A tighter read of events leading to the outbreak of war. It was always about slavery and this was true for the southern elite in the war of independence. After all slavery was falling out of favor in england.
Slavery lost any remaining northern sympathy with the serialization of Uncle Toms Cabin. lincoln merely personified Northern sentiment with rigorous thinking
The judgment of history was a powerful inducement for southerners to “misremember” what they fought for.
MA in National Security Studies, Georgetown University (Graduated 1987)Jan 24
MA in National Security Studies, Georgetown University (Graduated 1987)Updated Jan 24
Since the 1950s, most professional historians have agreed with Lincoln’s assertion that “slavery was, somehow, the cause of the war.”“What Caused the Civil War?” James M. McPherson (2000)
The war did not start over taxation. And those issues involving tariffs that were considered unfair by the South were resolved through congressional compromise. It’s an awkward look to claim that taxes caused the Civil War. Lincoln signed into law a revenue-raising measure to help pay for Civil War expenses in 1862. The measure created a Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the nation's first income tax. The southern states seceded in 1861.
As background, it’s important to note that unilaterally seceding from the Union was not legal. Not only had there been five Supreme Court decisions reaffirming the permanence of the Union for the 50 years prior to the Civil War, but the nullification crisis of 1832–1833 affirmed the primacy of the Union over the states.
Some like to assert that unilateral secession is legal, since it is not explicitly forbidden in the Constitution, but if this were legal, the southern states would have taken their case to the Federal courts. They didn’t because they knew what the outcome would have been, even with a Supreme Court that was dominated by slave owners (or who were Southerners) and had given the South every advantage for over 50 years in terms of justifying slavery and ensuring slaves remained “property” in the eyes of the law .It’s overlooked that until Lincoln’s election the South “owned” the Federal government. Again, as James McPherson notes: “During forty-nine of the seventy-two years from 1789 to 1861, a Southerner—and slaveholder—was president of the United States. Two thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate were also Southerners. At all times during these years a majority of Supreme Court justices were Southerners…Southern domination of the Democratic party increased during the 1850s, so that even though both Democratic presidents in that decade—Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan—were Northerners, they were beholden to Southerners and did their bidding.
The South seceded because they knew that Lincoln was going to prevent them from expanding slavery into the western territories. And, they knew that, even though he had no intention of threatening their ability to hold slaves where it was currently legal, they could see the long game and they knew that Lincoln was going to put slavery on a path to extinction. As Jefferson Davis noted in his justification for secession:Lincoln’s policy of excluding slaves from the western territories of the US would make our “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless ... thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars”.
What tends to get lost in the discussion of why the South seceded is that even though the region was a society based on white supremacy, not every southerner supported secession. This political divide drove those leaders who supported secession to commit several strategic blunders through acts of rebellion against the United States prior to hostilities at Fort Sumter.
The South's intent to wage war against the Union was clear well before Lincoln was elected.
In the year prior to Lincoln's election, the Secretary of War, John Floyd, started transferring arsenals from the north to the south in order to give the South an edge in preparing for war. In this context, the corrupt and traitorous Floyd should have been hanged for sedition.As an aside, Floyd was acutely aware of what he had done and what the consequences could be for his actions. Later, while serving as a commanding general in the Confederate army, he abandoned his command and fled the area before his army surrendered to Grant at Ft Donelson. Floyd was the perfect trifecta of character: traitorous, corrupt, and cowardly. He knew that secession was illegal. If he had thought he had the right to secede, he would have surrendered to Grant and not be the least bit concerned.
John Floyd, Secretary of War, 1857-1860.
The South, though, had been calculating how to prepare for hostilities. During the four months between Lincoln’s election on November 7, 1860, and his inauguration on March 4, 1861, the Deep South seceded from the Union, seized all the federal forts, arsenals, navy yards, custom houses, revenue cutters, mints, courts and post offices within their borders except Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and Forts Pickens, Taylor, and Jefferson in Florida. These are acts of war.
The final strategic blunder the South committed before the armies met in combat was firing on Fort Sumter. As noted above, there was not unanimity of support for secession. There was unanimity of support for a society based on white supremacy, but there was enough potential resistance or desire for compromise that southern leaders “pulled the trigger”, so to speak, in order to force those who were uncommitted to join the rebellion.
But, returning to the key point in your question and the incorrect assertion that taxation caused the war, it wasn’t until after the war that southerners changed their tune. As James McPherson notes:“By the time they wrote their histories of the Confederacy, slavery was gone with the wind. To salvage as much honor and respectability as they could from the lost cause, they set to work to purge it of any association with the now dead and discredited institution of human bondage. In their postwar view, [all but a few] hewed to the same line: Southern states seceded not to protect slavery, but to vindicate state sovereignty.”
The judgment of history was a powerful inducement for southerners to “misremember” why they fought this war. Fighting to maintain other humans in perpetual bondage is never a good look.
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