of states’ rights to slavery in all discussions of Civil War causation appears to be an eternal riddle in American public memory.”. They had, he said, “adhered in general with great fidelity to the cause of their masters during the struggle. Stampp used many of the same sources as Phillips but “relied more heavily on diaries, journals, newspaper runaway-slave ads, and even a few slave narratives.” Stampp found that non-slaveholding whites supported slavery as “a means of controlling the social and economic competition of Negroes, concrete evidence of membership in a superior caste, a chance perhaps to rise into the planter class.”. Southern repression of black economic, civil, voting, and other rights during the hundred years following the Civil War further demonstrated the lack of motivation to terminate the slavery or subordination of African Americans. Southerners did not necessarily go to war to defend slavery, nor did northerners go to war to end it. Glorification of Southern women often took the form of harsh penalties for blacks who raped, tried to rape, or even ogled white women. In a generally successful effort to maintain discipline among the supposedly satisfied slaves, each slave state had a slave code. The argument is essentially that the war was unnecessary or could not have been about slavery because slavery was on the cusp of extinction without a war. It was the economy of slavery and the control of the system of slavery that was a major controversy in this dispute. Don't waste time. Northern Democrats, led by President Franklin Pierce, aggressively enforced the new Fugitive Slave Act, and the fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery led some fifteen to twenty thousand free Northern blacks to migrate to Canada between 1850 and 1860. Revenge spread to other states. By 1860 Southerners had convinced themselves that slavery, far from being an evil practice, benefitted both master and slave. That is what started the Civil War. As the New York Times pointed out in 1859, the South had made “the doctrine of state rights, so long slavery’s friend . The South was further from a just solution of the slavery problem in 1830 than it had been in 1789. It is clear, therefore, that the “benefits” of slavery extended far beyond the slave-owning minority of white Southerners. Essay an ideal student in english, case study on pnb bank the civil slavery essay war cause How did. Even though many historical revisionists offered various additional reasons for why the war started, the majority of the scholars agree that slavery was the central cause. One of those is the cause of the Civil War, which was slavery, of course.But then, I did … The possibility of such actions by blacks became a favorite argument of those opposing emancipation, including the proposals to arm and free slaves to prevent loss of the Civil War. Slavery played the central role during the American Civil War.The primary catalyst for secession was slavery, especially Southern political leaders' resistance to attempts by Northern antislavery political forces to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories.Slave life went through great changes, as the South saw Union Armies take control of broad areas of land. Only by using as much force as was necessary did whites compel blacks to remain in a sub-human condition. His soul may be the very seat of honor and integrity, yet without slaves—himself a slave—he is accounted as nobody. B. Phillips, a Georgian, promoted this benign view of slavery in the early twentieth century. . . Slave-owners’ ultimate weapon was virtually unlimited force. The North let the South substitute a war for liberty for the war for slavery, and the North ceased to think of slaves and freedmen as serious persons. HIRE verified writer $35.80 for a 2-page paper. It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe, and as a general thing, they do believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world…. Many of the monuments’ defenders have claimed that the Civil War was not about slavery but instead about states’ rights. J. In 1865, an Atlanta editor wrote that slaves’ position was “an enviable one” and contended that “they constitute a privileged class in the community.” He mused, “how happy we should be we the slave of some good and provident owner” because “simple daily toil would fill the measure of duty, and comfortable food and clothing would be the assured reward.”. Yet, when the South’s political leaders discussed the subject of denied rights during the secession crisis they spoke almost exclusively with reference to federal rights not states’ rights.”, Slavery, in Edward L. Ayers’s formulation, is the “one-word” answer to the question of what caused the Civil War, but slavery per se was not the cause of the war. . He and the British minister to the United States, Richard Lyons, advised London that the Confederate Constitution’s ban on the slave trade was primarily to encourage Virginia and Maryland to secede and would not preclude African imports if economically beneficial. To what extent was slavery a “cause” of the Civil War? . Another there was burned alive for suspected rape. You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”. Did that question or others related to slavery affect those seven states’ decision to secede and form the Confederacy? This continuing interest in reviving the slave trade suggested that slavery was not going away anytime soon. . Newspaper editors were a favorite target; five editors of the Vicksburg Journal were killed in thirteen years. At the heart of the Myth of the Lost Cause is the insistence that secession, the Confederacy, and the Civil War were all about states’ rights, not slavery. Masters were supposedly benevolent patriarchs. The American Civil War was the battle between the Union and the Confederacy. Woodman’s studies convinced him, however, that the slave market had room to grow within the existing slave states: The belief, however, that in 1860 slavery in the South was on the point of being “strangled for lack of room to expand” is a wholly mistaken interpretation of actual conditions. . Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder’s point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between slave and master.” Phillips’s interpretation had a lasting effect and influenced Mitchell’s novel. A historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, he is a publisher of popular history, a podcaster, and online course creator. The myth holds that slavery was Bible- sanctioned, benevolent, and a boon to all involved in it. Sectionalism, Protectionism, and States’ Rights were also major factors.Or phrased another way, slavery was a central factor in the tension leading up to the Civil War, but it wasn’t the only cause for tension (nor was slavery the main stated reason the Civil War was started).To better understand the above claims we can look at writings in … But [the yeoman and the 25 percent of whites who were slave-owners] have something in common, which is white skin. At the root of these anti–states’ rights complaints was the return of fugitive slaves. . The center and circumference, diameter and periphery, sine, tangent and secant of all our affections!’ Such was the toast which brought twenty great cheers from the audience at the celebration of Georgia’s one-hundredth anniversary in the 1830’s.”. “With the natural increase in slave population,” writes Sydnor, “the price must have declined unless a market for the surplus could be found. Yeats wrote his short po… While the slaves were freed in territory captured by Union armies by the Emancipation Proclamation during the war, and all forms of slavery ended by the 13th Amendment after the war, recent films such as Gods and Generals have portrayed Southern generals as hoping for an end to slavery, and as fighting first for their state and its rights … I don't care, I am not asking this question to debate this. Their harsh working conditions, minimal food and clothing; abominable housing, lack of freedom to move about, and vulnerability to sale and family dispersion led many slaves, not surprisingly, to become what Stampp called “troublesome property.” They tried to sabotage production, challenge overseers, fight back when provoked, flee for their freedom, or even (rarely kill their overseers or plan or participate in slave revolts. [W]hen Texas and the rest of the new Southwest were supplied, slave prices would fall unless more territory suited to slave labor could be discovered. its foe.”, Michael C. C. Adams agrees with this analysis: “Appeals to state sovereignty usually masked other, more pragmatic, interests. . Please give me some ideas Now some people might disagree that slavery caused the civil war. Whites from Richmond rode through the county killing all blacks they saw—one hundred and twenty in one day. It was not ameliorating slavery, but making it harsher and more implacable. . The South wanted to succeed from the Union. B. Phillips, as Woodman explains, concluded that cotton prices had dropped in price, slavery had become unprofitable just prior to the Civil War, and that it was a dying institution. They recognized how deeply contingency could run and how quickly things could shift; a Supreme Court decision or a presidential election could change the evolution of vast structures of slavery and economic development.”. The Confederacy game them ample time and warning to clear the battery (Fort Sumter) or they would be fired upon. recalled her first husband’s being sold away from her: ‘White folks got a heap to answer for the way they’ve done to colored folks! . The root cause of the American Civil War is perhaps the most controversial topic in American history. ”, In the first three postwar decades, Pollard, Davis, Stephens, Jubal Early, William Nelson Pendleton, the Reverend J. William Jones, and others made and developed the proposition that slavery was not the cause for secession or the formation of the Confederacy. That was, in fact, almost the only issue in the four-way presidential race. In 1861, Bunch encouraged the new Confederate government to abolish the slave trade. Actual experience confirms that analysis; the “land devoted to cotton nearly doubled between 1860 and 1890; it more than doubled between 1890 and 1925.”. To facilitate perhaps a million of these heartless and usually economically motivated transactions, Southerners did not recognize slave “marriages” or encourage black family relationships. . And while it’s true that the North did not go to war to free the slaves — they fought to preserve the union — the South went to war to preserve one states’ right: the right to own slaves. The distinguishing feature of Lincoln’s … Hungering in body and heart they bore with more than a soldier’s courage, more than a soldier’s hardship, and to the last, undaunted and dauntless, gave them new courage as with tear-dimmed eyes they sustained them in the darkest hours of their despondency and defeat.”