In late December 1860, as the United States hurtled toward disunion, the state of South Carolina formally explained why it was leaving the Union. The declaration was not a long document, but it was unambiguous. Every grievance it listed revolved around slavery. The state complained that northern states protected runaway slaves, that northerners called slavery sinful, that abolition societies helped people escape bondage, and that a president had just been elected whose opinions and purposes were openly hostile to slavery.
There was no mention of tariffs, taxes, or government overreach. South Carolina knew how to complain about tariffs—it had nearly seceded over one in 1832—but in 1860, its stated reason for leaving was slavery alone. South Carolina was not alone in putting its reasons in writing. Mississippi declared that its position was thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.
Texas accused the northern states of proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men irrespective of race or color and argued that the servitude of the African race was mutually beneficial to both bond and free. Even Texas’s one complaint that was not directly about slavery, the federal government’s failure to protect the frontier from raids, was blamed on the fact that Texas was a slaveholding state. The Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, made the point even more bluntly. In March 1861, in what became known as the Cornerstone Speech, he declared that the Confederacy rested upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man and that slavery, subordination to the superior race, was his natural and normal condition.
Some later claimed the speech was misreported, but in 1865 Stephens wrote in his own diary that slavery was without a doubt the occasion of secession. Only four Confederate states issued formal declarations of causes, which has led some to argue that slavery could not have been the central issue. But the other states left evidence of their own. Alabama and Virginia named slavery in their secession ordinances.
Florida drafted a declaration citing slavery but never formally adopted it. Louisiana sent a commissioner to Texas in February 1861 who stated plainly that Louisiana looked to the formation of a southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery. Arkansas, which cited Lincoln’s call for troops as its immediate reason for leaving, had earlier voted to remain in the Union while issuing grievances mostly about slavery and the fugitive slave laws. Tennessee and North Carolina, the only two states that never openly cited slavery, had demanded constitutional guarantees protecting slavery as their price for staying in the Union.
When Congress did not deliver, they joined the Confederacy. The tariff argument does not hold up either. The tariff in effect when the South seceded was the Tariff of 1857, the lowest the country had seen since 1816, and it had passed with southern votes. The Morrill Tariff, which is often blamed for the war, did not pass the Senate until March 1861, after seven states had already left the Union, and only because southern senators had walked out.
Secession caused the tariff, not the other way around. Abraham Lincoln’s own words have been used to argue that the war was not about slavery. In August 1862 he wrote to Horace Greeley that his paramount object was to save the Union, not either to save or to destroy slavery. But by then the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was already sitting on his desk.
Lincoln’s position was legal, not moral. He did not believe the presidency gave him the constitutional authority to end slavery in peacetime. In a letter written in the spring of 1864, he said he was naturally anti-slavery and that if slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong, but that he had never understood the presidency to confer upon him an unrestricted right to act officially upon that judgment. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 was possible only because the war itself gave him, as commander-in-chief, the authority to seize enemy resources.
The Confederacy’s greatest resource was its millions of enslaved people. The border slave states that stayed with the Union were unaffected, and slavery remained legal in places like New Jersey until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Congress’s passage of the Corwin Amendment in March 1861 is sometimes used as proof that the war could not have been about slavery. That amendment would have permanently barred the federal government from abolishing slavery in states where it already existed, and Lincoln said he had no objection to it.
But by the time it passed Congress, seven states had already seceded. It was a last-ditch effort to keep the remaining slave states from following. More importantly, the amendment did nothing to allow the expansion of slavery. That was the real issue.
Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky had earlier proposed a compromise that would have protected slavery south of the 36°30′ parallel, including in future territories. Lincoln refused to support the expansion of slavery into new lands. The South would not accept that limitation. Instead, the Confederate states wrote their own constitution guaranteeing slavery in all future territories.
Protection for slavery where it already existed was not enough. They wanted slavery to spread. The question of why so many poor southerners fought for the Confederacy does not change the cause of the war. Slave ownership in the South was far more common than is often assumed.
Roughly one in every three families in the Confederate states owned at least one slave, and in places like Mississippi and South Carolina the figure was closer to half. Even poor whites who owned no slaves had friends and family members who did. They were surrounded by a society that insisted slavery benefited them. Ministers defended slavery from the pulpit.
