Civil War in the Early

¶ … Civil War

In the early months of 1861, a large contingent of Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in the state of South Carolina, an event which some historians believe was the beginning of the one of the most disruptive and violent periods in American history. Known to those in the North as the Civil War, this major conflict has been a heated topic of debate for more than a hundred years, especially related to exactly what caused it to occur in the first place. Some place the blame on state's rights as it relates to the states in the South wishing to conduct their business as they saw fit without infringement from the Union government.

However, most historians agree that the main cause of the Civil War was the issue of slavery, especially concerning the South's insistence that slavery must be allowed to spread beyond the Mississippi River and into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Thus, in contrast to what most Southerners fervently believed and supported, the true cause of the American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, was the great social and political struggle to bring an end to slavery, an institution which the South greatly depended upon for its very existence.

But first, the issue of state's rights should be discussed, due to its popularity with the people of the Deep South, many of whom overwhelmingly depended upon the institution of slavery in order to survive financially and to continue the age-old plantation system for the cultivation of cotton and tobacco. Overall, most Southerners were convinced that the Union government, circa 1860 and just after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, was creating and ratifying certain laws and regulations which discriminated against their so-called rights to own slaves and profit from their sale at auction.

These Southerners also believed "that individual states had the right to nullify or overturn any law" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet) passed or ratified by the Union government, due to feeling that each state in the South was a sovereign entity. In addition, they also believed that each state in the South "had the right to leave" the Union and thus create their own independent nation. However, "most people in the North believed that these concepts of nullification and state's rights" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet) threatened the national security of the country and allowed the citizens of the South to practice a form of laissez faire government, all at the expense of African-Americans who toiled in the fields from sunup to sundown as slaves.

As to the alleged right of Southern states to secede from the Union, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America (CSA), did not hold back his feelings at his inaugural speech in February of 1861. "It is the right of the people," Davis declared, "to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive to the ends for which they were established" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet), a clear reference to the Declaration of Independence which states in so many words that the people have the right to overthrow a government which they feel is corrupt, inadequate or out-dated.

Davis also made it abundantly clear that the reason behind states like South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia withdrawing from the Union was to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and to secure" the blessings of American liberty for all Southerners ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet); however, what Davis really meant to say was that all white Southerners deserved the special privileges and rights of freedom and liberty, while the slaves remained without any rights whatsoever and were nothing more than second-class citizens on a social level with animals.

One other important source related to state's rights in the Confederate South comes from a letter written by S.F. Hale, Commissioner of the state of Alabama, to the governor of Kentucky in 1860, just prior to the attack on Fort Sumter. Hale provides a number of propositions, such as "Whenever any form of government," in this case the Federal government in Washington, D.C., "becomes destructive. . . It is the inalienable right and the duty of the people to alter or abolish it" ("The Causes of the Civil War," Internet), especially when such a government attempts to enforce the notion that slavery is morally wrong and must be eliminated.

Hale also points out in this letter that slavery, as an institution in the Confederate states, serves as the foundation for political power and that since slaves are viewed as property, they must be protected, much like any other type of property, such as a home, a farm, or one's bank account. Hale then states that slavery "has not only become. . . The fixed domestic institution" of the Confederacy but also forms "an important element of its political power" and adds up to "the most valuable species of. . . property," estimated to have been somewhere in the area of $4 billion dollars ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet). Therefore, it is easy to understand why the people of the Confederacy saw state's rights as the true cause of the outbreak of the Civil War, for if such rights were taken away by the federal government, then the political power and influence of the South would vanish and would end up as a broken shell of its former self.

As to the issue of slavery being the actual cause of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, most Americans living in the North in such states as Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York, and those with solid connections with a number of anti-slavery movements, considered the institution of slavery as a highly immoral and racially-based system that utilized slave labor for financial gain and for the spread of anti-abolitionist propaganda throughout the North. In other words, a majority of white Americans living in the North sensed that something terrible was lingering in the air, a sense that the issue of slavery in the South would eventually culminate in some type of conflict which would inevitably cause the South to collapse under the weight of its own flagrant disregard for the rights of all Americans, especially African-Americans.