. In the 1830s, “[p]rominent southern politicians, clergymen, and academics presented a more positive view of slavery, as something not only necessary but also good for African Americans and for the entire society.” Justifications for it were found in the Bible and scientific studies. that good people fought valiantly for disgraceful causes. Before the Civil War railways were rapidly opening up new fertile areas to plantation agriculture. Scott Michael Rank, Ph.D., is the editor of History on the Net and host of the History Unplugged podcast. J. . . . What  caused the Civil War? Slave-owning soldiers’ higher casualty rates and lower desertion rates suggest that they may have been more enthusiastic about participating in the war. It was further from tenable solution in 1860 than it had been in 1830.”, There is much evidence that slavery was strong and thriving on the eve of the Civil War. . . In addition, the racial underpinning of slavery ensured its widespread support among whites who were not slave-owners. Because the states copied each other’s codes, their provisions were generally uniform throughout the South. The whole subject was disposed of with the coolest deliberation and with regard only to interest of the public.” In South Carolina, two slaves suspected of kidnapping and rape were stripped, tied to forked poles, had their mouths bound, and were left to be eaten by crows and buzzards. and a thoroughly national one. Each of the last five states to secede had a slave population between 25 and 33 percent of the total, while the non-seceding slave states had slave populations between 2 and 20 percent. This position was a far cry from the one that prevailed in the days of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath when abolition and manumission enjoyed popularity and resulted in the gradual abolishment of slavery in many Northern states. In the face of national turmoil over this issue, Congress reached the Missouri Compromise. There other reasons that left to the Civil War as well but slavery was the main cause of the war. The result was a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, authorizing federal officials to compel the return of runaways slaves, requiring state officials and the public at large to aid in their capture and return, providing a modicum of nonjudicial due process for alleged runaways, and setting magistrate fees of five dollars when an alleged runaway was released and ten dollars when that person was ordered to be transported to the slave state from which he or she allegedly had fled. “Probably 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on the broad questions of what the war was about and what brought it about and what caused it,” McPherson said, “which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery.” Margaret Mitchell captured the “mint julep school” of antebellum Southern history—happy, indolent, and ignorant slaves protected by their kind and benevolent masters—in her novel Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, and the epic film version of 1939 engraved it on the popular imagination. The distinguishing feature of Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ campaign was opposition to the extension of slavery into the Western territories. “The panic of the slaveholders at the slightest hint of slave insurrection revealed what lay beneath their endless self-congratulation over the supposed docility, contentment, and loyalty of their slaves.” One of the few actual revolts was Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. As the price for their signing the Declaration of Independence and ratifying the U.S. Constitution, the Southern states had demanded that anti-slavery statements in the Declaration be deleted and that certain concessions to slavery be made in the Constitution. Children were expected to work as soon as they were deemed old enough to be useful. Looking back on the growing national controversy over slavery, Lincoln’s secretaries and biographers John Hay and John Nicolay wrote: “It is now universally understood, if not conceded, that the Rebellion of 1861 was begun for the sole purpose of defending and preserving to the seceding States the institution of African slavery and making them the nucleus of a great slave empire. Non-slavery rationales for the Civil War certainly are not dead. More money could be made on female than male slaves because the children of female slaves became the property of the mothers’ owners. Whatever other factors need to be considered in a complete analysis, the low level of demand in this plantation-based slave society was sufficient to retard the economic development of the South.” Despite slavery’s harmful effects on the South generally, no change to it was imminent because gerrymandering of state legislative districts, property requirements for voting, and the traditional political power structure of the South kept crucial political and governmental decision-making in the hands of the slaveholding elite, who individually were reaping large financial benefits from the practice. State rights have been a problem from the Southern perspective in that many of the Northern states have passed laws that make it difficult to enforce federal law. In 1856, Governor James Hopkins Adams told the legislature, “To maintain our present position [of cotton dominance], we must have cheap labor also. This myth began long before the Civil War. It arose out of disputes over slavery and states’ rights. Exported to the North, the happy darky stereotype was widely embraced, prevailing well into the twentieth century and pervading the popular imagination from novels and the press to Walt Disney movies.”