Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, January 25, 2024 "Understanding WHY the Civil War Was About Slavery"

January 25, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“Understanding Why the Civil War Was About Slavery”

Last week I presented several primary source documents demonstrating that -at the time the Civil War started -Confederate government officials were clearly saying that protecting slavery and white supremacy was the reason the southern states seceded and formed a new government, and the reason they were prepared to fight. Now I am going to explain WHY that was.

First, as most readers are aware, Lincoln stated clearly that he did NOT want to end slavery in the South. What was the problem, then? The big argument was whether slavery would be permitted in NEW states in the West. Why would northerners not want slavery to “spread”?

Two main reasons, neither of which was tied to fighting racism or protecting Black people. First, the political: due to the 3/5ths Compromise, slave states could count 60% of their slave population toward their state population in the question of how many House of Representatives members that state could have. This meant that southern states wound up having significantly more Congressional representation than was warranted by the actual number of CITIZENS they had, which gave them a lot of political power in Washington. More new slave states would mean more new pro-slavery, pro-South members of Congress, in both houses (as each new state gets two Senators, as well- and this combined number is how we come up with how many electoral votes each state has).

Second, the economic: people in the North, by the 1850s, were championing what historian Eric Foner has called Free Labor Ideology. This does NOT mean you’re getting labor done for free -rather, it is the belief that the labor of free people, performed for wages, is superior to slave labor because it protects and improves the position of white working-class people. Where you have African slavery, white people’s labor is not in demand. Further, if a new state allowed slavery, all the best land would be bought up by plantation owners -which would hurt poor-and-working-class white people who hoped to claim small parcels of land for individual farms, and would also hurt those same people if they wanted instead to get a job in industry. While there were lots of abolitionists in the North, they were never in the majority (and were often hated, even beaten or killed, by their neighbors). The only racial concern most white northerners had… was protecting the interests of their own, and that meant preventing the spread of slavery.

Why were southerners so worried about being able to spread slavery? Two reasons. One, the political: if a bunch of new states form, and they do NOT have slavery, southerners would find themselves outnumbered in Congress, and one day Congress could ban slavery. Second, the economic: slavery existed, by the mid-nineteenth century, primarily to support cotton agriculture and give planters higher profits by having cheaper labor costs. However, so much cotton was being grown in the South that the soil was becoming moribund. Everyone knew you SHOULD rotate your crops or rest your fields, but nobody was willing to be the one to do it- and lose a year’s worth of cotton profit for that field. The fields, therefore, were “drying up.” The planter class needed NEW lands, for new fields, to plant more cotton (using slave labor, if they wanted to maintain their profit margins). So, in their thinking, if slavery was blocked from spreading to the West, the lifestyle of planters would become unsustainable. Merely blocking slavery, to them, was an attempt to kill it.

In the 1850s, southern Congressmen pushed for laws that enabled the federal government to force free states to help catch runaway slaves, whether they wanted to or not. They also opposed laws that would allow each new state to take a vote on whether to have slavery or not- Southerners wanted to force them to have slavery. Where’s the states’ rights in either of those things?

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.