Original subtitles

On April 12, 1861, South Carolina troops opened fire on Federal forces in Fort Sumter,

initiating the American Civil War. Four years and two million casualties later, the North would

stand triumphant over a broken and devastated South. What drove the Southern slaveholding

states to war is simultaneously complicated and extremely simple. Numerous disputes

and confrontations had threatened the union between the states since independence. However,

the only issue that the democratic process failed to overcome was slavery. Ultimately, it was the

fear-driven need to preserve the institution of slavery that caused the American Civil War. There

was no doubt of this at the time; there should be no doubt now. Welcome to the introduction to our

new series on the American Civil War, where we will discuss the leadup to the deadliest

war in American history and discuss the causes that led to it. Spoiler alert: it was slavery.

In Their Own Words The eminent Civil War

historian James M. McPherson describes slavery as the basic and most deep-rooted cause of

the Civil War, a stance with which we wholly and unequivocally agree. While the immediate

cause of the war was southern secession, and numerous other issues exacerbated tensions, the

proximate cause was slavery. Absent that peculiar institution, there would have been no Civil War.

However, you shouldn’t take historians’ word for it, for the Confederates’ own words agree with

them as well. The Confederates were quite open about slavery being their reason for revolt. In

personal letters, church sermons , newspaper articles , and even their founding documents,

the Confederates repeatedly stated that maintaining slavery was the entire reason

for secession. The second line of Mississippi’s declaration of the causes for secession states

that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material

interest of the world.” It then proceeds to lay out 17 grievances regarding the threat to slavery

by free states before declaring, “We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property

worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure

this as well as every other species of property.” The original seceding states who made their own

declarations had the same grievances and drew the same conclusion, though far less concisely.

The Confederate Constitution was similarly clear about defending slavery. It was mostly copied from

the US Constitution except for adding protections for slavery and restricting internal improvements.

Article 1, Section 9, line 4 of the Confederate Constitution states, “No bill of attainder,

ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be

passed,” while Article 4, Section 3 specifically allows slavery in any new territories.

Founding Words In defending this constitution,

the Confederacy’s Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens explicitly confirmed that the Confederacy

was specifically created to defend slavery. In his famous Cornerstone Speech , he states,

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our

peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our

form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” He

further asserted that contrary to the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that all men are

created equal, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are

laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man;

that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Throughout

the speech, Stephens blatantly and unequivocally rejects all American founding principles which

could threaten the institution of slavery. He made no effort to hide the truth that the South was

seceding to continue the enslavement of Africans. Confederate President Jefferson Davis preferred

to be more guarded about secession’s causes and always couched them in terms of property

rights. However, he never publicly disagreed with Stephens , and no evidence exists that he did so

privately. In fact, it’s quite clear from his words that he had the exact same sentiments as

Stephens. In his farewell address to the Senate , he repeatedly defended the idea that Africans

were inferior and deserved to be slaves, as in the Constitution, “we find provision made for

that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white

men.” In a speech to the Confederate Congress, he celebrates their freedom from “a persistent

and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern

States,” ensuring abolitionists wouldn’t be “thus rendering the property in slaves so

insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth

thousands of millions of dollars.” Overall, it can be seen that there was never any ambiguity or

dissension. The southern states openly seceded in order to continue the chattel slavery of Africans,

and they trumpeted that fact to everyone. Lost Cause Myth

This leaves the question of how there came to be any ambiguity or dissent over the Civil War’s

causes when those behind the war were so open about what was happening. There are two reasons.

The first is a lack of focus on slavery from legitimate scholarly sources. Early historians who

wrote about the Civil War did not see the need to write about slavery. That slavery was the primary

cause of the war was considered a settled point. Thus, most scholars focused on untangling the web

of other contributing causes and let slavery fall to the side. After all, there’s little academic

need to write about established facts when there’s obscura to be investigated. This lack

of focus created a perception that slavery was less important to the conflict than it truly was.

Another reason that slavery fell to the wayside in Civil War historiography was deliberate

obfuscation by the Confederates themselves. Having lost the war and facing the judgment of history,

they sought to distance themselves from their indefensible championing of slavery.

In a post-war diary entry written while imprisoned and in subsequent correspondence,

Confederate Vice President Stephens claimed that his extemporaneous Cornerstone Speech was

misquoted and miscopied by a reporter and that the real issues were Constitutional questions

over states' rights. His claim is undercut by his other claim that the misquotes occurred

despite consulting with the reporter after the speech, suggesting that Stephens is responsible

for his own “misinterpretation.” More damning, Stephens was an avid letter writer and newspaper

contributor yet never mentioned being misquoted nor offered to correct the record before his

incarceration. Davis would similarly change his tune, claiming that the war had been fought for

“the inalienable right of a people to change their government” and the right “to withdraw

from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered.” Slavery was

incidental to that issue, a complete reversal of everything both men had said prior to the

war and everything their own states’ secession documents said. Credible historians dismiss

Davis’ and Stephens’ obfuscations as self-serving and blatant falsehoods.