. Southern secessionist leaders’ own words made clear their economic dependence upon slavery, the interconnection between slavery and white supremacy, and their violent reactions to perceived threats to the peculiar institution—reactions that led them to secede. Indeed they came to think that their opinions about Negroes were not prejudices at all but merely objective assessments of the realities of Negro inferiority.” Prospects for ending slavery in Virginia were increasingly bleak. Richmond’s industry really depend[ed] on it. Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state, slavery was prohibited north of Missouri’s southern border except in Missouri itself, and a fugitive slave provision was applied to those slavery-free territories. Edward Ayers observes, “White Southerners hardly lashed out in desperation over a dying institution. . . So much they won’t ever pray it away.’”. Such burnings occurred throughout the South; two thousand slaves were compelled to attend one in Mississippi, and another in Alabama was justified by an editor as consistent with “the law of self-protection. This myth began almost as soon as the war ended. Each of the first six states to secede had a slave population between 44 and 57 percent of the total population. I think it told a more painful story than any I have ever heard, of the cruelty of slavery.”, During harvesting season on sugar plantations, slaves worked sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. . In summary, antebellum slavery in America was not a benevolent institution benefitting whites and blacks alike. Having acknowledged that, let me also say I have long believed there is no more concise or stirring accounting for the war than the sentiments propounded by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in The Second Coming, some lines of which are included in this essay. . This was especially true with the hoe-gangs. SUMMARY OF SLAVERY AS THE CAUSE OF SECESSION AND THE CONFEDERACY. This can be obtained in but one way—by re-opening the African slave trade.” In March 1857, Bunch secretly wrote that increasing slave prices and cotton production would force the South to reopen the African slave trade: “Such is the evil which is rapidly developing.” In fact, there were instances of slave importations with minimal, if any, legal repercussions. WHAT CAUSED THE CIVIL WAR: THE SETTING. The profits slavery provided to white slave-owners and the social superiority it provided to non-slaveholding whites gave the peculiar institution a firm hold on the South. All rights reserved. The masters’ wives had to ignore the mixed-race children and dared not confront their husbands about the obvious sexual misconduct.36 Masters seemed to compensate for their sexual relations with slaves by elevating their wives onto a high pedestal honoring Pure Southern Womanhood. The Civil War began after several states seceded from the Union in late 1860 and early 1861. A different and likely more accurate view of slavery emerged in 1956 with Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. Helper explained: Every white man who is under the necessity of earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow, or by manual labor, in any capacity, no matter how unassuming in deportment, or exemplary in morals, is treated as if he was a loathsome beast, and shunned with the utmost disdain. Click here for our podcast series Key Battles of the Civil War. Cash described as the cover-up for master-slave sexual relations: And the only really satisfactory escape here . It was brutalizing to white men—releasing sadism and cruelty in masters and breeding in the “common whites”savage hate for blacks in response to the “white trash” epithets they endured. Some advocates of the Lost Cause have contended that Southerners, aware that slavery’s disappearance was inevitable, would not have fought a war to save the dying institution. According to Alan Nolan, “This belief was advanced by such prominent twentieth-century historians as Charles and Mary Beard, Avery Craven, and James G. Randall, influenced surely in part by their own racism. Slavery, as Abraham Lincoln often noted, was the root cause of the Civil War. . Slavery Was the Primary Cause of the Civil War The American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, the War of Rebellion, or the War for the Southern Independence, began on April 12, 1861. Some historians claim that the main cause of the Civil War was the institution of Slavery. Northern opposition to that law led to conflicts about its enforcement and Southern anger about its non-enforcement in the North. –James McPherson, Historian The issue was not the existence of slavery… Gary Gallagher explains the situation in late 1860 from a contemporary perspective: The best friend of the slaveholding South in that regard is the federal government. . After all, it had “caused” the War. The fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs reported that she was constantly sexually threatened by her master and added that white men preyed on female slaves so often that “if God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse.” The ex-slave Henry Bibb observed the sexual activities of slave-owners: “I have long thought from what has fallen under my own observation while a slave, that the strongest reason why southerners stick with such tenacity to their ‘peculiar institution,’ is because licentious white men could not carry out their wicked purposes among the defenseless colored population as they now do, without being exposed and punished by law, if slavery was abolished. Perhaps surprisingly, Edward Pollard of Richmond, who had his finger on the Confederate pulse, explained in 1866 that Lincoln’s 1860 