What was the Civil War About?

Article - The Origins of the American Civil War

The four published state secession declarations of the first seven seceding states. 

Florida's unpublished secession declaration.


    The Civil War was fought almost wholly over the future of slavery.  While other factors fueled sectional division, the immediate cause of secession by the first seven southern states was the 1860 election of a  Republican Party president (Abraham Lincoln) and congress who were determined to block the spread of slavery into the western federal territories.  The Fugitive Slave Act was almost equally as divisive.  Other charges were that the Republican Party was dedicated to the complete abolition of slavery, the political and social equality of the races, and was inciting slave rebellions in the South.  The non-slavery issue that was sometimes mentioned by the secessionists was the federal government's favoritism towards northern industry over southern agriculture (e.g. tariffs).  But these were mentioned much less often than the slavery issues.

The following is a basic history of how the war came about....

     There was slavery in both the northern and southern states during the colonial era (c. 1619 - 1776).  But it was never as important to the northern economy as it was to the southern economy as the North did not have the labor-intensive agricultural products like rice, sugar and tobacco that were in great demand in Europe.  In the mid-1700s, some northerners, particularly some Quakers in Pennsylvania, began to agitate for the ending of slavery.  The American Revolution, with its idea of equality for all men, further enhanced the idea of abolitionism and, after the revolution, northern states began emancipating slaves.  A lot of this was accomplished through gradual emancipation (children born to slaves after a certain date would be freed).  By 1860 there were 430,000 slaves in the border states and 3.8 million in the Confederate states. (1860 census slave populations by state)

Around the time of the Revolution, most founding fathers thought that slavery would gradually disappear in the South, too.  But Eli Whitney invented the "cotton gin" in the 1790s.  It allowed for the easy separation of cotton seed from the cotton fiber.  The desire for cotton clothing to replace woolen garments started an international demand that by 1860 had the cotton states exported 5 million bales worth $200 million (about $5 billion today).  Profits were so great that the phrase "King Cotton" had been coined ("Cotton is King" speech extract). 
  
Decades earlier, slavery had already expanded into the mid-west as the territory gained from the Louisiana Purchase had been divided up between free states and slave states by the Missouri Compromise in 1820.  Between 1790 and 1860 about one million slaves were moved in the "second middle passage" from the upper South to the lower South to build and work new cotton plantations.  The average slave's daily work output increased from 25 lbs to 100 lbs of cotton daily.

Map of the Missouri Compromise

The Compromise of 1850 divided up the newly acquired territories from the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War into free and slave states.  But the Missouri Compromise was rescinded in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act proposed by Democrat Stephen Douglas (The Democratic Party of the 19th century was the "small federal government" party in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson).  This act determined that "popular sovereignty," whether the people of a state wanted a free state or a slave state, would decide the matter on a state by state basis.  Thus, the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the possibility of slavery in the northern territories.  Pro-slavery men and anti-slavery men rushed into Kansas to bid for the proposed state's direction, and violence broke out lasting for several years.  This event became known as "Bleeding Kansas."

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

In response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Republican Party formed in 1854 around a ideology of "free soil, free labor and free men."  It was formed mostly from remnants of the collapsed Whig Party and shorter-lived Free Soil Party. (Free Soilers were northerners who wanted the western federal territories converted into free states with free homesteads for farmers). 
  
Republicans  believed in free labor ideology.  They were proud of owning their small farms and machine shops and believed that slave labor demeaned their way of life.  A 1858 speech by South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond  suggested that "menial" laborers of the North were, in fact, slaves. 
   
Northerners also wanted to be able to migrate west without completing economically with slave owners (and, in some cases, without living among Blacks).  The South had a much thinner and less prosperous middle class than did the North and northerners attributed this to the wealth driven political control of southern slave owners (what northerners termed the 'slavocracy') .  (In 1857, southerner and racial separatist Hinton Helper wrote a book The Impending Crisis of the South making this claim and urged non-slave owners in the South to vote the planters out of office and to end slavery.  The book infuriated slave owners.) 
  
  The Whig Party had been "big government" politicos who advocated federal support for building roads, canals, and railroads, and also import tariffs for increasing northern industry.  Many of them, like William Seward, were also staunch abolitionists who detested slavery on moral grounds. These men were called "conscious Whigs." While the large majority of northerners were still apathetic towards the plight of the slaves in 1860, abolitionism had been growing since 1830 when William Lloyd Garrison founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.  The publication of Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was an international best seller and the writings and speeches of the eloquent ex-slave Frederick Douglass drew large crowds of northerners to see hear him speak against slavery.  Great Britain (1834) and several other European countries had already ended slavery and slave owners feared the eventual demise of slavery (by 1861, New World slavery only existed in the U.S., Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil - world abolition of slavery timeline). 

Two other major factors increased anti-slavery sentiment in the north.  In the Compromise of 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law was strengthened, requiring northern states to use their resources to catch runaway slaves and return them to their owners in the South.  And in 1858 the Democrat-heavy U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision which seemed to open the door for overturning state's decisions to be free states and thus could potentially allow slavery to re-enter the North.  In 1859 a failed attempt by John Brown and a small band of followers to start a slave liberation revolt in the South indicated to southerners that northern abolitionists could cause uncontrollable violence in their region.  
  
In 1860, the northern population, over three times as large as the southern white population, voted for Abraham Lincoln to be president.  He had promised to push for legislation to stop slavery from moving into the western federal territories while leaving slavery alone in the states it already existed.  Extreme southern secessionists, known as "fire-eaters," pushed for state secession conferences.  Starting with South Carolina, seven deep south "cotton states" seceded from the Union between December of 1860 and February 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America.  Confederates seized several U.S. government forts and munition arsenals as well as federal bouillon.

State Secession 1860 - 1861

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated president. Lincoln's primary concern was the preservation of the Union.  While adamant about halting the expansion of slavery, he over-estimated the amount of Unionism in the South, particularly in the state of Virginia, and had hoped Unionism would pull the deep south back into the Union.  In his inaugural address, Lincoln stated he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed and also supported the Fugitive Slave law as he saw both as guaranteed by the Constitution.  But he stated that Congress had the right to pass legislation to keep slavery contained where it already existed.  He asked the Confederacy to think over what they were doing and urged them to remain friendly with the North.  He did state, however, that he would continue to hold the southern ports to collect tariffs and warned the Confederates against taking further steps.
 
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, ignored Lincoln's advice and warning, and four weeks later he order Confederates to open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston bay.  Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteer troops from the remaining states to put down the "insurrection" and many more than that responded, the large majority more inclined to stop disunion than to free any slaves.  But Kentucky refused to send troops.  Four other states not only refused to send troops, they also seceded.  Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee joined the Confederacy and the Civil War was on.    
    
While the North and the South (these terms are problematic in that they hide many similarities between some northerners and southerners and also hide disagreements among northerners and southerners themselves) had several and social, cultural, political, and economic differences, and these differences inflamed passions towards the war, none of them (e.g. tariffs) were combative enough to be the necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.  Only the differences between pro-slavery and anti-slavery proponents were powerful enough to bring it about.  Without these differences over slavery the war would have never happened even if all the other differences still existed.  If none of the other differences existed but the differences over slavery did, the war would still have happened.   
                                                 __________________________________________________

None of this means that Civil War soldiers all fought primarily over either the issues of slavery or preservation of the Union.  Civil War soldiers on both sides fought for a number of different reasons.  But those issues should not be confused with how and why the war came to happen.