Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 20: Yes, the Civil War was about slavery

A key feature of the Lost Cause narrative basically started the day the war ended, which is that the war wasn’t about slavery, but about States Rights and "Suthern Honuh" and so on. If many Americans in Union states had been indifferent to the fate of slaves before the war, by 1865, most of them had come to hate the institution of slavery. That was partly became it had led the Confederates to start a massive civil war. And also because Union troops in the South got to see slavery and slaves up close and now understood what a vicious institution it was.
Paul Finkelman describes the view of the South Carolina secession convention, the first to declare secession in December, 1860:

On December 20, 1860, the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention voted to leave the Union. In the declaration explaining the causes of their momentous decision, they charged that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution." "Thus," they concluded, "the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation." As almost all historians have increasingly recognized, the institution of slavery was the primary cause of secession and, consequently, of the Civil War. At the same time, as the South Carolina declaration suggests, the debate over slavery and secession was framed in constitutional terms. (2)

Caroline Janney gives the following six items as basic tenets of the Lost Cause narrative:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

Paul Finkelman summarized the view of the South Carolina secession convention, the first to declare secession in December, 1860:

On December 20, 1860, the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention voted to leave the Union. In the declaration explaining the causes of their momentous decision, they charged that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution." "Thus," they concluded, "the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation." As almost all historians have increasingly recognized, the institution of slavery was the primary cause of secession and, consequently, of the Civil War. At the same time, as the South Carolina declaration suggests, the debate over slavery and secession was framed in constitutional terms. (2)

He also recalls that the institution of slavery was increasingly suppressing the freedom of free white citizens even in non-slave states:

Most Americans believe that secession was about "states' rights," but the South Carolina delegates' complaints about the "increasing hostility" to slavery suggests quite the opposite. In the four decades before the outbreak of Civil War, Southern leaders had called for Northern states to support and enforce the federal fugitive slave law, change their own state laws to allow Southerners to travel with slaves in the North, and suppress abolitionist speech. In the constitutional debate over slavery, that is, Southerners wanted states' rights for their states, but not for the Northern states.

The politicians in the slave states wanted “states rights” for their states to preserve slavery. But they were willing to ignore any “states rights” claimed by the free states that might inconvenience the slaveowners’ control of their human property. For instance, in the decades before 1860, “most Northern states had passed personal liberty laws, which were designed to prevent the kidnapping or removal of free blacks who were wrongly seized as fugitive slaves.” The slaveowners had no respect for that kind of exercise of states rights.

That consideration is also important in understanding how bogus the Lost Cause claim is that the Confederate states just wanted to secede peacefully and would leave the remaining states of the Union alone. With the Confederate states separated from the Union and no longer subject to fugitive slave laws, the remaining Union states would have become even more attractive as destinations for fugitive slaves.

So the slave states would have had to use various means to coerce the remaining United States to return escaped human property to the foreign country of the Confederate States of America. And the latter would have had ways of exerting such pressure aside from directly military ones. With the Confederacy controlling the entry of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, that would have given it enormous economic clout over the most important commercial river on which Midwestern states in particular were directly dependent.

Finkelman also notes that slave states were not exactly fastidious in their respect for the “states rights” of free states:

Ironically, these same Southern states denied any rights to free blacks who lived in the North. When Northern ships docked in Charleston or New Orleans, any free black sailors on them were arrested and held in the local jail. They were allowed to leave only if the ship captain paid the jailer for their upkeep.

Notes:

(1) Caroline Janney, Caroline (2020): The Lost Cause. Encyclopedia Virginia. <https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/> (Accessed: 2024-20-04).

(2) Finkelman, Paul (2011): Slavery, the Constitution, and the Origins of the Civil War. OAH Magazine of History 25: 2, 14-18. [Civil War at 150: Origins issue] <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23210240>