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Historians: “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery”



… why is there any doubt?


As a teacher of American history in the 1970s, I was clear and correct when I told students that the reason for the Civil War was because the South feared losing slavery. That analysis came directly from the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which condemned, in part, those states which refused to allow slavery in them,


… an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution.


South Carolina Document of Secession, 1860


That makes it clear that the only reason that the war started, with South Carolina’s secession, is because of slavery, yet many Americans in the South have attempted to change that narrative.


In 2010, on the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War, the people of Charleston were celebrating the secession from a war that destroyed them,


The Sons of Confederate Veterans are holding a gala this week in Charleston, S.C., a hundred-dollar-a-ticket affair celebrating the state’s secession from the Union 150 years ago. It’s the first of countless commemorations planned for the coming four years — lectures, conferences, parades, re-enactments, museum exhibitions and government proclamations — to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.


The Charleston “Secession Ball” — advertised as “an event of a lifetime” — includes a theatrical re-enactment of the signing of the Ordinance of Secession (the original version of which will be on display), as well as dinner and a dance.


“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” one of the event’s organizers told The New York Times. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause.”


Emily Badger, “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,”

New York Times, Dec. 20, 2010

Slavery makes the South seem like their cause was not just. States rights and trade and other rationales make it sound so much better

Historians disagree


However, history is history — and the vast majority of historians are clear about what caused the Civil War.


“Of course, when South Carolina did secede, there was enormous celebration, dancing in the streets and so on,” said James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Battle Cry of Freedom


But something about the Charleston event of 2010 strikes an odd tone.

“They didn’t know what was going to happen to them,” McPherson said of the original revelers. “Now we do know what happened to them, and maybe a celebratory note is not very appropriate.”


Scholars today are mostly of one mind about why South Carolina seceded and what caused the war. But Americans, even a century and a half later, still deeply disagree with each other and historians, many of them embracing a Civil War story about self-government and “states’ rights” that reveals more about America in 2010 than what actually occurred in the 1860s.


This disconnect between scholarship and public memory has traced a curious evolution over past 150 years, and now on the eve of the sesquicentennial, it threatens to complicate any honest national conversation about the significance of the war’s anniversary.


“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.”


Emily Badger, New York Times, December 20, 2021


Another professor asks why no one reads it


How did this narrative begin about slavery no being the the causus belli of the war?

ntion of that?


"One hundred and fifty years ago Christmas Eve day, everyone knew why South Carolina was seceding because they said so — it’s a wonderful document,” said James Loewen, a sociologist and co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.


Four days after South Carolina seceded on Dec. 20, 1860, the state adopted a second document titled “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” Loewen considers the record, central to his new collection, one of the five most important documents in the history of the country, launching as it did a seminal chapter in America’s ongoing struggle to define itself.


“So why does nobody ever read it?” he asked. “Everybody knew [secession was] about slavery. This document is all about slavery.”


In it, South Carolina laments the election of a new president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” State leaders indeed sound incensed about “states’ rights,” but not in the way most people think today.


“They are against states’ rights,” Loewen said. “And they name the states and they name the rights that really upset them.”


Specifically, South Carolina spells out grievances with 13 Northern states that had passed local laws that “render useless” the federal Fugitive Slave Act. South Carolina is miffed at New York for denying slaveholders the right to transport slaves through its territory, and at Ohio and Iowa for refusing to surrender escaped slaves charged with crimes in Virginia. It’s angry at several Northern states for giving freed blacks citizenship and even the right to vote (a decision that was then the responsibility of the states, not the federal government). These northern laws were essentially an attempt to hold federal slave policy at bay — using states’ rights.


Emily Badger, New York Times, December 20, 2010


Why don’t they acknowledge this?


In 2010, 150 years after South Carolina started the war, the United States had its first black president. But a decade later, half of the people in the South still want to secede again, even though they would starve. Only Texas has an economy that could carry its own weight. Even Florida would suffer because the southern states are takers — they take away more taxes from the federal government than they contribute.


The South continues to fight this narrative instead of acknowledging their role in the slavery fiasco that caused the war,

In the years since the Civil Rights era, historians have coalesced around the account outlined by McPherson and supported in records like those Loewen has collected. “It’s cut-and-dry,” Loewen says. Two generations of historians have made the case “thoroughly and conclusively and persuasively,” Blight says.


Grade-school textbooks have not entirely caught up (a crusade of Loewen, who also wrote the best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me). This fall, Carol Sheriff, a history colleague of Ely’s at William & Mary, discovered in her daughter’s fourth-grade Virginia textbook a passage about the “thousands” of blacks who fought for the Confederacy. Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue also celebrated this relatively new narrative about the war in a 2008 state proclamation (using a historic inaccuracy arguably worse than not mentioning slaves at all in state Civil War proclamations).


The claim, sourced by the Virginia textbook’s author from a Sons of Confederate Veterans website, is roundly refuted by historians. The Confederate army did not permit blacks to serve as soldiers until late March of 1865, weeks before Richmond fell. But the idea that Southern blacks had fought throughout the conflict would undercut the very premise that Southern whites went to war to continue enslaving them.


Emily Badger, New York Times, December 20, 2010


Quite simply, southern historians have to acknowledge that they have been peddling a false narrative. Historical documents prove them wrong, yet they continue to push it.









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