I heard again yesterday on NPR the wholly erroneous claim that slavery was not the only cause… indeed not the primary cause… of the Civil War. Let us set the record straight. If slavery had not been an issue, there would have been no Civil War. If states' rights was the issue, it was the right of southern states to impose their cultural values on the north. Certanly, the issue is a lot more complex than most educated modern Americans understand. Issues get fuzzed over in 150 years. Any great nation may want to gloss over the details in an attempt to achieve some normalcy after a war as murderous as this one. Here are the facts: It is certain that the North did not fight the war to end slavery. Lincoln always said he would accept slavery in the southern states as an alternative to war. In any political climate, there are people on the left fringe and in 1860, the left, represented by radical abolitionists, disagreed strongly with Lincoln. He was the man in the middle, but he likely represented most northern voters. His Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in the rebellious states. (Slavery was not ended in Maryland, for example). In fact most southern states had succeeded before Lincoln could take office and do anything, but the issues that gave them an excuse to succeed were all about slavery and about Lincoln's position on slavery. Lincoln, and most 1860 voters, were adamantly opposed to the two things the South felt it needed to make slavery work for them. The wanted the North to acquiesce in the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, and it wanted slavery extended to all the territories. Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws was repugnant to the North because the laws would make Northern states complicit in enforcing slavery. At the ground level, this meant that the average Boston citizen would have to cooperate with bounty hunters from the south who came north to capture slaves. It meant that the sight of slaves shackled would be common on the streets of Lima, Ohio, and local resources, jails and law enforcement authorities, would be forced to assist in the capture of slaves and required to arrest anyone who helped slaves escape. Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law posed for Northern citizens a moral dilemma that can well be understood by Catholics concerned that their hospitals might have to accommodate an abortion. (They are not required to do so.) Moreover, while the South claims the issue was one of states' rights, for the North, the issue was the right of the Southern states to impose their cultural values on the North. The demand to extend slavery into the territories has a deep and contentious history. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery above the Mason-Dixon Line. The Missouri Compromise of 1850 provided that two new territories that were carved out of Texas, New Mexico and Utah, would determine by plebiscite whether to be slave states. The Kansas Nebraska Act (1854) provided that those states would also determine their fate by popular vote. The South wanted slavery extended into the territories because major cotton planters were running out of good cotton land at home, and wanted to expand. They also believed the chances of a state becoming pro slave would increase if they established slavery to start with. They believed Kansas would have become a slave state had slavery been allowed there prior to the approval of the Wyandotte Constitution by a vote of the people in 1859. The economic side of this argument becomes a little like "Drill Baby Drill." You can't drill enough oil to solve the energy crisis, and you could not grow much cotton in most of the new territories. Moreover, slavery was not suited to most other types of agriculture. None the less, the extension of slavery beyond its 1850 borders was abhorrent to an increasingly militant anti-slavery north. By the time Lincoln was elected the time for compromise had long since passed. The South had concluded that it was being sorely abused and began it's rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States.
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