Civil War: Causes and Results
"Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery," wrote historian James Ford Rhodes in 1913. Although historians today would not put it quite so starkly, Rhodes''s basic point remains valid.
In the decades since 1913 various schools of historiography have advanced other interpretations of the war''s causes. The progressive historians emphasized the widening economic gulf between the North and South. Cultural and social historians stressed the contrast between the civilizations and values of the two regions. But revisionist historians denied the existence of any fundamental economic or social conflicts. They pointed instead to self-serving politicians who created and then exploited the false issue of slavery''s expansion into new territories to whip up sectional passions and get themselves elected to office.
Few historians today subscribe to either the progressive or the revisionist interpretation in unalloyed form. To be sure, conflicts of interest occurred between the agricultural South and the industrializing North. But issues like tariffs, banks, and land grants divided parties and interest groups more than they did North and South. The South in the 1840s and 1850s had its advocates of industrialization and protective tariffs, just as the North had its millions of farmers and its low-tariff, antibank Democratic majority in many states. The Civil War was not fought over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants. Nor was it a consequence of false issues invented by demagogues. It was fought over profound, intractable problems that Americans on both sides believed went to the heart of their society and its future.
In this sense the "two civilizations" thesis comes closest to the mark. As a lawyer in Savannah, Georgia, expressed it in 1860, "in this country have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government." What lay at the root of this separation? Slavery. It was the sole institution not shared by North and South. The peculiar institution defined the South. "On the subject of slavery," declared the Charleston Mercury in 1858, "the North and South ... are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples."
Two of the North''s foremost political leaders echoed this point in the same year. Slavery and freedom, said Senator William H. Seward of New York, are "more than incongruous - they are incompatible." The collision between them "is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Abraham Lincoln, in a famous speech, declared that "]a house divided against itself cannot stand.[ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free."
But why could it not so endure? After all, in 1858 it had done so for seventy years. To be sure, slavery had been a source of contention at the Constitutional Convention, at the time of Missouri''s admission into the Union in 1821, in the debates between abolitionists and slavery''s defenders especially in the 1830s, at the time of Texas''s admission as a state in 1845 and the subsequent war with Mexico, and on numerous other occasions. But compromises palliated these conflicts; the Republic endured. What made the rhetoric of 1858 different? What split the Republic in 1861? The answer lies mainly in the schism generated by the expansion of slavery.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had seemed to settle this matter by dividing the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery and freedom at the latitude of 36°30 (with Missouri as a slave-state exception north of that line). But the conquest from Mexico of vast new regions in the Southwest following the annexation of Texas as a slave state reopened the question in 1846. With the support of nearly all Northern congressmen, the House of Representatives passed over unanimous Southern opposition the Wilmot Proviso stating that slavery should be excluded from all territory acquired by the Mexican War. Southern strength in the Senate was sufficient to defeat the proviso there. And that was the point. With the Union comprising fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in 1848, the South could block in the Senate any measures threatening slavery. But if only free states were to be admitted in the future, the South would eventually become a helpless minority in all branches of government. Slavery would be doomed by Northern hostility.
What explained the growing Northern hostility to slavery? Since 1831 the militant phase of the abolitionist movement had crusaded against bondage as unchristian, immoral, and a violation of the republican principle of equality on which the nation had been founded. The fact that this land of liberty had become the world''s largest slaveholding nation seemed a shameful anomaly to an increasing number of Northerners. "The monstrous injustice of slavery," said Lincoln in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world - enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." Slavery degraded not only the slaves, argued Northerners opposed to its expansion, by demeaning the dignity of labor and dragging down the wages of all workers; it also degraded free people who owned no slaves. If slavery goes into the territories, declared abolitionists, "the free labor of all the states will not.... If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population." The contest over expansion of slavery into the territories thus became a contest over the future of America, for these territories held the balance of power between slavery and freedom.