Pamphlets argued that enslaved labor kept wages high and that even the poorest white man had someone beneath him. Many who enlisted did so for personal reasons, to defend their homes, to avoid being labeled cowards, or because they were drafted. Individual soldiers throughout history have always had their own reasons for serving that do not always align with the government’s reasons. That does not change why the war began.
The claim that thousands of black men fought for the Confederacy is not supported by the evidence. In 1861, roughly 1,500 free men of color in New Orleans offered to serve and were accepted into the state militia as the Louisiana Native Guard. They were never armed and never saw combat. In January 1862 the Louisiana legislature ruled that militia members had to be white, and the unit was disbanded.
When New Orleans fell to the Union that spring, some of the same officers wore blue uniforms and fought for the United States. The Confederate Congress did not authorize black soldiers until March 1865, about four weeks before Appomattox, and there is no solid evidence that any of the handful who enlisted saw combat. Tens of thousands of black men did serve in Confederate camps, but they were cooks, teamsters, laborers, and body servants, and almost all of them were enslaved. The war also did not begin with northern aggression.
By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, the seceded states had seized nearly every piece of federal property within their borders, including forts, arsenals, custom houses, and the U. S. mint in New Orleans. They then fired on Fort Sumter.
Lincoln’s position was that the United States was still one nation, that federal law still applied, and that the federal government could not surrender its own territory. The South fired the first shot. The Confederacy’s armies did not stay home either. They invaded Kentucky, marched into Pennsylvania, and raided as far north as Ohio and Vermont.
Atrocities were committed by both sides, but how a war is fought and why it began are separate questions. The reason so many Americans today believe the war was fought over states’ rights rather than slavery is that the Confederates wrote the textbooks. Within a year of Lee’s surrender, Richmond newspaper editor Edward Pollard published a book titled The Lost Cause, which laid out the talking points still repeated today: that the South fought over states’ rights, and that slavery was not really that bad. Alexander Stephens published his own two-volume work arguing the war had been over competing ideas of government.
Jefferson Davis wrote in his 1881 memoir that slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict but only an incident, directly contradicting what he had told his own Congress in 1861, when he said that the South’s crops depended on the labor of African slaves and that with interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the southern states had been forced to secede. The United Daughters of the Confederacy then carried this narrative into southern classrooms, sending out checklists that rejected any textbook that said the war was fought over slavery. As recently as 2010, a member of the Texas State Board of Education stated on record that states’ rights were the real issue and that slavery was an afterthought. The Lost Cause was quite simply propaganda with the goal of rehabilitating the Confederate public image.
No other factor explains the war. Black southerners did own slaves, but they accounted for less than one percent of slaveholders. In many cases, freed people purchased their own relatives to protect them and were legally required to hold them as slaves on paper. The North had its own racism and its own fortunes built on southern cotton.
There were slave owners who treated enslaved people less cruelly than others. But slavery was a legal status. Enslaved people were property. They could be bought, sold, rented, gambled away, or inherited.
The status was hereditary. In 1850 a sixty-year-old Missouri farmer purchased a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia, raped her on the way home, and continued to rape her for years. When she killed him in self-defense in 1855, the judge refused to let the jury consider a statute protecting women from assault because she was enslaved. She was hanged a few days before Christmas.
Slave patrols, bounties for runaways, and an underground railroad existed because slavery was maintained through constant force. Slavery was the main cause of the Civil War for a simple reason. Without slavery, there would have been no secession. Without secession, there would have been no war.
The Confederate leaders said so themselves, in writing, in plain language. That those who fought for the Confederacy had personal reasons for serving, that some were drafted, and that some were decent men who believed they were defending their homes, does not change why the war began. The fight over what the war meant did not end at Appomattox. Historian David Blight has argued that the struggle over the memory of the war became a struggle over what kind of country America would become.
Pollard wrote in 1866 that the war had settled two things: the Union was restored and slavery was gone, but it had not decided negro equality or negro suffrage. That war of ideas continued long after the fighting stopped.