election, with its power shift to the North, caused the South to leave the Union, “which no longer afforded any guaranty for her rights or any permanent sense of security” and which intended to “destroy her institutions, and even involve the lives of her people.” His analysis continued: “Power in the hands of the North affected the safety and happiness of every individual in the South.” The code words for slavery protection were the substance of his conclusions.14 In fact, the seceding states themselves complained that the federal government was not doing enough to protect slavery and that non-slave states were exercising their own rights in a manner disagreeable to the slave states (for example, by passing “liberty laws” to hinder efforts to retrieve runaway slaves). James and Lois Horton conclude that “by the late 1850s, the South seemed stronger than ever. Children were separated from their parents and grandparents, spouses were separated from each other, and numerous other relatives were separated from their kin. The efforts by congressional Democrats and Presidents Pierce and Buchanan to appease Southerners on the fugitive slave issue failed to satisfy them. They conclude, “the tale about the uncommercial planter who was gripped by an irresistible tendency to the overproduction of cotton is sheer fantasy.”, Although slavery was therefore proving to be of continuing economic benefit to those who engaged in it, it probably had a deleterious long-term effect on the Southern economy as a whole. Slaveholders not only expected their social order to endure but foresaw an era of prosperity.”, The twentieth-century historian Charles W. Ramsdell made a different argument for the alleged impending doom of slavery. Many Americans are confused by the causes of the Civil War. As the South Carolina planter and state senator John Townsend acknowledged in late 1864, “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations as to the negro. .”. All rights reserved. . James and Lois Horton offer a matter-of-fact depiction of Revolutionary-era slavery: Planters required both men and women to engage in hard physical labor, and they worked in marshy rice fields, hot and humid tobacco fields, dusty wheat fields, and dangerous backbreaking lumbering camps. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negros [sic] to an equality with himself and his family.”. In 1860 Richmond had dozens of slave traders, about six major slave auction houses, and at least nineteen slave auctioneers. Sunstroke killed many slaves overworked on all types of plantations. Frederick Law Olmsted was dismayed by what he saw in Mississippi: “[T]he stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labor is painful to witness. The tobacco factories hire[d] hundreds of slaves. Rubrics for essay writing doc. . Innocent slaves were “tortured, burned to death, shot or otherwise horribly murdered.” Turner himself was hanged and his body skinned and dissected to create souvenirs of the event. Whatever part states’ rights allegedly played in secession, concern for those rights corresponded to a state’s interest in maintaining or protecting the institution of slavery. He stated that culture was not the cause of the war, but rather, slavery was: "For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. This fear of Negro equality had a long history. Did the extent of slave ownership in a state or the size of its slave population have anything to do with how likely a state was to secede? between the supporters of a strictly Federative Government . There was room for slavery to expand in Texas and in many bypassed sections of the South, and slavery would have provided a ready workforce in the industries that the South needed to develop. For this reason, the critics of slavery who urged that the institution was an economic burden to the master were using the weakest weapon in their arsenal. Over the next two decades, a Northern abolitionist movement, the Nat Turner Revolt of 1831, and Southern reaction to both revived the national contention over slavery. . As the following chapter demonstrates, Southern opposition to the possible end of slavery was so violent that voluntary abolition was simply unforeseeable. moving across the field in parallel lines, with a considerable degree of precision. The reality was that slavery often involved beating, killing, and raping slaves, as well as breaking up slave families for economic or disciplinary reasons. There is, however, much evidence that contradicts the myth that slavery was not the cause of secession and the war. Page’s tribute was a perfect example of what W. J. By VOA News, Catherine Maddux. Winthrop Jordan concludes these had no realistic chance for adoption. If that were the case, then the logical first step of the Union would have been a direct assault on the institution. After the Revolution, Virginians, inspired by some Founding Fathers, considered some emancipation and colonization proposals. When antislavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president (1860), the Southern states seceded. In order to discuss this question, we must examine the nature of slavery in 1861 and determine if it was in fact a dying institution, as some claim. The south also believed that the states should have the stronger government more so … In response, there was a frenzy of whites’ killing blacks on sight—most of them uninvolved in the uprising. Alan Nolan explains: “This revisionism in regard to the role of slavery and the character of the slaves could have remained an entirely Southern theme. He added, “And, worst of all, there was the