Frank's Musings

It is time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the American civil War was fought mainly over the injustice of enslaving  a specific class of US residents. That 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 original  U.S. Constitution allowed the South to take advantage of the Cotton Boom by buying additional 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 its labor cost advantage there, too.

Why were Northerners ready to use force to heel the obstreperous southern slave states?  Southern cotton growers had benefited from the serendipitous cotton boom, which was owed to the invention of the cotton gin.  They used their increased wealth to invest in enlarging the 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 fairness that the burden of making a living ought to be shared equally among all residents  of the country.  Moreover, the 3/5 provision effectively enlarged the power of the slave states in the U.S. government.

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 resented because it gave southern growers a source of cheap labor that not only lowered their production costs but also allowed the slavery states to strengthen their relative influence in Washington, not by attracting more citizens, but by buying more slaves.

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 regarding racial discrimination and would continue to be until the mid-twentieth century.  The southern states had used the Constitution’s 3/5 provision to increase those states’ citizenry counts by 60% of each non-voting enslaved laborer.

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 Congress and in the Electoral  College 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 as states into the Union. In all, this allowed Southern entrepreneurs to enjoy a comparative economic advantage that was not available to  Northern business interests.  The prevailing dualistic zero-sum view of the world belittled searching for a collaborative solution to this resentment-inducing artifact of the Constitutional Congress.   (What was deemed necessary for stitching together the original thirteen states was no longer acceptable to 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 politically, economically and culturally indulged them ever since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.  Northerners were not jealous or envious of their Southern compatriots.  They simply resented the fact that because of the peculiar history of the Revolution and the negotiation of the Constitution the slave states enjoyed outsized strength in government affairs.  For that reason, 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 20^th Century civil rights movement than to rigorous historical analysis.

It was clear to the ambitious Southern leaders in 1860 that despite what they considered their important 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 the 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 causes of the War between the States was Northerners’ resentment of more than six decades of privileged living conditions in the South, and Southerners’ desperate conclusion that they could not rely on an endless series of Congressional Compromises for achievement of their goal of expanding their slavery-based business model.

When the South had the temerity to begin firing on an Union asset like Fort Sumter, the citizens of the Northern states reached their limit.  That violent  attack, unnecessary as it was, symbolized the South’s umbrage at being denied the liberty to pursue its own economic self-interest.    It  provoked the North to embark on a bloody and costly action of discipline against what surely was a hopeless defense of personal  honor by the residents of what had become 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 was necessary to  help bring an end to combat.