"Everything You Know About the Civil War is Wrong"

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Originally Posted by Todd.K

Making slavery the main focus of the war from the Northern side is a modern thing. It was a factor at the time but not a main one. It was an issue that went back to the founding. There was a practice of adding States only two at a time with one slave and one not in order to keep the balance in the Senate. This says a lot more about how invested in keeping slavery the South really was, vs your "northern aggression" narrative that seeks to downplay slavery at all cost.

Keeping slavery meant more to the South than ending slavery meant to the North, at least to the ruling/powerful class of each.

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150-odd years after the end of the war, the losing side is still distorting history and using the trope themes that Ilhan Omar is out spreading. The linked article cherrypicked quotes; remember that well-esteemed and Mississippian writer Shelby Foote acknowledged the North wanted to end slavery immediately while the Southern state rights cause saw a generational wind-down of slavery over 50-100 years.

Lincoln was a Republican candidate for President and there was not a question where the party stood in 1860, hence the causi belli for the Southern Aggression against the US government. Lincoln was a politician who said many things, not all of which were truthful.

To the article’s wear rehashing of old tales, Lincoln was also a tyrant during the war, except when he stood for election and generally maintained contextual civil liberties of the time. He suspended Habeas Corpus, generally under George Washington’s Insurrection Act, and the use was mostly restricted to areas of warfare.

My biggest refutation of the thrust of the revisionist article is it was a war of economic causes and slavery was inconsequential as a cause. There is no reasonable support to say the Midwest, who were anti-slavery and voted en masse for Lincoln, was not thoroughly intending to end slavery as an institution. In the aftermath of the genocidal Southern Aggression in Kansas absolutely turned much of the North and all of the Midwest firmly against slavery.

Attachment 56335
https://www.270towin.com/1860_Election/
Compare to the 1856 election map - https://www.270towin.com/1856_Election/index.html

I write this a few dozens of miles from one of John Brown’s terrorist training camps, which openly trained white and black men for anti-slavery martyrdom in 1850’s Kansas and then in Virginia. The regiments from the non-border Northern states absolutely marched in 1861-62 against slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation was ever entertained publicly in Washington DC.

I certainly understand the desire to paint the defeat of the Southern Cause in morally more ambiguous territory. Much of the North fought against slavery - maybe the South fought for States’ Rights, but the cause of the war was slavery, both in economic and political attributes.

Excellent thread, Will - thanks for this ...

I give this thread 12 hours from OP before it gets locked.

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Originally Posted by mack7.62

I don't think slavery was a primary cause of the War of Northern Aggression, it was a way to scapegoat the South. By the time of the war slavery was becoming economically nonviable, share cropping was more profitable.

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Slavery wasn't why the North fought - the North fought to maintain the Union. Slavery was why the South fought. In the South's own words, no less.

Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

There's a quote from Lincoln, and I am paraphrasing from memory, where he essentially said that if keeping the the states together meant keeping slavery, he'd do it. The thrust of Lincoln was keeping the union period.
As I understand it, the emancipation proclamation applied only to Confederate states at the time and not Union states. Think on that.

The war was about slavery for the South - at least for the oligarchic plantation owners leading the charge out of the Union. The other crap is what they fed to the majority of their population who didn't own slaves to go out and fight for them. It was all about money for plantation-owning class, who, not coincidentally, were leaders of the CSA and state governments. States' rights? Sure, in regard to their "right" to own slaves.

For the North, I think the idea of the war as ending slavery evolved later in the conflict. It was initially about preserving the Union. There has been some research on the political attitudes of the Midwest prior to and at the outset of the war - many folks were anti-slavery only because they feared competition from "free" farm labor, not because of any real moral compunction. Plus, Lincoln was smart enough to realize that the war would've had far less support in the North at the outset if slavery was elevated to the same importance as preserving the Union (because, like in the Midwest, many weren't ardently anti-slavery), which is why he vacillated on when to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and whether to include Border states (he didn't). I don't think there's any doubt, though, that ending slavery became a main driver for the North towards the end of the war, say from Gettysburg on.

Looks to be an interesting read:

https://archive.org/details/freenegr...0wood/page/n13