Apr 7, 2018 3 min read

“All knew that this interest (slavery) was somehow the cause of the war.”

~ President Lincoln, second inaugural address

The Civil War began this week (April 12) in 1861 when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and despite the claims of Southern Confederates that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and federal government “oppression,” most Confederate leaders, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens, verbally and in writing proclaimed that protecting slavery was the main reason the Southern states seceded. It was only after the war that Southerners made “states’ rights” the main reason.

The other argument the Confederacy’s defenders use in claiming the war wasn’t fought over slavery is that very few Southerners owned slaves. Which was true – only one in four Southerners owned slaves in 1861, and only about 1 percent of those Southerners were of the “planter class” that owned hundreds of slaves.

That said, those slave-owning Southerners made a highly successful effort to convince the South’s nonslaveholding majority, mostly yeoman farmers working small plots of land, that preserving slavery was critically important to their own way of life. This successful sales job was even more impressive because most of that nonslaveholding majority resented the powerful plantation owners who got rich on the backs of slave labor.

But if the nonslaveholding majority resented the slave owners, they trembled at the thought of free slaves living as their “equals.” And the South’s slave owners freely exploited this fear, pointing out that freed slaves would compete economically with poor whites, and would also be their “social equals,” attending the same churches, sitting side by side on juries and having the same rights before the law. As equals, free slaves might even expect to socialize with whites, and at some point intermarry! As one Southern farmer put it, “If I ain’t better than a (N word), who am I better than?”

Building on that fear, slave owners also disingenuously proclaimed a solidarity with their poorer white brethren, pointing out that the institution of slavery meant there was a “ruling class” – whites of all economic and social backgrounds – and a “ruled class” – slaves. As one white slave owner put it, the existence of black slaves meant that every white Southerner, including the yeoman farmer and common laborer, “was an aristocrat.”

Finally, there was the longstanding Southern resentment of Northerners. Slave owners essentially asked their nonslaveholding brethren, do you want Yankees, much less freed slaves, interfering with your lives?

The answer was a resounding no, meaning the South’s majority nonslaveholding population joined the slave owners in defense of slavery, resulting in a Civil War unarguably on behalf of its preservation.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.