This mythmaking was aided by the work of Jubal Early. Acting on what he believed

were Robert E. Lee’s final orders to his troops, Early sought to romanticize and

celebrate the Confederacy as a noble Lost Cause in numerous articles for the Southern Historical

Society and newspapers in the 1870s. These works, coupled with other former Confederates’ memoirs,

created a mythology to protect the South from the bitter reality of what it had done

and the unjust institution it had fought to preserve . This didn’t fool anyone post-war,

as Union General George H. Thomas noted in 1868 , “The greatest efforts made by the defeated

insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty,

justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedmen, suffered violence and

wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species

of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of

patriotism so that the precipitators of rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the

defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains.” All in all,

the dedicated efforts of Lost Causers enabled post-war Southerners to blur

slavery’s importance to the war, but there was no true doubt then, and none should remain.

The South’s Fears The exact reasons why the South was

willing to fight were as complicated and simple as why slavery was the cause. Historians agree,

and Confederate rhetoric corroborates, that fear drove Southerners to rebellion. Exactly what those

fears were and which were most important is still a source of considerable debate, but three of

them stand out. The most visceral fear was of the slaves themselves. This may sound absurd,

but as Thomas Jefferson eloquently observed in 1820, slaveholding is like holding “a wolf by

the ear; we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Slave owners lived in perpetual fear of

slave uprisings, and with good reason. Many of the richest slave owners were classically educated and

familiar with Spartacus and the Roman Servile Wars . They drew parallels between themselves

and those ancient Italian slaveowners who had been cut down by their slaves. More pressingly,

the Haitian Revolution, which happened only a few decades before the American Civil War, was

still fresh in everyone’s memory. The brutality and cruelty of that conflict were bad enough,

but far worse for the Southern slaveholders was the 1804 massacre of surviving French citizens on

the island. Southerners, even those who didn’t personally hold slaves, feared suffering the

same fate if they lost control of their slaves. Demographics made this fate seem highly plausible.

According to the 1860 Census, the United States population was approximately 31 million,

of which about 4 million were slaves. The free population in the states that formed

the Confederacy was about 5.5 million, with about 3.5 million slaves. South Carolina and

Mississippi had more slaves than free citizens , which was a contributing factor in those states

being the first two to secede. In the event of a widespread, dedicated revolt, state governments

feared they would lack the manpower to put down the rebellion. Worse, the North might

simply watch the rebelling slaves exact just retribution and do nothing, which certain

firebrand abolitionists certainly advocated . In the slaveholder’s minds, releasing their slaves

from servitude could only end in disaster, even as they encouraged the slave population to grow.

There had already been a number of localized slave rebellions, which had been defeated more by luck

and the rebels’ mistakes than any competence on Southerners' behalf. The Southerners foresaw an

oncoming disaster of their own making, which an indifferent North might allow. However,

they needed slavery too much to make any choice but to hold on as long as possible.

A related fear was the loss of political power. Freeing the slaves would mean giving the black man

the right to vote, and even if things didn’t turn violent, the sheer number of former slaves would

be a threat at the ballot box. Southern whites feared newly enfranchised black voters taking

political power away from whites and possibly using it to oppress them as they’d been oppressed.

A more immediate fear was their states losing relevance. The South was rapidly losing power

to the North and West, and it feared that soon, the other regions would simply stop caring about

their needs and push their own agenda. The slaveholding states had agrarian economies

that depended on a favourable balance of trade and low industrialization to be profitable. However,

both the North and West were rapidly industrializing and were looking for

increased government spending on infrastructure and protective tariffs. Given that most immigrants

were moving to the North and West, it was only a matter of time before non-Southern

interests dominated national politics. It was already clear in 1860 that the

so-called Slave Power was dying. 9 of the first 15 presidents were Southerners, and the ones from

the North had relied on Southern votes to win their elections. However, when Abraham Lincoln

handily won the Electoral College despite not even being on the ballot in much of the South,

it was clear that the slave states were now in the minority, which was unlikely to ever change since

few areas west or north of Texas were suitable for cotton production and therefore slavery.

This economic bottleneck was a key Southern problem. The Antebellum South was utterly

dependent on slavery. Ever since they were first settled, the economies of the southern states

had been built around agriculture, with large plantations being the economic capstone.

This system was nearing collapse in the 18th century due to the falling prices of southern

cash crops and the devastation of its soil. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed everything.

