The United States Civil War began in April of 1861 and would last four long years. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln referred to the secessionist movement as an "insurrection" which he believed could be quickly squelched. Approximately 650,000 men would die before it was over.
I can only speculate as to why Lincoln was so dismissive and so wrong about the seriousness of the differences between the North and South. After Lincoln was elected and before he was sworn in as president, seven states had already seceded from the Union. Those states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, in that order. If he discounted that fact, by June, four more states had joined the Confederacy...Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
The victors write history and that's nowhere more true than in the case of our Civil War. We are taught in school that the hero of the Civil War was Lincoln for freeing slaves when, in fact, he did no such thing. Nor was he inclined to. He did make some "official" proclamations, but they were so full of exceptions that the result wasn't even close to completely outlawing slavery and many remained enslaved. He made political gestures, not sweeping reforms.
If I were the victor, I'd prefer that history record me as the savior of an entire group of people too, rather than as the hapless president who over saw a blood bath in the name of preserving the union. As victor, perhaps it would be convenient to omit things like states' rights and unfair taxes/tariffs as legitimate grievances of one's enemy.
After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in the late 1700s, the South became increasingly a one crop economy. More and more plantation owners abandoned other crops in favor of cotton after Whitney's invention dramatically reduced harvest time. In contrast, the North was becoming more and more industrialized. The South claimed the North had an unfair advantage when it came to tariffs, as the South had to import many more of their needs than did Northerners. Northerners were producing their own products in their own factories while the South was picking cotton. In some ways, the Civil War was about an industrialized economy bumping heads with an agrarian society and it was a boil festering since at least the early 1800s.
Southern secessionist states believed their rights as sovereign entities were being steadily eroded and further believed that to be in violation of provisions of the Constitution. They fervently resented what they saw as federal encroachment into their daily lives and didn't believe a state should have to accept every law coming out of the nation's capital at the expense of what was coming from their own state legislators.
This is not to say that slavery was not an issue in the Civil War. Some would even argue that our Civil War began in the 1840s and 1850s when the streets of Kansas and Missouri bled red over the issue of slavery, not in 1861 at Fort Sumter. Missourians were primarily pro-slavery, while Kansas was home to many abolitionists. Missourians repeatedly crossed into Kansas and made raids. "Bloody Kansas" referred to battles with "Border Ruffians."
The abolitionists were busy too, including pulling off one particularly infamous massacre in 1856 (at Pottawatomie), led by abolitionist John Brown and several of his sons in retaliation for those killed in a massacre in Lawrence, Kansas. This is the same John Brown who would in 1859 lead a disastrous raid at Harper's Ferry, in an effort to arm slaves for revolt. Yes, we were fighting a war over slavery a long time before 1861.
There's a popular misconception about the Southerners who fought for the Confederacy. Many still cling to the belief that rich plantation owners were fighting to protect their livelihoods and what they saw as their property (slaves). The reality is that there were relatively few rich people in the South in 1861. Most were dirt poor, unable to afford even shoes, and struggling to put food on their tables.
Unfortunately, Southern politicians and large plantation owners (often, one and the same) banded together to rally poor white folks to fight their war for them and used the issue of slavery to persuade them to bear arms against the "damn Yankees." Those with a lot at stake stirred the masses with the assertion that if slavery was made illegal, there would be even fewer jobs for poor whites; the argument was that, of course, freed slaves would work for less than would whites. For those barely able to keep food on their family table, this was perceived as an unacceptable threat to their already marginal existence. It was a rallying call.
The bottom line? Poor white folks fought the rich man's war. What a surprise. Fat cat plantation owners knew their livelihoods depended on their ability to keep slaves. No less than the Governor of Georgia would in 1860 write a letter to the editor of a prominent newspaper warning that whites would have fewer employment opportunities if slaves were freed, but he positioned it as a states' rights issue. In the main, Confederate soldiers were not fighting to keep slaves; they were fighting out of fear they'd be in even more dire economic circumstances than they already were if slaves were freed. There's a difference.
Even today, some in the South are still angry about the Civil War and some in the North don't understand why. They wonder, "Why don't they just get over it?" If I had a nickel for every time I've seen that sentiment expressed online on a political forum, I'd be in a hammock today, somewhere in a balmy clime, sipping daiquiris instead of sitting here writing this damn blog.
It's important to remember just how relatively recent the Civil War really was when you look at it in the context of generations and not just the number of years since it's been over. When viewed in that context, it really wasn't so long ago. I grew up knowing people who had known people who fought this bloody war. Does that put it in better perspective?
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