Frank's Musings

We can disabuse ourselves of the notion that the American civil War was fought mainly over the injustice enslaving  a specific class of US residents. This sanctification of the country’s motivations probably owes more to the politics of the twentieth century civil rights movement than to rigorous historical analysis.

The 3/5 Clause of the U.S. Constitution allowed the South to take advantage of the Cotton Boom by buying slaves and thereby increasing its influence in the federal government.  Furthermore, southern leaders wanted to extend legalized slavery to new states admitted to the Union so their enterprises  could enjoy the labor cost advantage there, too.

Why were Northerners ready to use force to heel the obstreperous southern slave states?  Southerners had benefited from the serendipitous cotton boom, owing  to the invention of the cotton gin, and used their increased wealth to invest in enlarging he number of enslaved pickers, which gave them a cost advantage on the world cotton market.  Moreover, Southern society benefited from relief from the hard work involved in its main source of income, which made possible a physically more leisurely style of life.  Beyond that, the popular view of life in the plantation sector insulted Northerners’ sense of democratic sharing of the burden of making a living.

In other words, it wasn’t the abolition of slavery that drove Northerners to fight the Civil War. Sure, slavery was  distasteful in their eyes, but not primarily for humanitarian reasons. It was believed, more critically, to give southern growers an unfair source of cheap labor.

Contrary to what Nikki Haley was forced to concede during the 2024 Republican presidential primary debates, slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War.  It certainly was a necessary condition for the events that made inevitable the clash between Northern and Southern states.  However, Northerners were ambivalent in regard to racial discrimination and would continue to be until the mid-twentieth century.

Slavery made the South wealthy as a competitive world supplier of raw cotton to UK textile mills. It provided the South with outsized voting power in the US legislature because of the Constitution’s 3/5 rule. It also led Southern politicians to seek extension of slavery to other territories newly to be admitted into the Union. In all, this allowed Southern entrepreneurs to enjoy a comparative economic advantage that was not available to  Northern business interests. A dualistic zero-sum view of the world prevented finding a collaborative solution to this resentful artifact of the Constitutional Congress.   What was deemed necessary for stitching together the original thirteen states was no longer acceptable for most Americans as the Union embarked on its manifest destiny.

Disgust with the cruel and demeaning subjugation of certain human beings only distinguished by the color of their skin and their cultural and geographic origin didn’t compel northerners to fight against the recalcitrant and aggressive Confederacy. The driving force behind the North’s and Lincoln’s (cf. his Cooper Union speech) desire to discipline the southern slave states was impatience with having economically and culturally indulged the southern states ever since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

Making the abolition of slavery the leading  motive behind northern leaders’ and soldiers’ willingness to fight against the disintegration of the Union is an after-the fact rationalization, probably owing more to the rhetoric of the civil rights movement than to rigorous historical analysis.

It was clear to the ambitious Southern leaders in 1860 that despite what they considered their dominant contribution to the financial strength of the U.S. they could only expand their model of slavery-based business growth in the westward expansion of  civilization by seceding from the Union.  Whether slavery would be allowed to follow was going to be determined by a federal administration under the leadership of the author of the Cooper Union Speech.  In that address Abraham Lincoln had meticulously laid out the historical basis for banning extension of slavery to any of the new territories to be admitted to the federal Union. 

Southern leaders were surprisingly able to disregard the peculiar circumstances of the creation of the Constitution and not realize (a) that the U.S. would not  permanently  hinge  the country’s future on indulging an inhumane proclivity of a select number of states, and (b) that the more populous  and more economically diversified  portion of the country would not sheepishly allow the South temperamentally and violently break from the Union.

You can almost hear the public in the North say, “They certainly have their nerve!”   That is the main  reason that  Union enlistees as well as their influencers were willing to make the sacrifices that warfare would entail.  Defense of an abstract value such as the basic law of the land does not usually compel citizens to risk their lives; nor do the civil rights of a minority group of people.  Therefore, although the ugliness of slavery was undoubtedly a contributing factor, the real cause of the War between the States was Noreterners’ resentment of more than six decades of privileged living conditions in the South. 

When the South had the temerity to begin firing on Union assets like Fort Sumpter, the citizens of the Northern states reached their limit.  They embarked on a bloody and costly action of discipline against what surely was a hopeless defense of personal  honor by the residents of what became the Confederacy.  Allegiance to that principle of self-regard lasts to this day for a dwindling portion of Southerners in their celebration of the “Lost Cause.”  Slavery was only abolished nationally after Lincoln and the Union were confident that removal of that canker sore from America’s body would surely help bring an end to combat.