It wasn't about slavery, I mean yeah the vice president of the confederacy made a speech saying slavery was the cornerstone of the CSA, and multiple seceding states released documents that explicitly stated they were seceding in large part because of slavery, and all the seceding states were slave owning states, and West Virginia exists because they split from Virginia as they had no slaves and thus no reason to fight to hold them, and the CSA constitution mandated that any new state would be required to be a slave state... but... umm...
So, this annoys me to no end, because the first dude is technically right, Lincoln came in to office with no intention to outlaw slavery, although he did want to keep it confined to the states it was already legal in. And what he’s actually wrong about is that Lincoln made it about slavery to get the support of the northerners - he actually made sure that it northerners believed it was about “keeping the union together.” Remember the union still had the slave states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. He wanted to keep these states in the union.
Lincoln (through Seward) stressed the anti-slavery stuff to Europeans, many of whom wanted to intervene on the side of the confederacy because that was where they got their cotton. The industrial north also was a threat to industrial Europe, but the agrarian south was a source of raw materials. But by stressing the anti-slavery stuff in Europe (and then of course the emancipation proclamation which didn’t actually outlaw slavery in the border states) he ensured Europe could not intervene on behalf of the confederacy since it would be so unpopular. So, in the states it was about the union, abroad it was about slavery.
But anyway, he’s right on a technicality that, for Lincoln, it was not really about slavery. But this does not mean the war itself was not about slavery. His conclusion rests on the assumption that in a war, two sides must be diametrically opposed to one another, so if Lincoln and the north were not fighting against slavery, therefore the south could not be fighting for slavery.
But as others have pointed out, the south explicitly says they are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. They are worried about waning political power also - if Lincoln stopped the spread of slavery across the continent as he desired, the growth of free states would mean congress would not be as evenly split between slave and free states, opening up the possibility of legislating an end to slavery.
So the war was about slavery, and would not have occurred without slavery. Often we point to the Battle of Sumter as the beginning of the civil war, but many historians also point out the popular civil war could instead be said to begin in 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, or with Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawotamie Massacre, or maybe the caning of Charles sumner or the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, or any of the political battles that arose when the US began to expand west and the question arose “what about slavery.” All of these events are directly about slavery and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
And also, just as a last thing “many southern generals didn’t care about slavery.” I have no idea how true that is and it doesn’t matter, because the war was not fought because of southern generals but because of politicians, southern landowners, and an economy resting on the subjugation of Black people, and that’s why they were fighting.
Of course it was about slavery. Aka money. They were intrinsically linked, and outlawing slavery would have trashed their largely cash crop economy while the North's industrialization kept right on chugging away. The racism was more complicated but primarily served to keep the poor - free - white citizenry from realizing that the rich elite were the real enemy. Just like today, really.
I had some teachers pushing this bullshit. And they want to claim systemic racism doesn't exist.
It's, I think, sort of true that the Civil War wasn't always going to necessarily mean the end of slavery if the north won.
It started as a war to keep the union together, and initially a lot of people in the north thought that it would end quickly and that the states would return to the union and give up their rebellion.
However, as time went on and the losses started to pile up, it became clear to Lincoln and the other northern leaders that a war with this much bloodshed must end the slavery debate for good. That is why Lincoln ultimately wrote and delivered the Emancipation Proclamation.
But it's a point that's splitting a lot of hairs and very nuanced, because the Civil War started when pro-slavery states seceded from the union because they were afraid that a president elected without consent from any of the southern states might move to eliminate slavery...so summarily, the Civil War was definitely about slavery from beginning to end.
TL;DR: The Civil War was about slavery.
This is why we need school standards. I was taught this at home and believed it till I got to college.
This is the shit you get when your knowledge of history is based solely on broadcasts from your preferred 24-hour news network and/or Youtube.
Apparently reading history books is hard.
(Also, for everyone here, read up on Benjamin Lay. The founding fathers knew what piece of shit slavers they were because there was at least one prominent person willing to tell them in the Mid-1700's.)
They are part right, if we really want to give them the benefit of the doubt. For the south it was absolutely about preserving slavery, but for the north abolishing it was still kind of a controversial topic.
The decision to make it about ending slavery from Lincoln's part was part tactical, even though he personally always wanted to do so anyway. It made a lot of former slaves and other black people available for enlistment and also secured the support of people opposing slavery.
But initially it was more about the southern paranoia of the north forcing them to abolish slavery and since the north could not provide any security about this, they decided to quit, which lead the north to try and preserve the union.
