My reading of history is very different from that of some of you gentlemen. I have no need of convincing you, and I must tell you, I am wholly UNCONVINCED by most of your claims that the slavery was not at the heart of why the ACW was fought. I stand by what I said, and I hope you can respect my rights to say my mind.
The CSA was deeply unjust, deeply delusional, and entirely wrong. In contrast, the Union was relatively just in seeking to keep the Union intact and to constrain the growth of the Southern slave economy, and later more fully just and rigtheous by enacting the Emancipation Proclamation; the Union might have been nearly as delusional as the South about many things, including its rights to impose its economic, or social standards on the South, as well as being mostly racist, but these to me are auxillary issues, not central to a discussion of "What the ACW Was 'About.'" Lastly, whereas the CSA was wrong to secede and provoke a war, the Union was entirely right to insist that secession should not be allowed: United we Stand, Divided we Fall. I hope we can all agree that the entire World would have been a much worse-off place, had the CSA managed to achieve a peace settlement that did not involve its re-introduction into the USA.
I also stand by the analogy I made above about the German National Socialist movement and the holocaust. To keep a person alive simply for the sake of extorting their toil can be argued to be less ultimately evil than genocide because it does not involve the secession of their life. But this relative difference in injustice does not make slavery any "more just," it simply makes it a different injustice. One which I will say again, is in some ways equally if not more repugnant than Nazi genocide. The idea that an entire class of people are a lessser form of humanity, and not deserving of the same rights as any other person is a repugnant idea. Defending institutions that deprive that entire class of people of basic life, liberty and freedom is also repugnant. To end a person's life is to permanently deprive them of all prospects of life, liberty, and happiness, and as such this can be seen to be the "ultimate injustice." To enslave a person is to deprive them of some--though perhaps not all life, liberty, and happiness--but in being a "lesser evil" slavery was also a more insidious evil, that threatened a perpetuity which, left unchecked could readily have stolen liberty from far more than 22 million souls.
There was only a reluctant consideration of emancipation by the CSA leadership during the latter days of the war when the nations reservoirs of manpower were very low. This does not 'prove' that the CSA would have been willing eventually to free its slaves, and indeed, to suggest as such is entirely contrary to an accurate reading of history. The economy of the CSA at the wars start was almost entirely dependent on slavery, and this what they were fighting to preserve.
What would the world be like today, had the CSA not been thwarted in its efforts to break away from the Union which it accurately recognized was growing increasingly abolitionist in opinion? What if those bitter months of 1864 and 1865 had had a few slightly different turns of events: the anti-war movement in the north had prevailed more; Lincoln had lost; a few more defeats of Union forces, with the ultimate consequence that the Union accepted the CSA's bid for peace and separatism?
We would likely still have slavery in the south today, and indeed, the dream which many CSA writers expounded of a entire "Southern Hemisphere International Network of Slave States" may well have come true. Mexico was ripe for the introduction of the Southern slave institution, and Brazil would like have remained/resumed being a slave state too. Republic of South Africa, the Congo, various Caribbean states including Cuba . . . had the CSA not been subjected to utter defeat and unconditional surrender, an open-minded "what-if" read of history suggests that slavery-by degrees-may well have persisted, emerged, or re-emerged in all these and potential more locales all around the world. Indeed, when viewed from this perspective, the ACW was not simply about a war between the Union division of the former U.S. and the Confederate division, it was a war between an impending novel world order that recognized all types of people as humans, and an ancient world order in which class, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, etc., had been for thousands of years used as bases to exploit, abuse, and oppress.
Indeed, one of you quote the figure of "3 million African slaves." I do not doubt that this is about the correct number of slaves in the CSA at the start of the war. But how many more human beings had been born died lives of slavery in the decades before the start of the war? Had the CSA not been defeated, how many MORE would have been born and died lives of slavery in the decades that followed? Cumulatively, over generations, slavery is no less repugnant than an acute historical genocide, and in being a superficially "lesser" evil that some might almost apologize for, it is in fact just as evil in its long-term toll on human dignity as a genocide. Slavery was wrong, and the CSA fought to defend its right to maintain the institution; this simple point makes any argument about the war being "about State's Rights" largely a moot evasion of the history.