The South accepted the gauntlet flung down by the Free-Soil movement. Proslavery advocates countered that the bondage of blacks was the basis of liberty for whites. Slavery elevated all whites to an equality of status and dignity by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks. "If slaves are freed," said Southerners, whites "will become menials. We will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen." The fear that emancipation would degrade whites to the level of black slaves explains why most of the Southern whites who owned no slaves (70 percent of all whites) supported the institution. They agreed with slave owners that slavery must be allowed in the territories, for such expansion might increase their own chances of acquiring slaves.
This question became the dominant political issue of the 1850s. Southerners led several filibustering expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua to try to gain control of these regions in order to annex them to the United States as slave states. Southern Democrats used their domination of the party, which in turn controlled the federal government during most of the decade, to make annexation of Cuba a party policy (but Spain refused to sell its colony). Southern Democrats and their Northern allies passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise''s restriction on slavery north of 36°30 in Louisiana Purchase territories. The outraged Northern response led to the founding of the Republican party as a coalition of Free-Soilers, Northern Whigs, and those Northern Democrats who were fed up with Southern domination of their party. Tensions were exacerbated in 1857 when the Southern-dominated Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision, which declared slavery legal in all territories. During the remainder of the decade, the territory of Kansas echoed with the gunfire of strife between pro- and antislavery settlers. Out of the Kansas conflict came John Brown with his vision of a holy war to free the slaves, which culminated with his attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
These events were flash points in the increasing polarization of North and South over slavery. When Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860 without winning a single electoral vote and with scarcely any popular votes in the slave states, Southerners knew they had lost control of the government. A Northern antislavery party would dominate the future. Slavery was doomed if the South remained in the Union. So seven slave states seceded (followed by four more after the firing on Fort Sumter) and formed the Confederate States of America.
Still, that did not inevitably mean war. If the new Lincoln administration and the Northern people had been willing to accept secession, the two halves of the former United States might have coexisted in an uneasy peace. But most Northerners were not willing to tolerate the dismemberment of the United States. This would create a fatal precedent whereby "any minority [would] have the right to break up the Government at pleasure," declared Northern newspapers and political leaders. The government would become "a rope of sand" and "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics.... Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government."
Lincoln intended to maintain the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay as a symbol of national sovereignty in the Confederate states, in the hope that a reaction toward Unionism in those states would eventually bring them back. To forestall this happening, the Confederate army attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. This was the spark that ignited four years of war in which at least 620,000 American soldiers lost their lives - nearly as many as in all the other wars this country has fought combined. The destruction wrought in the South by the Civil War was devastating. It killed one-quarter of the Confederacy''s white men of military age and destroyed two-fifths of Southern livestock, half of the farm machinery and a similar proportion of factories and railroads, and two-thirds of Southern wealth. The Civil War was the great trauma and tragedy of American history.
But it was also a great triumph of nationalism and freedom. The war resolved the two fundamental problems left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776, problems that had preoccupied the country for four score and nine years down to 1865. The first was the question whether this fragile republic would survive in a world of monarchs and emperors and dictators or would follow the example of most republics through history (including many in the nineteenth century) and collapse into tyranny or fragment in a dreary succession of revolutions and civil wars. Northern victory in the Civil War settled that question: the United States would survive as a single nation with a republican form of government. Since 1865 no state or region has tried to secede. The second problem left unresolved by the Revolution was slavery, which had divided the country from the beginning. The Civil War abolished the institution and freed 4 million slaves. What still remained unresolved in 1865 were the meaning and dimensions of that freedom - issues that continue to concern Americans today.
Slavery was the Final Straw to lead to the secession and the Beginning of the Civil War...
http://www.historychannel.com/cgi-bin/frameit2.cgi?p=%2Fperl%2Fsearch.pl&word=Civil+War&x=19&y=10
Hog
btw this Flag is a symbol of History of the United States and the People who fought for the Freedoms there of.. either North Or South...
Next we will be digging up Arlington Cemetary because that was Gen. Lee's Homeplace and the NAACP feel's it isn't proper to keep it a monument because it's infringing on somebody's rights....
Let History Remain as just that!!!!!
there is no way to Place Political Correctness to the events of History that took Place at that time...
"In otherwords Changing events to suit the times... Not Going to Happen!!!!!
Hog
