What caused the Civil War? The answer is clear to me: slavery.
When Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1803, there were 9 slave-holding states. Ohio became only the 8th free state. In 1804, New Jersey abolished slavery, the so the balance finally tilted in favor of free states, 9 free states to 8 slave states. (New York had abolished slavery in 1799.) In 1812, Louisiana was admitted to the Union, making for an equal number of slave and free states. By 1848, when I was 4 years old, there were 15 slave states and 15 free states. Then, in 1850, California entered the Union as a free state.
In his autobiography, U.S. Grant made the following statement about slavery. “In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats–in a word, rapid transit of any sort–the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time, the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized, and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution (slavery).”
Also, in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed into a national law. This Act required citizens of any state — slave or free — to assist in the capture of runaway slaves and denied them the right to a jury trial. In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott, in spite of living in a free state, and all other African-Americans could not be US citizens. These laws and rulings and other factors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book about slaves, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, further fueled and accelerated the abolitionist movement.
Grant wrote about the South in his autobiography: “They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the perogatives and independence of the Northern states by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law, every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.” He went on to say, “This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such laws from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.”
In 1858, an eloquent Illinois lawyer and U.S. Senate nominee named Abraham Lincoln, inspired by Matthew 12, verse 25, stated that ”I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
The country was becoming much less than half slave. The power of southern slave states continued to erode when Minnesota and Oregon were admitted to the Union as free states in 1858 and 1859, respectively. Now there were a total of 33 states in the Union: 15 were slave but 18 were free.
Abraham Lincoln, whose brand new Republican party was anti-slavery, further upset the balance between free and slave states. Lincoln won the presidential election on 6 Nov 1860, pledging to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. The slave-holding states were losing power and found themselves in a no-win situation, from their pro-slavery perspective.
On 20 Dec 1860, the state of South Carolina seceded from the Union, the first of 11 states to do so. The vote was 169 to 0. In South Carolina, 57% of its population was enslaved and 46% of its families owned at least one slave. In the South Carolina declaration secession, the root word “slave” is used 18 times. The word “right” is in the document 23 times, often in the context of the right to own slaves. The phrase “states rights” does not appear in the document.
In January of 1861, the citizens of Kansas voted to enter the Union as a free state, further tilting the balance. Now there were 19 free states but only 15 slave-holding states. On 9 Feb 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected President of the Confederate States of America
The slave-holding states felt they had no hope of retaining their power over the the institution of slavery. The United States had an anti-slavery President and the senate was now dominated by senators from free states. As a result, states from the deep south decided to form their own slave-holding county. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 Mar 1861, seven slave states in the deep south had seceded from the Union and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. These states were: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Texas. Mississippi’s secession document contains the following sentence: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Alexander Stephens, a Georgian and the vice president of the Confederacy, stated that “Our new Government, … its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
President Lincoln and most Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. The great Civil War began on 12 Apr 1861 when 50 Southern cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter, a United States military outpost in South Carolina. On the 14 Apr 1861, Ft. Sumpter, commanded by Major Robert Anderson, surrendered. Amazingly, no soldiers were killed or wounded.
Within a few weeks of the Fort Sumter attack, four more slave holding states succeeded: Virginia on April 17, Arkansas on May 6, North Carolina on May 20, and Tennessee on June 8. Eleven of the 15 slave-holding states had seceded. The remaining four slave-holding states on the border between north and south — Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — never did secede.
The great Civil War had begun in earnest.
In his autobiography, Grant wrote, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that “A state half slave and half free cannot exist.” All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.”
After the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman’s wrote, “Still, civil war was to be; and, now that it has come and gone, we can rest secure in the knowledge that as the chief cause, slavery, has been eradicated forever, it is not likely to come again.”
Neither Grant nor Sherman were abolitionists in any way. Yet both came to the same conclusion. Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