22 million murdered in cold blood in the span of 9 or 10 years is a gargantuan, and grotesque credit of human evil. The potential outcome had the CSA not been stopped: Hundreds of millions enslaved in scores of states around the globe over the last 160 years is a different scenario of human evil, but I would not necessarily be so quick to discount it as a "lesser evil," unless any of you are actually willing to take up Mr. Lincoln's challenge:
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln.
At the end of the day, slavery was a legal and indeed thriving institution in the South at the onset of the war. It was not in "the North." In the years before the war, there had been much wrangling about whether prospective new states would have slavery or not, most southern politicians pushing for the spread, many northern politicians pushing for containment. Most of the southern economy prior to the war was based on slave plantation economies.
The southern states seceded when the Republican party managed to win the election, and a middle-of-the-road but abolitionist-leaning President (Lincoln) was elected, and he installed some of the most radical abolitionists in teh U.S. at the time in his cabinet (William Seward and Salmon P. Chase). Lincoln was a moderate on the issue of abolition: he stated repeatedly that he felt slavery was an obsolete institution which should not be allowed to expand and spread, but that the economic well-being of the southern states also dictated that a long-term "phasing out" of slavery, potentially even involving reparations to slave owners for forfeiting their property, was the best solution. However, it sent a clear message to the leaders of the South when Lincoln won and installed a mostly radical abolitionist cabinet: their goals of expanding the slave-economy to additional territories would not only continue to be thwarted, it would very likely experience serious reversals in the coming years. They concluded that the writing was on the wall, and if they had any hope of preserving their way of life, they had to act quickly. With respect to the "absurdity" of hundreds of thousands of people dying for what essentially constituted elitist privilege: for thousands of years, Kings, Priests, Emperors, and Generals have managed to inspire the common peasantry with sufficient zeal for countless wars to have been fought, so why is it so absurd that a similar point cannot apply to the CSA? Indeed, one could also argue that it applied to the USA: most of the working-class or destitute Union infantrymen who sacrified all frankly stood to gain very little immediate or direct benefit by dying to help force the South back into the Union, or emancipate the slaves. It is the way of all human societies that the most intelligent, charismatic, and influential have always been able to get the less enfranchised, less advantaged, and less intelligent to do their bidding if they can manage to spin a sufficiently convincing story about the "cause" or the "mutual benefits to all our people" if individuals are willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice. This is nothing but the most basic principle of Nationalism, which is fundamentally nothing more than an elaboration of Tribalism.
None of our "homelands" are entirely just. It was a President of the U.S. who was the architect of the Trail of Tears, later Presidents promoted the Indian Wars. These were also entirely unjust, wrong, and "evil," deeds by "my homeland" the United States.
I deeply LOVE the South, that is, what the South has become these last hundred-and-fifty-odd years. I respect her traditions, her cultures, her people, her history, right back to the point of the CSA, at which point I will state unconditionally, that I do not respect the CSA nor what it fought for. This is not to say that I dis-respect everyone who was involved in or complicit with that polity and its actions. Culture is a powerful thing, and in a context like the 1850s of the American South, it was a fairly rare person (such as one of the enlightened Southerners you fellas have listed as being "anti-slavery") who could actually and explicate the injustice of slavery. Even those who could were largely powerless to do anything. It took a war to bring slavery in the U.S. to a quick and total cessation; that is just how deeply ingrained it was in the culture of the Southern States at the time. Indeed, racism was so deeply ingrained in American society that it took another ~160 years for the Civil Rights movements to make their piecemeal progress of social change through our society. Thank God that the CSA lost . . . I shudder to imagine what sort of world we would be living in today, had any lesser magnitude of defeat NOT been meted out by the Union on the CSA . . .
It behooves us to be as objective and realistic about recognizing the foibles of our ancestors at least as much as we honor their memories and bask in their glory.
... OK, it’s just a thought.