At least as far as I know.
Just look at the primary source documents that declare the purpose of the war, Mississippi is a good example:
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
Just decontextualized nonsense. I suspect this is a corruption of some idea about lincoln's thoughts about slavery paired with some wholly fabricated victimhood propaganda about the slave states.
For anyone who (like me) had trouble with history: After Kansas elected to be a free state the soon-to-be confederacy saw the writing on the wall for slavery. When the electoral college fucked up with a split vote between 4 candidates lincoln (an abolitionist) came out on top after several vote rounds as he was the closest to start. Instead of taking the political L peacefully the pro-slavery faction decided to kill as many people as possible and got wrecked.
As long as you don't ask the traitor leadership, who said over and over again that the war is explicitly about slavery and enslaving PoC in particular. The legalization of slavery was a requirement for entry into the confederacy. It was built into their constitution that anyone who wanted to join had to allow slavery.
That's how they teach it in Floriduh.
When someone comes at you with this, hit 'em with the cornerstone speech. Never had it fail yet.
#confederationly incorrect
So, prepare for nuance. There is the slightest bit of truth in what they're saying. Lincoln did not initially make the war about slavery. Yes, the south 100% did leave over slavery, but originally the war was just about getting the states back together. It still feels incredibly disingenuous to say "the war wasn't about slavery" because of that though. For one side leaving it was, it just wasn't about slavery to the other side yet. I'd have to see the context of this comment but I feel hard pressed to imagine it as anything other than Lost Cause propaganda.
Someone from the Florida Education Department probably bookmarked that 'Fact' for the next round of History Book printing.
So the post does have a tiny bit of truth to it, then goes wildly false.
As far as I know, Lincoln was not an abolishonist. He wanted to keep the status quo and allow southerners to keep their slaves and the northerners to continue to not allow slavery. He felt the Constitution protected the southerner's "property". The Union was what he cared about. I do think he was against adding more slavery in other states, and that's probably why southern states seceded.
Freeing existing slaves did come after an early loss in the war.
I'm just learning about all this now in a podcast, but I haven't completed the series so I could be very wrong. Or the podcast could be. It's American History Tellers.
Wait people still think America had or has their best interest? Fuck we're dead.
I've had high school history teachers spout similar nonsense
Oh come on, I'm sure he's heard much dumber fucking things.
Actually it was about the blooming onion becoming the national dish, what the northern states absolutely refused, because they couldn't agree on the dip.
I mean, he isn't ENTIRELY wrong, he's just mostly wrong.
"Harmonizing the interest betwixt capital and labor, Southern slavery has solved the problem over which states-men have toiled and philanthropists mourned from the first existence of organized society" (American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South, III (1859), pp. 105-106.).
As I learned it in public schools long before everything became a political football, slavery was not the main focus of Lincoln's administration initially. It was all about the constitution and the Union. The seceding states, however, had slavery very much on the top of their list of grievances. Lincoln politically embraced abolition as part of his effort to rally the unionists and gain the support of the slaves somewhere in the early stages. I don't know if it was before or after secession. I suspect it was after the secession because he was focusing on the constitutional issues of dividing the union.
So, yes the civil war was all about slavery. The southern states wanted to expand slavery into the new territories, which was not allowed in the constitution. They wanted to protect and expand slavery as an institution. Some useful information from the Lincoln Home.
The Cornerstone speech?!?!
He didn't read these comments, then
It has quite a few seeds of truth. 11 Southern states wanted to secede from the US, which would have made the Northern states collapse (because the South was exporting huge amounts of food to the big cities in the North), so Lincoln needed to weaken them.
Lincoln's move to set the slaves free in 1863 was exactly that, it was to undermine the South during the Civil War. The Northern states had slaves too, but the Southern ones directly depended on them, and it gave a good narrative about what the Civil War would "actually" be about.
Until you read about Lincoln happening upon slave markets as a young man and having trouble controlling himself over how much it enraged him.
Imagine it as one of many things in today's world that a politician might want to change but it's so polarizing that they can't actively act on it, instead electing to act on easier, smaller goals everyone might get behind.
If you read the writings of the time, they might have had trouble including abolition to their agenda, but pretty much everyone was ready to jump on board as soon as it was.
It was about slavery, but it wasn't about slavery in terms of what Lincoln was trying to do initially. He would have actively allowed it to continue if it kept the nation together, but ultimately had to use it to build efforts for the war.
