Was the Civil War actually about slavery?
A leading historian challenges the new
orthodoxy about how slavery ended in America
James Oakes, Jacobin
This article originally appeared on
Jacobin.
On 6
November 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party elected its first
president. During the tense crisis months that followed – the “secession
winter” of 1860–61 – practically all observers believed that Lincoln
and the Republicans would begin attacking slavery as soon as they took
power.
Democrats in the North blamed the Republican Party for the entire
sectional crisis. They accused Republicans of plotting to circumvent the
Constitutional prohibition against direct federal attacks on slavery.
Republicans would instead allegedly try to squeeze slavery to death
indirectly,
by abolishing it in the territories and in Washington DC, suppressing
it in the high seas, and refusing federal enforcement of the Slave Laws.
The first to succumb to the Republican program of “ultimate
extinction,” Democrats charged, would be the border states where slavery
was most vulnerable. For Northern Democrats, this is what caused the
crisis; the Republicans were to blame for trying to get around the
Constitution.
Southern secessionists said almost exactly the same
thing. The Republicans supposedly intended to bypass the Constitution’s
protections for slavery by surrounding the South with free states, free
territories, and free waters. What Republicans called a “cordon of
freedom,” secessionists denounced as an inflammatory circle of fire.
The
Southern cooperationists – those who opposed immediate
secession – agreed with the secessionists’ and Northern Democrats’
analysis of Republican intentions. But they argued that the only way the
Republicans would actually have the power to act on those intentions
was if the Southern states seceded. If the slave states remained within
the Union, the Republicans would not have the majorities in Congress to
adopt their antislavery policies. And if the South
did secede,
all bets would be off. The rebellious states would forfeit all the
constitutional protections of slavery. The South would get something
much worse than a cordon of freedom. It would get direct military
intervention, leading to the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of
the slaves.
The slaves themselves seem to have understood this.
They took an unusual interest in the 1860 election and had high hopes
for what Lincoln’s victory would mean. They assumed that Lincoln’s
inauguration would lead to war, that war would bring on a Union invasion
of the South, and that the invading Union army would free the slaves.
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But
to read what historians have been saying for decades is to conclude
that all of these people – the Democrats, the secessionists, the
cooperationists, and the slaves – were all wrong. The Northern Democrats
were just demagogues. The secessionists were hysterical. And the slaves
were, alas, sadly misguided.
Unwilling to take seriously what
contemporaries were saying, historians have constructed a narrative of
Emancipation and the Civil War that begins with the premise that
Republicans came into the war with no intention of attacking
slavery – indeed, that they disavowed any antislavery intentions. The
narrative is designed to demonstrate the original premise, according to
which everyone at the time was mistaken about what the Republicans
intended to do.
It’s a familiar chronology: Under the terms of the
First Confiscation Act of August 1861, disloyal masters would “forfeit”
the use of their slaves, but the slaves were not actually freed.
Lincoln ordered General John C. Frémont to rescind his decree of that
September freeing the slaves of rebels in Missouri, and several months
later the President rescinded General Hunter’s order abolishing slavery
in three states. As late as the summer of 1862, we are reminded, Lincoln
was writing letters to Horace Greeley saying that if he could end the
war without freeing a single slave, he would do so. Even after the
President finally promised an emancipation proclamation, in September
1862, several months elapsed until the proclamation actually came on 1
January 1863.
Only then, according to the standard narrative, was
the North committed to emancipation. Only then did the purpose of the
Civil War expand from the mere restoration of the Union to include the
overthrow of slavery.
In one form or another, this narrative is
familiar to all scholars of the period. Historians who agree on little
else will agree on this version of the story, even when they have
entirely divergent interpretations of what it means.
But what if
the original premise is wrong? What if, during the secession winter of
1860–1861, everybody was right about what the Republicans intended to do
about slavery? What if the Republicans came into the war ready and
willing to destroy slavery? What does that do for a narrative of
emancipation?
For one thing, it flies in the face of the
prevailing neo-revisionism in contemporary Civil War scholarship. The
old revisionist interpretation, which reached its zenith of influence in
the 1930s and 1940s, came in many varieties. But it always rested on an
essentially negative proposition: whatever else the war was about, it
was not about slavery. This viewpoint required one set of claims about
the South, and another about the North.
Revisionists claimed that
slavery was already dying in the South, that it was unprofitable, that
it wasn’t important to Southern economy and society, that it had reached
the natural limits of its expansion, and that Southern leaders were
more concerned about defending state rights than protecting slavery.
Most contemporary historians, though not all of them, now reject these
old revisionist claims. Slavery was thriving and the Southern states
seceded to protect it.
But revisionists also claimed that the
North did not go to war over slavery. If there were “interests”
involved, they were the interests of Northern capitalists against
Southern agrarians. The Civil War was an accident brought on by bungling
politicians. The abolitionists were a tiny, beleaguered minority; most
Northerners shared the general conviction of black racial inferiority.
The South had slavery, the argument went, but the North was racist too.
This argument, in turn, was really just a revival of the antebellum
Democratic Party’s relentless efforts to shift the terms of debate from
slavery to race.
