It was either the fall of 1968 or the spring of 1969. The American History teacher of my rural South Texas junior high school was ladling out generous helpings of Kool-Aid regarding the Civil War, particularly slavery. It seemed that slaves -- given their sheltered lives of manacles, the lash, and the bondsman's unrequited toil -- were not ready for freedom. They were happier and better off under the protective watch of their benevolent masters.
I actually believed it. Then I happened to notice the three African-American kids in the class, sitting together. Like me, they were 13- and 14-year old boys. Unlike me, they stared at the floor during the learned discourse, plainly not sharing the sentiment and equally plainly afraid to speak up about it.
At that moment, I realized that I was being fed not Kool-Aid, but a crock of shit.
I've spent much of my adult life trying to understand the Civil War, an endeavor intensified by a recent return to the South after more than 20 years away. 8ackgr0und N015e's recent post (Mything the Point of the War of Northern Aggression) and the following commentary inspired the following set of crib notes about the war; a list of recommended readings follows.
Note: I use the terms "North" and "South" for convenience. In reality, the regions did not present a unified front: There was substantial Unionist sentiment in parts of the South (particularly the mountainous areas western North Carolina, northern Alabama, and eastern Tennessee) and an antiwar faction in the North large enough that Lincoln doubted his reelection prospects.
Background
The framers of the Constitution punted on slavery, touching off a process of failed compromises designed to put off a final decision as long as possible. As the country expanded westward, the question arose of whether slavery should expand with it. Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery because they believed that competing with slave labor in the territories would put them in a unfavorable economic position. Southerners supported slavery in the territories because they believed that the peculiar institution could not survive in the South unless it expanded with the country.
The Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act sought to find a middle ground based on geographical limits and popular sovereignty. Ultimately, they failed, culminating in brutal guerrilla warfare called Bleeding Kansas. Meanwhile, northern resentment toward the South increased, driven by such measures as the Gag Rule and the Fugitive Slave Act. The Republican party, formed in 1854, provided a viable political voice to the Free Soil movement.
What Caused the Civil War?
Abraham Lincoln's election was undoubtedly the flash point, but it was also a legitimate expression of democratic will. The ultimate cause of the war was the secession of eleven slave states.
Why Did They Fight?
At the outset, the South fought to protect slavery and the North fought to preserve the Union. Contemporary sources -- most famously the declarations of secession by Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas -- leave no doubt as to the South's motivation, and no reputable historian of the era thinks otherwise. Confusion, however, often arises over the intentions of the North.
Jefferson Davis and other southern leaders believed -- probably correctly -- that the North would not shed blood to end slavery. But they gravely underestimated the commitment of the North to a union of states that no individual state had the right to dissolve unilaterally. The South never seriously considered that the North would fight for the Union, a miscalculation of historic proportions.
But northern leaders were capable of error, too. Despite his supreme political genius and despite all evidence to the contrary, Lincoln believed well into the war that southern Unionists could be persuaded to become allies and be a decisive factor in derailing the southern war effort. His reasoning was on the surface strong: Most southerners did not own slaves. But, Lincoln did not appreciate the myriad ways in which slave owners had created a general economic dependency on slavery or the South's commitment to white supremacy.
Nonetheless, by 1864 both sides' motivations for fighting the Civil War had changed, drastically in the case of the South. By then, most Southerners concurred that the institution of slavery was finished regardless of the military outcome. As Union troops drove South, thousands of slaves -- encouraged by the Emancipation Proclamation -- opted for freedom. Moreover, even victory would leave the South with a border too long to be secured against fleeing slaves. The South now fought for its existence and freedom from what had become a hated enemy. In this lie the roots of the myth of the Lost Cause as the primary driver of secession.
To the North, military success and the Emancipation Proclamation transformed the primary war aim from preservation of the Union to the establishment of Union of free men.
Who Was The Aggressor?
On April 12, 1861, the South commenced an artillery barrage on Fort Sumter. This ended a political duel between Lincoln and Davis in which the former outmaneuvered the latter. But war was inevitable by then, and who actually fired the first shot is an irrelevant question when it comes to defining the aggressor.
For that, one must look to the decision of the seven states of the lower South to secede -- an act that any government at any time would consider as aggressive. What's more, the entire South knew it: For a year leading up to secession, southern states had been assiduously building their military capacity by enlarging state militias and adding to arsenals. But it was specifically South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas that committed the initial act of aggression by seceding unilaterally and forming the Confederate States of America.
How Do You Know This Stuff?
I read a lot. Books that informed this diary include:
Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (Current)
Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (Furgurson)
General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse (Glatthaar)
The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Levine)
The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Stoker)
Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (Woodworth)