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Slavery and the Civil War                                                                                    

Posted at: May/04/2011 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Historical Insights,

One of those common and sometimes almost mystical traits of humanity is our selective memory. This takes a lot of interesting form. Woman often scream in agony during child birth, yet moments after the arrival of their child start talking about doing it again. Thank goodness for selective memory, else as a species we would certainly cease to exist after just a few generations. Another example of our special memory skills is how we romanticize war either as an adventure, or as some noble crusade carefully forgetting the horrors.

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a war that without question redefined our regional and national identity. This war has been taught to many generations of children as a noble struggle of resistance for independence by the South, and for the rest of the country, a mighty moral struggle to erase the stain of slavery. I doubt there is a more virtuous reason to go to war than the freedom of others from the yoke of slavery. Unfortunately, while not a lie, this battle for freedom appears to be a gross over simplification of the era and its struggles.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina after Major Anderson refused to turn the fort over to Confederate forces. By April 14, the fort had fallen and the war had begun in earnest. By the time Fort Sumter was again in Union hands, following the evacuation of Charleston in the closing days of the war in 1865, the war had become the bloodiest in the nation's history -- and has not yet been surpassed. Yet the relationship of the North to the South, and to slavery before and during the war is not at all what we remember, or are taught today. The reality is that both the North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation's most "peculiar institution."

I will begin by taking a look at some of the things that don’t show up in high school history books. Start by considering the response of New York City to the announced secession of the southern states. On January 7, 1861, after the secession of South Carolina but before any other state joined in rebellion, Mayor Fernando Wood delivered his annual message to the New York City Council. You might expect the mayor of the largest and wealthiest northern city to denounce the southern cause and how it had effectively begun to split this young country? He might even use this as an opportunity to rally his fellow New Yorkers around the Union and its president-elect, Abraham Lincoln? Perhaps he could lament the necessity of a bloody moral struggle to abolish slavery?

Wood did none of these things. Instead, he announced that New York would offer "friendly relations and a common sympathy" with the "aggrieved brethren of the slave states." He then offered the bold proposal that New York City would secede, as well, forming an independent city-state. This move, he argued, "would have the whole and united support of the southern states" and would allow the city to avoid breaking off its existing relationships with the slave states.

Of course, history tells us that despite a rousing speech, New York did not secede from the Union. Nevertheless, we need to ask why did this northern mayor, along with many of his fellow citizens, so dramatically embrace the southern cause.

My father in one of his more cynical moments suggested years ago, that when searching for a motive, “follow the money.” The money at that time (1850-1865) took the form of cotton. Southern, slave-picked cotton was the backbone of not just the south, but of New York City's antebellum economy, and indeed, of the North's economy in general. In 1860, the South produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton, accounting for two-thirds of world production and more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Most of this wealth, however, flowed north and west, as these regions provided the financing, insurance, marketing, transportation, food stuffs and manufactured goods to support southern slave plantations. Even the growing industrialization of the North took the form initially of cotton textile mills, which were dependent on southern cotton production. The interrelated steel and railroad industry was closely tied to cotton as well. One of the primary reasons to build the first major railroad routes was to move picked cotton from the plantations of the south to the northern mills. Clearly cotton was king of the American economy.

The critical linkage of southern slavery and northern industrialization, while generally ignored or downplayed in the past, has been drawing increasing attention from historians. No one profited more handsomely from the cotton trade and the textile industry than New York's financial and maritime businesses. There is no record that Mayor Wood was in the pocket of big business, but he was a populist mayor elected by and supported by the city's working-class immigrants. New York's waves of Irish laborers and other immigrants were not fools; they knew that even the modest wages that they received came from the cotton industry.

The second item that is slowly being sterilized with the passage of time is racism. The northern states had seen slave-owning slowly fade away, and had passed emancipation laws, though often very grudgingly. All this led to elimination of slavery in the north over a just a couple of generations. Yet as the civil right movement of the last century proved; just because blacks in the north were free, did not mean they were equal and were often increasingly ill-treated.

Draconian laws tightly controlled the lives and employment opportunities of free blacks in the north. Black families were often being driven out of northern towns by being deemed poor or disorderly or on rare occasion by armed attack. It would have been easy after a while to look at the poor living conditions of many blacks suffering this treatment and draw the collective conclusion that their impoverishment arose out of inferiority. Ultimately, New York City’s working class viewed the blacks as economic competition for their jobs.

We read a lot about the abolition movement, but abolition was a radical cause and like most radical causes, was only taken up by only a few in the northern states.

The real issue was “states rights' and the Union. During the first 80 years of our American history states had a great deal more power than they do now. The southern states went to war to preserve the states’ rights they had previously enjoy over any federal authority and what we would now call big government. Slavery and tarriffs were merely the item that states and the federal government were most divided over. It would be eloquent as well to say that northerners marched to war in vast numbers to end slavery, but the in truth they seemed much more interested in preserving the Union.

There is no doubt that a growing cultural divide existed. The southern states had an agriculture based economy and they were dependant on the industry, ports and banking of the northern states. The northern states needed the raw materials of the south and west to feed the new industrial base they were developing. Because the north had much of the new wealth, they were able to leverage their position to impose taxes and tariffs on southern goods further challenging them.

It would be easy to argue that the founding of the United States some 80 years earlier included an avoidance of the slavery question. Slavery was avoided at the time because making it an issue would have meant half as many colonies uniting to fight for independence against the British, the world superpower of that era. Unfortunately, by deferring the slavery issue by 80 years it was that much more exacerbated. The northern states used the 80 years to diversify their economy, but were still very dependent on southern states for raw materials including slave picked cotton. Strangled by the circumstances the southern states sought secession as a means of gaining control over their destiny. For the north, they needed the cotton of the south and breaking the Union in two pieces also would make them more vulnerable to other international forces.

I think it is clear that most southerner’s did not own slaves, but fought to have control over their economic destiny being manipulated by powers in the north. Equally important, I feel strongly from my research that most northern soldiers joined to “preserve the Union" as opposed to specifically freeing the slaves.

When the dust of war had settled a few years later, over 600,000 Americans had died and the Federal Government had shown it had power over states rights. The South's noble resistance and the North's moral crusade to end slavery are myths. While the Civil War formally ended slavery, the isolation and issues of second class citizenship were not really attacked for an additional 100 years and still have a long way to go.

The early American economy at all levels, from farm and plantation, to mill, shipping and banking were all dependants on the low cost and relatively high productivity of slaves. Historical revisionists will do their best to paint a different picture, but it is clear that both the North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery.

There is a lot we can learn from history, but only as long as we look at the facts and avoid the selective memories of those choosing to rewrite history for some agenda, or just out of ignorance. Did we change the history because others want us to remember something that was not there, or because like the pain of childbirth, it is easier to forget?

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