For the most part, the burning and highly-controversial problem of slavery in the Confederate South came to a head when President Abraham Lincoln introduced his Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863 which in essence made slavery in the United States null and void, meaning that all slaves within the boundaries of the U.S. were set free to pursue their own lives as citizens on an equal footing with white Americans. As might be suspected, when the principles of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation reached the ears of Southern politicians and wealthy plantation owners, it set off a storm of protest, mostly because the proclamation made slavery illegal, thus forcing slave owners to abandon their "property."

In addition, upon hearing about Lincoln's bold move to eradicate the institution of slavery from the South, a majority of white slave owners reacted with utter shock and dismay, for they considered Lincoln's proclamation as a form of discrimination and were convinced that its principles, if made the law of the land, would destroy the "Old South" and the institution of slavery which had existed in various forms for hundreds of years.

In 1864, President Lincoln provided to the nation a very simple explanation for his actions regarding the proclamation, for he declared that "In giving slaves their freedom, we guarantee the right to be a free human being" (Horwitz, 245) with equal rights and protections under federal law and with the ability to decide one's own fate and to live and work wherever one chose. Thus, it is clear that President Lincoln was fully aware of the fact that the basis of the Civil War was to end slavery in the United States once and for all and to allow all African-Americans the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens.

Some ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote a short letter to his friend and colleague George Robertson, a lawyer from Kentucky who had once served as legal counsel for Lincoln regarding a private family matter. In this letter, Lincoln reminds Robertson that he once demanded "the peaceful extinction of slavery," something which Lincoln doubted even as early as 1855. Lincoln also states that the spirit that once existed for the elimination of slavery in America "had itself become extinct" in the early 1850's and that the plight of African-Americans is "as fixed and hopeless of change for the better," a reference to the absence of a direct assault upon slavery in the South by concerned Northerners ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet).

In the last few lines of this letter, Lincoln offers the observation, "Can we as a nation continue together permanently forever, half-slave, half-free?" (Horwitz, 250), a predicament which Lincoln did not believe could be solved without some type of direct confrontation between the federal government and the South at some point in the future. Certainly, Lincoln was extremely upset with the notion that while some Americans were free to pursue their own personal agendas, others were not free in any respect whatsoever, these being African-American slaves. Thus, in order to end this situation, Lincoln dedicated his life to seeing the institution of slavery eradicated from the face of the earth which he accomplished in some small measure in 1863 with his Emancipation Proclamation.

Furthermore, in 1860, the editor for the Charleston Mercury, a staunch advocate of slavery, wrote an editorial called "The Terrors of Submission," a reference to the South falling under the control of the abolitionists who wished to see slavery destroyed and the slaves given their freedom. This unidentified editor points out that if Abraham Lincoln becomes President in 1861, then an "immediate danger will be brought to slavery. . . all slave property will be weakened. . . And all the frontier states (i.e., those west of the Mississippi River) will enter upon the policy of making themselves free states" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet).

Also, the editor admits that slave property in the shape of human beings "is the foundation of all property in the South" and that if the rules of the abolitionists takes hold in the South, there would be "an end of all peaceful separation (from) the Union" by a majority of Southern states; thus, "We can only escape the ruin. . . By war" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet).

Thus, one could say with some certainty that white plantation owners in states like Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia and those who profited handsomely from the selling of human beings on the open American and European markets quickly came to the conclusion that open warfare between the Union and the Confederacy was inevitable, especially when South Carolina

seceded from the Union in 1861, followed by a number of other Southern states in rapid succession.

In this respect, the dissolution of the United States of America in the form of two separate entities, being the Union in the North and the Confederacy in the South, was preceded by fierce vocal opposition from those in the North and by wholehearted joy by those in the South who desired simply to be left alone to pursue their profits via the sale and exchange of human beings like cattle headed for the slaughterhouse.