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Why Slaveholding interests did indeed cause the the Civil War
When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then. Most Southerners even saw slavery as a regrettable institution that would be phased out (Jefferson most famously).
Then Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin, and suddenly mass cotton agriculture became a profitable option for slave agriculture. With the old southwest open for settlement in the first decades of the 19th century, those territories filled with cotton slave plantations. Because of soil exhaustion, the states of the old south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland) were not as suitable for cultivation of cotton, and so profited mainly from the selling of their excess slave population to plantations in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missippi and Florida (later Missouri and Texas). In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).
Now of course this was not a sustainable system because a). there is only so much land that is suitable for cotton farming and b). plantations directly competed with free settlers for land (which explains some of the rivalry between the north and the south better than fringe abolitionism). This also doesn’t fit with the argument that if we had merely waited slavery would have fixed itself more peacefully. A large portion of the southern political class was heavily invested in the continued expansion of slavery (so they could make money selling slaves). This was one cause of the Mexican-American war (to acquire more land for growing cotton), and also resulted in schemes like that of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s plan to capture Central America and the Caribbean to make more slave states, and William Walker’s Filibuster War in Nicaragua. The compromise of 1820, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all continued to give more power to slaveholding interests. You wouldn’t have needed to be an abolitionist to be resentful towards what seemed like the disproportionate power and influence of slaveholding interests in the elections leading up to the Civil War.
Then there’s the actual election of 1860. First of all, I want to note that Lincoln was not elected on a platform of sudden abolition, nor did he actually move to abolish slavery during the Civil War until 1863. All Lincoln promised to do was to prevent the expansion of the institution into new territories (few of which were suitable for plantation agriculture anyway).
Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats refused to endorse Douglas at the party convention in Charleston because Douglas was not willing to endorse the maximalist position of allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any new territory (potentially against the wishes of the population). This was just a bridge too far for Northern voters after the Kansas Nebraska act opened territory that was supposed to be closed to slavery by the compromise of 1820 to slaveholders, and the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern States to enforce the institution within their own borders where the population was opposed to it.
Both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions seem like reasonable ways of gradually phasing out slavery to me (especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL). Instead the South chose secession and war. It also seems to me that the political impasse that led to the war was less caused by abolitionism, but rather the political extremism of the Southern Planters class.
I’d urge those who disagree to put yourself in the shoes of a northern farmer in the late 1850s/1860s. Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by the stranglehold that slaveholding interests seemed to have on the national government, preventing the opening of new lands in the West for settlement by your sons? Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop? A vote for Lincoln was less of a vote for abolitionism, and more of a “fuck you” to the insidious and outsized influence of slaveholders on federal economic policies.
As it happens, I just finished a massive biography of Lincoln which covers pretty much every political contest and debate he was ever in blow by blow.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The Southern states that seceded stated this very clearly; they announced their intention to secede literally the night Lincoln was elected, because they believed Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery and would try to curb its spread.
In fact, Lincoln did despise slavery and believed it would eventually have to end, but he was also a Constitutionalist and a Unionist and so accepted slavery as the law of the land, and repeatedly assured the South that he had no intention of infringing on their property rights.
Anti-slavery sentiments were not as black-and-white (hah) as "pro-abolition" or "anti-abolition." The "Ultras" were the "radical leftists" of the day who wanted immediate emancipation and full suffrage for blacks, and Lincoln avoided being associated with them; he thought they were too extreme and he disliked their moralizing. There was a full spectrum of less radical views (gradual ending of slavery, with compensation for slaveowners, with blacks maybe being allowed to settle in other territories, or maybe being sent back to Africa), but very few abolitionists were for full equality.
The South's objections were that the Republicans wanted to forbid expanding slavery to new territories - which, since the political divide then was between slave states and non-slave states, essentially meant the South would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress as the country expanded. The North also very much resented the fugitive slave laws - even Northerners who weren't abolitionists and didn't care much about blacks hated being forced to cooperate with Southern slave-catchers. (Keep in mind also that the South wanted to make abetting escaped slaves a capital crime, and many Southern states essentially criminalized being an abolitionist even before the war.)
Some of the claims that the Civil War "wasn't about slavery" originate in Lincoln's own arguments. During the war, he frequently had to call up more men, and was constantly trying to balance the concerns of the border states in particular, as well as trying to entice the South to cease rebelling. (Towards the end, he took a much more hardline stance towards reconstruction, but earlier in the war the South had many opportunities to concede under very generous terms.) The North believed they were fighting to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union, and being told they were fighting "to free the slaves" didn't go over well with a lot of Northerners, so Lincoln couldn't allow it to be framed that way. (And, again, had the South surrendered earlier, they probably could have kept their slaves.) But the fact was that the war was about slavery, and it was caused by people who (1) wanted to keep their slaves, (2) wanted to expand slavery, (3) wanted to write it into the Constitution that slavery could never be abolished.
Not quite true. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty," which meant basically that new territories should be allowed to vote on whether or not slavery would be allowed there. The problem with this (and the reason why Popular Sovereignty was basically abandoned as a political platform) is that it not only tried to trump the Congressional prerogative to vote on the status of new territories, but it explicitly rolled back previous agreements such as the Missouri Compromise. (The result of this did not turn out well.)
Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
That's still not quite correct. Lincoln's position was not to ban slavery until the very end of the Civil War. During his debates with Douglas (both for the senate, and later during the presidential election), Lincoln was always very clear that while he disliked slavery, he was not seeking to abolish it (at least, not until the rest of the country had chosen to do that by democratic means).
That's overstating the case a little. The South obviously preferred that new territories be slave territories, but generally they sought "parity" - as long as there were some slave territories to balance free territories, they didn't actually expect that every new territory would necessarily allow slavery. There might have been some Southerners who'd have liked to just dictate that all new territories would allow slavery by default, but mostly both sides spent the decades leading up to the Civil War trying to maintain some kind of balance (hence the multiple compromise bills, that of course ultimately failed).
The South increasingly moved towards the idea of secession - they had been threatening to secede for decades, whenever they didn't get their way. This was part of the reason why Lincoln and the Republicans (and Buchanan before him) didn't move more decisively when the South made secession noises when it became apparent Lincoln had won. It sounded very much like "Oh, this again." But it should also be said that the South did not actually expect to have to fight a total war against the North. When the war began, both sides thought it would be brief; the North expected the South to be quickly brought back into line after a few token battles and then some more compromises; the South expected the North to let them go once they demonstrated they were really serious.
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
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