fact that the South itself definitely shared in these moral notions—in its secret heart always carried a powerful and uneasy sense of the essential rightness of the nineteenth century’s position on slavery. A black woman . They expect the entire nation to follow through with the legislation that came out of the Compromise of 1850 that said escaping slaves will be returned. The peculiar institution hovers over the conflict specter-like. Slaves were so valuable that there was even talk about changing or overriding the 1807 congressional ban on the international slave trade. April 12, 2017 02:15 PM Share on Facebook. They raised issues of social equality among blacks and whites, and there was pervasive and profound “thought and feeling about social intermixture.” “As time went on in the nineteenth century,” writes Jordan, “Virginians, realizing that colonization was utterly impractical and hating themselves as slave owners, turned more and more to the self-solacing thought that realities of ‘prejudice’ were inevitable, innate and right. The Democratic conventions of 1860 demonstrate Southerners’ interest in greater federal government protection of slavery. Their walkouts, which split the party and led to two separate party candidates for president, demonstrated the Southerners’ concern for greater protection of slavery by the federal government—far from a states’ rights position. Because the war resulted from the secession of seven Southern states and their formation of the Confederate States of America after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president on November 6, 1860, and his inauguration on March 4, 1861, whatever caused those states to secede is the primary cause of the Civil War. In 1860, slaves were still a reasonable capital investment. . Within the last 12 months, we have had to hang some 40 for plotting an insurrection, and there has been about that number put in irons.” That fall, after the Battle of Corinth (Mississippi), Union chaplain John Eaton reported that as cotton planters fled, their slaves “flocked in vast numbers— an army in themselves—to the camps of the Yankees.”, Before, during, and after the war, promoters of the Myth used words like “happy,” “content,” “faithful,” “amiable,” and “cheerful” to describe slaves’ attitudes about their condition. If anything, they were too confident in the future of slavery, too certain that the nation’s economy depended on the vast profits of the cotton and other goods produced by slavery, too sure that the industrialized world would stumble and fall without the bounty produced by the slave people of the South.” In fact, there was great interest in annexing the slavery-dominated island of Cuba. Union troops were illegally stationed in a battery off the coast of South Carolina, trespassing was just one of the charges. Gentle and simple, they gave their husbands, their brothers and their sons to the cause of the South, sorrowing chiefly that they themselves were too feeble to stand at their side. . The myth concludes that, whatever the merits of slavery, the Civil War was unnecessary to end it because the institution was economically doomed and would have died a natural death within a reasonable time. Soldiers who owned slaves—or lived with family members who did—turned out in great numbers to fight on behalf of their newly created nation. You have a whole population of four million people whom you consider, and your society considers, inferior to you. Far from being a decrepit institution, the economic motives for the continuance of slavery from the standpoint of the employer were never so strong as in the years just preceding the Civil War. . . Slavery didn't cause the Civil War, it was the war of Northern Agression that started it. Tredegar [Iron Works] hire[d] slaves every year.”50 Many Southerners envisioned the large-scale use of slaves in factories that could be built or expanded. . . . By the mid 19th century the Civil War began when the south seceded to mainly protect their institution of slavery. But by joining the Confederate war machine, all of them, irrespective of their personal motivations, advanced their nation’s political agenda—the perpetuation and territorial expansion of human bondage and the misery that it entailed.”. The South seceded from the Union to protect their way of life. As their secession resolutions demonstrated (see below), Southerners were disappointed that some Northern states were exercising state power to obstruct federal enforcement of slave-owners’ rights. In Holly Springs, Mississippi, one planter punished his slaves by slashing the soles of their feet with a Bowie knife. If the prices of all Southern products had fallen so low that it was impossible in any industry or region to earn more than a few dollars a year as the net return for slave labor, it would still have been advantageous to employ it. How did slavery cause the Civil War? The most extreme punishments (all without benefit of judge, jury, or trial) were reserved for alleged sex-related offenses. Of course, both sides claimed that God and the Bible were on their sides and had numerous biblical quotations to support their positions. What is the Civil War and how did it happen? It is often suggested that we have ignored the well-known facts that most southerners did not own slaves and that most northerners shared the era’s racist attitudes. Describing antebellum Southern society, Dew says, “The average Southern farmer is a yeoman who owns his own land and works it with the help of his family; he might own a slave. 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