Today, this revisionist interpretation of the
North is alive and well. Indeed, it is pervasive among historians. We
are repeatedly told that the North did not go to war over slavery. The
Civil War is once again denounced as morally unjustified on the grounds
that the North was not motivated by any substantial antislavery
convictions. Emancipation itself is described as an accidental byproduct
of a war the North fought for no purpose beyond the restoration of the
Union. A recent study of the secession crisis states that during the
war, slavery was abolished “inadvertently.”
Contemporary
scholarship is saturated by this neo-revisionist premise. Like the
antebellum Democrats and the Civil War revisionists, neo-revisionists
have insistently shifted the terms of the debate from slavery to race.
Virtually any Republican in 1860 would have recognized this argument as
Democratic Party propaganda.
If I sound skeptical, that’s because I
am. On the basis of my research, I can no longer accept the thesis that
the Union did not begin emancipating slaves until
1 January 1863.
It
was never my intention to overturn the conventional narrative. I began
by accepting the standard assumption that that the first Confiscation
Act achieved nothing. But I still wanted to know what Republicans thought they
were doing when they passed the law. Why did the Act turn out to be so
toothless? Why did it fail to free any slaves? Secondary accounts
usually pass over this question; they couldn’t provide me with the
answers I needed: who wrote the law, where did it come from, how did
people talk about it?
To my astonishment, I discovered that
Section Four of the Act, the clause specifically authorizing the
forfeiture of slaves, was written by Senator Lyman Trumbull, chair of
the Judiciary Committee, as an emancipation clause. Indeed, it was
understood by everyone in Congress to be an emancipation clause.
Trumbull’s proposal was denounced by Democrats and border-state
congressmen as an emancipation clause, defended almost unanimously by
congressional Republicans as an emancipation clause. These men thought
they were writing an emancipation bill. That’s what they said at the
time.
A full-scale congressional debate erupted in July of 1861,
focusing on the legitimacy of the emancipation that Republicans were
undertaking. When I read those debates I wondered where the arguments
for emancipation had come from.
I went back to the secession
debates. And sure enough, everything critics had accused the Republicans
of planning to do was exactly what Republicans themselves were saying
they were going to do.
The great mistake that historians have
made, I realized, was a misreading of the constitutional premises of the
Republican antislavery agenda. I doubt anything Lincoln said is more
commonly repeated by historians than the promise he made in his
inaugural address not to interfere with slavery in the states where it
already existed. That little quotation is all the proof historians seem
to require to demonstrate that when the war began, neither Lincoln nor
the Republicans had any idea of emancipating slaves.
In fact,
nearly every abolitionist (and just about every historian I can think
of) would agree with Lincoln: the Founders had made a series of
compromises resulting in a Constitution that did not allow the federal
government to abolish slavery in any state where it existed.
William
Lloyd Garrison wrote that consensus into the founding document of the
American Anti-Slavery Society, the 1833 Declaration of Sentiments, which
flatly declared that the power to abolish slavery rested exclusively
with the states. Theodore Dwight Weld said the same thing. So did Joshua
Giddings, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner. The federal government had
no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it already
existed.
Which raises the obvious question: how did the
abolitionists expect to get slavery abolished? A small group of
nonpolitical abolitionists argued for moral suasion. An even smaller
faction of antislavery radicals argued that the Constitution was an
antislavery document. But most abolitionists believed, on the one hand,
that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to abolish
slavery in the states, but that on the other hand, political action was necessary for slavery to be abolished. Given the Constitution’s restrictions, what did opponents of slavery think could be done?
Coming
out of the 1860 election, Republicans declared that there were two
possible policies. The first was to make freedom national and restrict
slavery to the states where it already existed. Republican policymakers
would seal off the South: they would no longer enforce the Fugitive
Slave Clause; slavery would be suppressed on the high seas; it would be
abolished in Washington DC, banned from all the Western territories, and
no new slave states would be admitted to the Union. A “cordon of
freedom” would surround the slave states. Then Republicans would offer a
series of incentives to the border states where slavery was weakest:
compensation, subsidies for voluntary emigration of freed slaves, a
gradual timetable for complete abolition.
Slavery was
intrinsically weak, Republicans said. By denationalizing it, they could
put it on a course of ultimate extinction. Surrounded on all sides,
deprived of life-giving federal support, the slave states would one by
one abolish slavery on their own, beginning with the border states. Each
new defection would further diminish the strength of the remaining
slave states, further accelerating the process of abolition. Yet because
the decision to abolish slavery remained with the states, Republican
policies would not violate the constitutional ban on direct federal
interference in slavery.
The South would simply have to accept
this. And if it couldn’t tolerate such a federal policy, it could leave
the Union. But once it seceded, all bets would be off – it would lose
the Constitutional protections that it had previously enjoyed. The
Republicans would then implement the second policy: direct military
emancipation, immediate and uncompensated.
Republicans said this
openly during the secession crisis. And that’s what they were saying in
Congress as they debated the Confiscation Act. It’s time to start
rethinking our fundamental assumptions about the causes as well as the
trajectory of the Civil War. And we can start by taking the perceptions
of its contemporaries a great deal more seriously.
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