Often in
history, the simplest and most obvious answers to basic questions are the correct ones. Although
a myriad of interpretations have been offered by historians of the central issues of the US
Civil War, in my view the explanations for the causes of the war and the motivations of each
side in fighting it are surprisingly straightforward and clear-cut.
The basic
advantage the North held at the start of the war, and for the duration of it, lay in its
superior manpower and industrial strength. The South had relatively few factories and
manufacturing facilities; its economy was primarily based on agriculture. Its ability to fight
the war successfully was dependent largely upon its ability to trade with the two European
countries which, at the start of the war, were in some sense its de facto
allies, Britain and France. Yet the Union initiated a naval blockade of the South
which was effective enough to prevent at least partially the unimpeded commerce the South needed
to sustain its war effort. And once Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making the
cause of abolishing slavery explicit, it became an embarrassment to the European countries to
continue supporting the Confederacy.
The South's advantage lay in the
enormity of its own territory and in the fact that it needed (or should have needed) merely to
fight a defensive war in order to win. The North needed to conquer a land-mass larger than that
which the British were unable to subdue 80 years earlier in the War of Independence. The South,
presumably, needed only to protect itself from invasion and to keep the war going long enough
for the North to exhaust itself and give up the attempt to conquer it.
Neither the North nor the South was monolithic in its motivations for fighting the war.
But, contrary to what Southerners themselves and the historians who have acted as apologists for
them have asserted, the central reason the South fought to break away from the United States was
its objection to Lincoln's plan to prevent the spread of slavery to the territories of
the US. The South knew that this, in itself, was an anti-slavery position and, given
the fact that many in the North were full-fledged abolitionists who wished
to see slavery eliminated entirely, the underlying cause of the secession was to protect
slavery. This was made clear when the Confederate Commissioners, the diplomatic agents who were
sent from the already seceded states with the purpose of persuading the other states of the
South to join them, repeatedly announced the "dangers" the abolition of slavery would
pose to Southern society and the consequent need to secede from the Union in order to keep the
slave system intact.
The North, at least initially, was on the
whole motivated by the desire to keep the Union intact because, if it were to break
apart, the cause of freedom and democracy most Americans believed their country had been founded
upon would then be weakened or destroyed. The dissolution of the United States would prove that
the "experiment" in democracy had failed. But again, the subtext of the effort to
quash the secession was the slavery issue. As stated, many in the North were in fact
abolitionists. Lincoln himself did not initially believe that slavery should be interfered with
in the states where it already existed, but he was nevertheless opposed to slavery, or else he
would not have made it his platform that slavery must be prohibited from spreading to the
territories. And his wish not to interfere with existing slavery was due to his belief that
outright and immediate abolition would be too disruptive to society and would lead to more
potential problems than it would solve. With the exclusion of slavery from the territories, the
institution, Lincoln and others believed, would "die a natural death." By the autumn
of 1862, Lincoln realized that this passive approach was not workable, and he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863.
The manner in which the South
carried out the war is itself indicative of its wish to defend slavery at all costs. Given the
size of its land-mass, as stated, one would think the South merely had to fight a defensive war,
using the "Fabian" technique Washington had successfully employed against the British
by making strategic retreats and allowing the enemy to take territory but keeping his armies
intact in order to fight another day. But for the most part, especially in the actions of their
leading general, Robert E. Lee, the Confederates chose to go on the offensive, attacking Union
armies repeatedly in order to attempt driving them out of the South (and even taking the war
into the Union at Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863). The underlying reason for this was
that if the Union took territory, it was possiblevery possiblethat the enslaved people would
liberate themselves, even during the early part of the war before the Emancipation Proclamation
was issued and the Union commanders did not yet have explicit orders to carry out
abolition.
Northern commanders were at first divided on how to prosecute the
war. Initially the intention was to aim for a quick victory, end the rebellion, and bring the
South back into the fold with little if any disruption to Southern society. This was the
thinking of Gen. George McClellan, for instance, and even possibly of a more competent and
successful commander such as George Meade. But the strategy did not work. Both Ulysses S. Grant
and William T. Sherman by 1864 realized that "total war" was the only realistic method
of prosecuting the conflict. Both men succeeded in demoralizing the South through the massive
destruction of propertySherman in the deep South in Georgia and South Carolina, while Grant
ordered Gen. Philip Sheridan to destroy the farmland of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia which
had been supplying Lee's army, trapped as it was in Petersburg. The Confederacy, overwhelmed by
the superior resources of the Union and by the imminent destruction of the slavery system on
which it was built, had no choice but unconditional surrender in the spring of
1865.
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