I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South. They may be correct.
But at the time of its delivery, Southern leaders heard these words and thought one thing: Lincoln aims to abolish slavery at the federal level. Lincoln aims to destroy our way of life. So, as this preemptive secession commenced, Southern state governments issued declarations of secession that placed the preservation of slavery front and center. The declaration of secession for Texas is perhaps the most dogmatic.
On Feb. All, however, passionately pontificated on the necessity of preserving an institution of slavery; and that no such preservation could be maintained within the Union as it was then organized.
Ironically, secession, and the creation of a Confederacy was the only conceivable way of maintaining the status quo.
In a last-ditch effort to deny the integrality of slavery to Southern secession, a contemporary Confederate sympathizer will inevitably raise the issue of the Corwin amendment. Seward of New York and in the House by Thomas Corwin of Ohio in , it was intended to lure seceded states back into the Union and convince border states to remain by promising to protect slaveholders from federal interference. Its reference is meant to convey a fallacious argument: that the impetus for secession could not have been the preservation of slavery because a few Northern politicians were willing to forgo abolition to keep the Union intact.
The Corwin amendment was never actually implemented. Only three states—Ohio, Illinois, and Maryland—ratified it. But its mere proposal indicates that the North, like the South, was no ideological monolith. There were men who fought for the Union that believed in the institution of slavery, who believed blacks to be inherently inferior to whites. But while the Civil War was fought, on the ground, by these ordinary men of diverse opinions, it was not a conflict of their own engineering.
Southern secession was not a guerrilla insurgency nor a populist rebellion as the neo-Confederate romantics prefer to believe. It was a conflict between two well-heeled establishments: one that depended—economically and spiritually—on the continued enslavement of black people, and another that did not.
Extant racism among Northerners does not extinguish this fact. Visits with esteemed Civil War historians, as well as academics specializing in abolition, liberation, and Afro-American studies, take on the intimate, mutually validating, warm feeling of group therapy sessions for survivors of abuse: finally there's a space where survivors can talk about what happened to them, without being told that it never happened, didn't happen that way, or wasn't as traumatizing as they feel it was.
There's a bit of fashionable, podcast-style "What is truth, really, and what is a story? You see Boynton with a boom mic talking to students in a classroom and asking questions off-camera and saying things like "I'm questioning the stories that we tell," and there are moments where you hear the crew talking or see them setting up lighting equipment.
But these touches rarely add anything substantive, and at times they inadvertently impede the rhetorical thrust of the project, which says, in essence, that this is not really a " Rashomon "-type situation where you can argue about what happened, why it happened, and what it meant. There is a fundamental objective truth, which is that the nation fought a war over slavery and equality, but for too long certain Americans have been in denial about that, and enshrined their denial in law and culture.
Of course this film is about stories and storytelling and who controls a narrative. Repeatedly stating as much in a movie like this one is like taking a Sharpie marker and scrawling the word "eggs" on the side of a carton that was obviously designed to hold eggs and already has the word "eggs" printed on it. The second half of "Civil War" is stronger than the first because Boynton get out of her own way and lets the subjects and images make her points.
A section with a young white high school student who repeats pro-Confederate talking points under the guise of examining the topics "logically" distills a certain type of modern discourse to its slippery essence. The snippets of a education film telling students that the Union and Confederate soldiers were just nice people fighting for what they believed in; the accumulation of shots of contemporary Southern landscapes with Civil War cannons reverently preserved; the close-ups of Black high school students in classrooms or in the interview seat rolling their eyes at white insistence that the Civil War was about federal overreach: all testify to a national awakening to the reality of forces that have shaped what the nation was, and is.
The concluding five minutes of the film are powerful, and the final shot is a knockout, because by that point Boynton has plugged into a pure filmmaking mode, letting every shot make its own argument.
This movie will be of particular interest to students who want a lively, thoughtful presentation of basic historical subjects but aren't going to get it in classrooms where the curriculum is approved by people who are mainly concerned with avoiding discomfort and preserving the status quo.
Matt Zoller Seitz September 17, Slavery also was ever present in political debate, although those debates did not always touch on slavery directly. The Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution, increasing the representation of slave states in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College, was only one reason why southerners dominated the presidency and the Supreme Court through the s.
Even as northern population growth ensured that northerners would eventually come to control Congress, the presence of a two-party system in which each party was divided by section encouraged building alliances across the Mason-Dixon line.
Only when these alliances collapsed in the s, and then only in part because of slavery, did politics become truly sectionalized. The sectional debates over slavery and its expansion rarely touched on the morality of slavery, and even those northern politicians who held that slavery was an immoral institution, including Abraham Lincoln, recognized that it enjoyed constitutional protection. Abolition remained a minority movement among northern whites and it was not until that an avowedly antislavery and, more importantly, anti-Southern political party won the White House.
Although they shared much in common, including an acceptance of white superiority and black inferiority, most white northerners and southerners tended to view themselves as different people, defined by sectional traits and stereotypes. White southerners saw their lifestyle as more refined and leisurely in part because of the use of enslaved people , whereas northerners saw themselves as industrious, hard-working, innovative, and practical—traits southerners saw as evidence that northerners were greedy, mean-spirited, and prized money above all.
White southerners, particularly among the elite, viewed themselves as athletic men and refined women as well as fighters ready to stand up for their rights, and they expected northerners to quake at the very idea of a war, whereas their counterparts saw their foes as hot-headed, irrational, and violent. Of course, such stereotypes distorted a far more complex and diverse reality; yet they persisted through the war itself. To be sure, the presence of slavery in one part of the country and its absence elsewhere shaped these debates, sometimes in fundamental ways.
But, although secessionist advocates freely admitted that their primary goal in seeking southern independence was to defend slavery as an institution and as a labor system, northerners who went to war in did so to preserve the Union their fathers had forged against a reckless attempt to destroy it.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.
The question of whether the Civil War was fought over slavery has set northerner against southerner and historian against historian since the whole catastrophe began. It hangs in the air still, an ever-floating controversy.
But it is very difficult to make a valid case—as many southerners tried to do, and still try to do, along with several historians—that sectional differences over slavery and its threatened expansion into the western territories were not the fundamental cause, the bedrock cause, of the Civil War.
Let us examine several different arguments that are usually put forth and see what they tell us about slavery as a cause. In those times, in many minds, the powers of individual states trumped federal powers, no matter what the U.
Constitution said. This was the reason that when the war began and people had to decide which side to fight on, southern officers in the U. Army and Navy overwhelmingly resigned to fight for their individual states in the Confederacy. But the right most important to the South, most necessary to southern lives, culture, and economy, most threatened, and most important to defend, was the right of the states to protect slavery. Another argument concerns slavery in the territories.
The South ardently desired to expand slavery into the Louisiana Territory in as well as those territories wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War in The North just as ardently opposed and derailed this expansion. Without question, this is considered one of the tripwires that caused the Civil War. And it was about slavery. Viral abolitionism in America, anathema to the South, awoke in the s, when William Lloyd Garrison established his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator , in Boston.
Centered in New England, Philadelphia, and New York, abolitionists had steadily grown in numbers and influence over the next three decades. By , abolition was seen by southerners as a monstrous threat, because what abolitionists wanted to abolish was slavery.
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