Federal troops burn the railway station at Madison, Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 7, `1865

MANY PEOPLE to this day believe the American “Civil War” was fought to end slavery. This falsehood dates to the war itself and has been perpetuated by apologists for the sort of lawless, centralized government that emerged during the war. As Adam S. Miller, author of three books on the war, wrote:

The war between the North and the South was not fought by the North (Union) to secure the freedom of slaves, nor to end slavery itself as many were told and others still think. Here are facts which prove this:

  – At a conference in Washington, D.C., on February 27, 1861, Northern delegates met and voted against a constitutional amendment to end slavery. Why would they not vote to end slavery if they were supposedly about to go to war to do so? The reason is because the war was not fought to free the slaves. The war was fought by the North to keep the South from seceding and to strengthen Northern control over the Southern states. The North, or Union, was fighting against the rights of states; it was fighting to destroy the agricultural way of life of the South so as forcibly to bring about the dominance of the industrial way of life of the North.

 – On July 25, 1861, a bill was passed in Congress -the Crittenden Resolution- which declared that the war was being fought to preserve the Union, not to stop, or even change, slavery in its established form.” (Source)

Furthermore, as Miller points out, Abraham Lincoln and his government solicited the support of slave states, including Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri. The Union included more slave states at the start of the war than the Confederacy. “Thus, the North could not have been fighting to end slavery, for it would have been fighting against a large portion of itself when the war began,” Miller states.

Only one in fifteen white Southern adults were slave-holders. The vast majority of those who fought for the Confederacy had no direct stake in the institution.

The idea that the North was fighting to end slavery was propaganda, inflaming passions and rallying both whites and blacks to the federal government’s acts of aggression against its own people.

— Comments —

Terry Morris writes:

I’m glad you are writing about this. I have written about the subject numerous times in the past. Most recently here.

The lawlessness you speak of had been going on for many years before the War Between The States broke out in earnest in 1861. The South bore this patiently all that time (at least thirty years), but it finally “came to a head,” so to speak. The main point of the WBTS was, from the “federal” perspective, to overthrow the federal principle of the U.S. Constitution and turn the Washington government into a purely (unrestrained by the pesky Constitution) national one.

A couple of good books to read on this subject are (1) The Lost Cause, by Pollard; (2) Origins of the Late War, by (Bostonian) George Lunt. There are numerous others, but those are the two I would most recommend to anyone interested in a truer perspective than they’ve ever heard. A third would be R.L. Dabney’s Defense of Virginia and the South. All agree that slavery was the occasion of the war, not the cause. The actual cause of the war is no more complicated than what I wrote in the article linked to above, but of course there are many many facets to it that I don’t touch on in the article that our authors above-recommended do touch on.

Caryl Johnston writes:

Great piece, Laura. I think I’ll nominate you as an Honorary Southerner!

Laura writes:

Thanks!

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