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.
Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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