The American Civil War: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘What caused the American Civil War?’
‘We could definitely talk about that for 45 minutes. But I'll tell you what, if you want I can do it in one word... slavery... if you imagine a hypothetical universe in which there had been no human enslavement in the United States, so somehow rather it had been abolished in the late 18th century, when the United States came into being there would not have been a civil war. You know, it is rare that you can make a claim about an alternative history as absolutely as that but I would absolutely make that claim. There would not have been a civil war without slavery. There might have been another kind of civil war, I suppose. There might have been a civil war between the west and the east, which was one of the things that the founding generation worried about, but there would not have been a civil war between the southern states and the northern states in the way that happened in the mid 19th century…
Up until very recently, opinion polls say, most people think slavery isn't the cause of the Civil War. And if you ask them, why not? They would say, if they give you an answer, they would say, because most Northerners were not abolitionists, which is true. And most southerners did not own slaves. Most white Southerners did not own enslaved people. And that's also true. So therefore, they say, well it can’t have been about slavery? Well, that doesn't demonstrate it wasn't about slavery. What that might demonstrate is that it wasn't a war in any straightforward sense between radical abolitionists and slaveholders. But if you take slavery out of the picture, nothing can be satisfactorily explained. And if you read the ordinances of secession, so that's to say the documents issued by the southern states as they left the Union in 1861, they make this very explicit that the reason why they're leaving the union is because they can no longer guarantee the preservation of their property, their human property... Southerners themselves said that they were leaving the union in order to preserve their slave property. Now, you might think, well, why would they do that if most Northerners weren't abolitionists?
But the answer to that question very simply, is that although most Northerners were not radical abolitionists, would not describe themselves as abolitionists, they were in a broad sense, anti slavery that is, if you were to have done an opinion poll in the north in 1860, 61, and you would say, do you think slavery is right or wrong? The vast majority of people, including people who didn't vote for Abraham Lincoln, who weren't radicals, weren't Republicans, vast majority would have said slavery is wrong...
[Lincoln’s] whole campaign was predicated on preventing the expansion of slavery and on stigmatizing it as antithetical to American values, as, more than that, as a danger to the Republic, as a danger to the freedom for white people. That's the thing we've got to struggle to get our heads around. It wasn't that Lincoln or the Republican Party were campaigning on the horrific treatment of enslaved people, some of them were. But mostly what they were saying was that the institution of slavery itself is corrupting of Republican liberty. For white people. We've got to get rid of it because it's endangering the Republic, or at least we've got to contain it, because it's endangering the Republic, and that it, in and of itself was enough, was threatening enough to the south to compel them to secede...
‘By and large though, and compared to other civil wars such as the English Civil War, for example, this was actually not a war of brother against brother, relatively speaking. It was a war in which geography determined loyalty in in most cases’...
‘The union in the words of Abraham Lincoln was the last best hope earth. If what was at stake in the war was the survive of government of the people, by the people for the people. It was, if the Union was destroyed, if it was broken up, if the Confederacy was allowed to survive as a separate independent republic, then the possibility of People's Government would be eliminated forever from the whole world. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to put it like that, but that is in terms what Northerners believed. It wasn't just Americans in fairness who said that at that time. British observers, radicals, people watching what’s happening, the great conflagration in North America watching from, from Britain and France and Germany and other places also shared that sense that there was, there were global issues at stake here. There was huge, that what would happen on the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania and Mississippi and Louisiana would determine whether or not democracy, the rights of ordinary working men, would succeed, in Europe and in the rest of the world, or whether autocracy and monarchy would continue to, to dominate’...
‘How many black competence fought on both sides?’
‘It's a long standing issue, this, and the American right. The claim that there were black soldiers fighting for the Confederacy. Actually, what happened was that throughout the second half of the war, from 1863 onwards, there were increasing voices within the Confederacy saying, always in a minority, but saying, and from within the army as well, saying we should arm slaves. We're bit, we're outmanned, we're outnumbered, we're outgunned on the battlefields. We have to make use of this Human Resource. And in the very dying days of the Confederacy, when the writing was on the wall, the Confederate Congress finally, finally passed a bill, which if the Confederacy had lasted longer, would have drafted some enslaved men on the promise of their eventual emancipation. So the notion that there were large numbers of African Americans fighting for the Confederacy, or that there are any African Americans fighting for the Confederacy, in, in the full sense, in uniform, is wrong. What is true is that there were tens and tens of thousands of enslaved African American people who were in various support roles for the Confederate Army and were accompanying the army throughout the war from the beginning right to the end.’
Strange how the question of whether any blacks fought for the South suddenly becomes whether any black slaves fought for the South, as if there were no free blacks in the South - when there were more free blacks in the South than in the North. And when even The Root acknowledges that some blacks - even free ones - fought for the South...