I’ve studied the Civil War and its underlying causes and its military tactics and strategy for over 30 years.
Some slaves were well treated, even well fed. Some slaves were considered members of the families who enslaved them. Some slaves had a great deal of personal freedom. Some slaves were well educated. Some slaves even earned their freedom to become slaveholders themselves.
So the fuck what?
The operative phrase in all those facts — and they are all true — is “some slaves.” These were all people who were enslaved; they were all people who had their labor stolen from them; they were all people whose lives were constricted by people who lorded an imaginary privilege over them. To cling to any other fact is to try to excuse the inexcusable and make humane the inhumane.
The Civil War was caused by many, many economic, political and social factors, but the one thing that catalyzed those multiple causes into war was that the country had become a critical mass of opinion favoring free labor over slave labor. That’s it. When people ask me (and they do) whether the Civil War was caused by slavery, I say “the short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes.”
Slavery as an institution in this country was a very complex one, sometimes contradictory. Some in the South opposed slavery; some slaveholders opposed slavery. Some fought for the Confederacy and were still opposed to slavery. Some “historians” glom onto these facts as if to say “it wasn’t all bad.” Of course it wasn’t “all bad.” Nothing is. Adolf Hitler had a genuine affection for children, yet nothing about that singular fact redeems the larger fact that he was a monster. No single cause of the Civil War redeems the larger cause for which it was fought.
Nothing is all one thing or another, but what defines the nature of something is the preponderance of its constituent parts. All the well-treated, well-fed, treated-as-a-member-of-the-family slaves in all the world do not change the fact that these people were slaves, marked off as different, set aside as exploitable, persecuted and defiled. Any benevolent slaveholder was still a slaveholder, a person who assumed a privilege no person can assume. If every single slave in the nation was treated well, it would not make slavery acceptable, justifiable or excusable.
These things speak for themselves, so I’m not making any particular point. There are always forces at work in this nation, and other nations, that want to assume ownership of other people and their labor, whether it be by men with whips or men with golden parachutes. The struggle for liberty is universal, and no shading of nuance will obscure the fact that any theft of liberty is an abomination.