Cotton was native to the South and grew well even in depleted soil, but cultivation was minimal due

to the seeds being extremely hard to remove by hand, limiting production to one pound of cotton

per day per worker. Gins, which had existed in India and China for several hundred years but

never made it west, easily sorted the seeds from the fibre and could process 50 pounds of cotton

per day. Meanwhile, Britain was in the throes of the early Industrial Revolution, built around its

textile industry. Thus, at the same time that the South began bringing cotton cultivation online,

Britain developed an almost insatiable appetite for cotton. This turned cotton from a pesky weed

into white gold. The South traded cotton at top dollar to British ships at their ports in exchange

for British manufactured goods. This trade was phenomenally profitable for both sides and by

1860, 57% of US exports were Southern cotton worth $191 million. This made cotton planters

the richest men in America for decades. “King Cotton” completely rewrote the South’s economy,

and production soared. The Trap

This system could not exist without slavery. The most profitable type of southern cotton

could be harvested up to seven times a year. Cotton had to be picked by hand, which was

unpleasant in the southern heat and dangerous due to the plant’s rock-hard and razor-sharp

bolls. The profit-maximizing amount of labour was one hand per 10 acres, picking 200 pounds

of cotton per day. Cotton would readily grow in any warm, humid climate, but it wasn’t possible

at the time to increase yield per acre. Growing more cotton required more land, which required

ever more workers. Luring non-enslaved workers to such a backbreaking job would have required

extremely high wages or them having literally no other choice. With the American frontier

promising limitless possibilities and the rapidly expanding Northern factories always hiring,

southern planters couldn’t compete in the labour market and maintain their profits. Therefore,

the lowest cost option was slavery, which was a steep investment up front in exchange for very low

maintenance cost over the long run . This resulted in plantation owners pouring money into buying

increasing amounts of slaves and land unsuitable for anything but cotton farming. An 1860 estimate

suggests that the total value of American slaves was at least $2 billion at a time when total

government revenue was about $4 billion. Almost all Southern wealth was tied up in slavery.

The Problem By this point, the Southern States were totally

reliant on a dangerous economic system. Known alternately as Dutch Disease, the Resource Curse,

and a Rentier Economy, it created a system of dramatic inequality and economic stagnation in

which extraction of a high-value resource is so profitable that all other industries

struggle to compete. The easy money in resource extraction leaves little incentive to invest in

other economic sectors, and so they are left to wither and frequently die. Thus, a rentier

economy becomes dependent on the resource and should that sector decline, the entire economy

collapses . This causes an enormous wealth gap between those who profit from the resource and

the general population, leading to instability. Most rentier states in the modern world use a

combination of violent oppression and social welfare to quash dissent . The slaveholding

South certainly used extreme violence to keep the slaves in line, but not the white population.

While the cotton economy created a highly privileged class of plantation aristocrats, the

vast majority of Southerners were poor farmers. About 25% of southern families held slaves, but

only about 8% had more than ten, and only 0.1% of planters had more than 100 slaves. However, even

southerners who held no slaves heavily supported slavery and the overall Southern economic system.

While the reasons for that support are complex and controversial, one important reason was

aspiration. In theory, a poor subsistence farmer needed only one year’s food surplus to switch to

cotton growing. The profit from one year’s cotton harvest would be enough to start buying slaves to

take over the work. Once slaves were working the land, wealth came quickly and exponentially. How

often this actually happened is hotly debated, but it was at least theoretically possible. Thus,

the allure of being an elite planter was enough to keep the majority invested in the system.

Compared With Other Emancipations A common talking point of the Lost

Cause myth is that if slavery was the issue which caused the war, why didn’t other nations have one

to end slavery? All the New World empires were built on slavery, and they peacefully emancipated

their slaves, so it can’t be the main reason America fought itself. However, this ignores the

unique aspects of emancipation in those empires. Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833,

which provided for the gradual emancipation of slaves outside of India over the following

ten years. This was accompanied by slaveholder compensation of 20 million pounds, roughly 40% of

the government’s budget. This compensation quelled most dissent, which was already limited because

slaveholders in the British Empire held less political sway than American slaveholders did.

Moreover, members of the British Parliament were elected by voters in Britain proper,

where slavery had never been legal, and few politicians had reason to ally with slaveholders

beyond limited commercial interests. Thus, slavery could be, and was, abolished without significant

political backlash. A better comparison is Brazil, which didn’t outlaw slavery until 1888.

The slaveholders there had very similar fears to the Americans and had resisted ending slavery

until the entire plantation system was beginning to fail. The final end came by Imperial decree,

almost on a whim, and directly contributed to the fall of the monarchy the following year.

Without the American Civil War, it is probable that the United States would have followed Brazil

in allowing slavery to continue for the benefit of the politically powerful slaveholding Southern

elite. As it was, their desperation to maintain the system triggered the war that caused their

downfall. It could not be any clearer that slavery was the powder keg that set off the

American Civil War. In the next episode of this series, we will discuss the opening stages of the

seminal showdown between North and South. To make sure you don’t miss it, please consider liking,

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